The Irreplaceable Moat:
How Exceptional CX Wins the Market. Ask Sub-Zero
Your top accounts are renewing with slimmer margins. After seeing revenue falling for the last year and the competition heating up, you know your products are becoming easier to copy. The R&D team is still a few years away from launching a new product. How do you keep customers engaged and willing to buy more from you?
Build a moat around your brand.
A clear example of this is from Sub-Zero/Wolf brand appliances. Having these top-of-the-line appliances in my house, I can testify to their warranty coverage (up to 12 years) and the quality of the appliances. The competition would need to re-engineer their core technology and build a distributor network to compete. The same math applies to your service contracts: if a competitor can match your commitment with a pricing change, it was never a moat.
Building a customer experience operational strategy is the first step in creating an irreplaceable moat. Where do you start? I recommend looking at your current metrics and determining you’re capturing the right leading metrics vs lagging metrics and tying them to overall recurring revenue. Reviewing the areas where customers are feeling the most friction from your company, and creating clear priorities are the first steps.
Examples of leading indicators focused on customer experience:
Customer churn predictors such as on time delivery, proactive service events vs reactive service events, contract renewals.
Win rates and retention rates
Shared customer experience KPI’s
Employee focused metrics such as regrettable loss and overall employee engagement
3-year NPS trending
Once you and your team have a baseline, determine your overall goal for maintaining and growing recurring revenue using leading indicators as your guide. Operationalizing customer experience using a playbook approach works well and keeps the company aligned on the key strategic imperatives.
The benefits include differentiation from the competition and protection of the brand. Your revenue is protected and you will see growth and reduced operational costs. In my work creating differentiation with B2B companies, I’ve built and implemented operational CX strategies leading to customer retention rates of >95% and a $10M increase in service revenue. This isn’t a customer sentiment exercise; it’s about knowing where in the customer lifecycle are areas of friction that can be resolved by using an operational mindset. Examples include: automated service contract renewals, early warning on product failures, intelligent product ordering systems that can predict inventory, and a more holistic onboarding program.
Depending on your business, knowing which customer touchpoints are the most critical for them gives your team the priority order in which to start building your operational model. This isn’t an easy task to do on top of your normal workload. Bringing in an outside team who has built the operational model from the ground up is a good first step.
Here's what I'd do next: the Heylo Diagnostic. I talk directly to your top customers, interview your commercial team and account leaders, and review the data to find where you’re the opportunities are to protect your revenue and use CX as a differentiator. You walk away with a written plan your team can run, closing the distance between the customers you have and the customers you should be keeping.
The first call is free — sixty minutes to find out if there's a gap worth closing.
jackie@heyloexperiencegroup.com