With the Intelligent Framework™ revenue management is extended, for the first time, across the entire customer lifecycle for proactive customer (i.e. revenue) measurement and forecasting.
Because the framework allows companies to drive repeatable success, it also allows them to observe and measure how the customer journey or desire path, evolves.
This is important for proactive customer, and by extension, revenue management.
Measuring Customer Progress Through the “Customer Funnel”
In order to continue to drive revenue and reduce churn, it’s crucial to monitor and measure customer progress and feedback coming from the interactions along the customer journey.
This is why the “customer funnel” or the otherwise forgotten funnel is so important.
The “customer funnel” can be defined as the way your current customers flow through the customer journey of service or product adoption.
Most companies only focus on the marketing funnel that begins with a channel of content and ends with a qualified lead, and the sales funnel which begins with a lead and ends with a closed opportunity.
Analogous to the sales and marketing funnels which measure velocity and cadence of prospects through the buyer’s journey pre-sale, the “customer funnel” measures the velocity and cadence of customers through the customer journey post-sale.
It acts as a mechanism for organizations to monitor and measure the progress of healthy relationships, and as a tool to proactively signal when customers are not tracking to expected progress, identifying risk and preventing customer churn.
In the above diagram, the Time of Customer Journey is the time it takes a customer to travel through their journey. The DesiredPath Benchmark™ is the time it takes a customer to travel through the ideal journey, or customer desire path.
Likewise, the Customer Service Cost (CSC) is the cost of the effort required to assist the customer through their journey.
The CSC is calculated by multiplying the time resources spend running the plays by the company’s hourly resource rate.
The DesiredPath Benchmark™ is the cost of the effort required to service the customer through the ideal journey, or customer desire path.
How Close Is Your Organization to Its Customer Desire Path?
Customers exceeding expected progress through the customer funnel are superstars.
This signal allows organizations to learn from their customer’s success and apply improvements back to the Intelligent Framework to further codify the customer journey.
These improvements will then be applied to all other customers in the future, ensuring renewals and customer loyalty.
Customers lagging expected progress through the customer funnel are laggards, indicating they require additional assistance.
This signal allows businesses to proactively reach out well in advance of the customer becoming unhealthy or at-risk, to get them back on track and avoid problems before they even occur.
All customers bottlenecking at one point of the journey indicates that there is some friction that customers are collectively experiencing which is making adoption challenging.
Something, be it certain plays, the product, communication, etc. is not driving adoption effectively and seamlessly.
This signal should be evaluated to improve the customer experience and progression through the customer funnel.
With the Intelligent Framework implemented, companies are now able to – for the first time - extend the “customer funnel” across the entire customer journey to drive revenue in a much more disciplined manner.
How aligned is your organization to its customer desire path?
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