These days, customer experience holds a lot of weight. Think about the last time you had a bad shopping experience. Did you ever go back to that retailer? Likely not, and the bad service is often to blame.
Delivering a “good,” customer experience can mean many different things, but it boils down to understanding your customers’ needs, and knowing when and how to help. Getting to that level of customer-centricity isn’t easy, but it can reap a lot of benefits. In fact, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t. Check out these three steps you can take to become a more customer-focused organization:
1. Team alignment
If you’ve worked in sales or marketing, then you’re probably aware of the old adage that marketing and sales departments don’t get along. They work towards a common goal—attracting and satisfying customers—yet they often act as a separate teams. This can have detrimental effects on customer experience and overall productivity.
To become more customer-centric, it’s crucial to align these departments and work together as one. Having weekly check-ins, for example, gives sales an opportunity to share leads and insights on prospects, and offers marketing a chance to review and identify trends in CRM metrics. Connecting the two teams can help you fine-tune your go-to-market strategy, and better understand how to improve your selling process. Most importantly, combining the two departments pushes them to work together and think as a team, which will lead to happier employees and more revenue growth down the line.
2. Goal alignment
Aligning your teams is just the start. The next, arguably harder step is aligning them on goals. Do you have a target number of leads? Do you want to improve retention? If your teams are tracking and putting weight into different metrics, you won’t have an accurate picture of your progress. Having a general goal helps motivate both teams and provide overall guidance.
A good goal to start with is revenue growth. Making revenue growth your common goal helps sales and marketing teams look beyond vanity metrics, like follower count and likes, and focus on generating new business.
3. Tool integration
What does your marketing tech stack look like? Is it just your CRM? Or are you switching between your CRM, marketing automation platform, CMS and other systems? No matter what tools you're using, you need to make sure that you have the right information when you need it.
If your teams are relying on different systems with different sets of data, that will result in a clunky, disjointed customer experience. For example, let’s say the marketing team wants to send email promotions, but doesn’t know who prospects are versus customers, or who has unsubscribed. That could quickly result in some award conversations with your sales team, or some angry customers. On the contrary, using an integrated platform, like HubSpot, enables all teams to work from the same set of data and better understand how their efforts are impacting the other teams.
Becoming truly customer-centric isn’t easy, but with a partner like iuvo Technologies, the transition can feel a lot more do-able. We can help you get started with HubSpot and set key goals. Check out our offerings, or contact us to learn more.