Category Archives: Customer Experience

LIMRA Marketing & Research Conference Wrap-Up

EMI recently attended the LIMRA Marketing & Research Conference at Disney World. Our take-away from the conference: No business today can achieve sustainable growth and gain market share without being customer-centric. Easy to say, but less easy to implement.

As an exhibitor, we had dozens of conversations on companies reassessing and refining their client-centered strategies. The challenge of operating with a consumer marketing lens, versus the traditional product-centric lens, which so many companies have done, was well expressed in a recent McKinsey report* on U.S. retirement readiness:

[Providers] “have a unique, largely untapped opportunity…But to capture it, firms must stop driving product innovation based on actuarial models and instead lead with a strong consumer marketing lens…financial institutions must take a much stronger consumer view as they create new product prototypes.”

These challenges relate to how companies engage with their channel partners to enable customer-centric throughput. For example, one mutual fund leader at the Conference addressed investment language and how “financial security” resonates far more than “financial freedom.” An insurance leader explained the need to help agents establish an online social presence and keep diverse customers engaged through social media.

The LIMRA event helped us to crystalize several fundamental questions:

  • “Am I using customer-centricity to achieve competitive advantage with my channels and end-customers?”
  • “Is my organization unified in this approach, even if product, sales and research are in silos?”
  • “Am I extending my consumer-centric expertise and assets (e.g., research, collateral to advisor and agent channels) that arms advisors and agents with educational and motivational client tools?”
  • “Am I adapting core messaging to engage different generations, particularly as they age and their needs evolve, across relevant traditional and digital communications?”
  • “Am I preparing for what my distribution channels will need in the next two years based on what my research, marketing analysis and industry trends are reporting now?”

These questions speak to the need for strategies and tactics to help financial service institutions to grow share with their captive and third party distribution channels. EMI examined many of these questions at our recent webinar Four Strategies to Win the Hearts and Minds of Your Advisor Channel – and Grow Share which shows you the need for customer-centric throughput and the importance of building better advisor relationships that can be adapted to sales channels and ultimately end customers. This is a topical concern of research and marketing experts at investment and insurance firms alike as we clearly recognized at the LIMRA event.

 

* McKinsey & Company, “Why Are We Not There Yet? An Update on U.S. Retirement Readiness,” May 2013.

Customer Segment Intelligence Delivers Balance to Your Customer Success Initiatives

In customer success management, there will always be a tension between treating each customer as special and unique in order to ensure their success, and serving all customers without exploding the CSM team budget. One way to strike a balance between these two poles is the collection, maintenance, and efficient utilization of customer segment intelligence.

Customer segment intelligence is the knowledge base of elements relevant to the sale and utilization of your product/service by companies within a target segment. These elements would likely include:

  • Key “firmographic” attributes of companies in the segment (e.g., size, geography) that might influence purchase and adoption
  • Market trends
  • Decision-making structures and influence networks
  • Typical needs and objectives related to your product/service
  • Propensity for and approach to technology adoption
  • Common objections to purchase
  • Common obstacles to implementation/utilization

Equipped with this kind of intelligence, SaaS companies can develop segment-specific customer success programs and segment “playbooks” that will produce better results more efficiently.  They achieve this by being adapted to align with the particular characteristics and meet the particular needs of companies in that segment. A “one-size-fits-all” onboarding program is almost always better than no onboarding program is likely to miss the mark for some customers.  A custom implementation plan is highly effective but unscalable.  A customer segment intelligence-based onboarding program strikes a balance between these extremes by delivering a template that applies to a group of customers, but is effective because it is built on the foundation of knowledge of the typical operational constraints on the companies’ ability to get quickly to value and capture quick wins.

As is the case with the aforementioned onboarding, most customer success initiatives benefit from segment intelligence. For example, it is much more effective and efficient to have a series of segment email templates for cross-selling and/or up-selling rather than each CSM writing new emails from scratch for every upsell/cross-sell opportunity and rather than using a single, generic “canned” email that fails to be compelling because it doesn’t speak to the specific segment needs. Similarly, understanding when breadth or depth of utilization should register either as a concern (too low) or an opportunity (very high) requires knowledge of the relevant segment-specific benchmarks rather than benchmarks based on the entire customer base, much of which may behave very differently than the customers in one specific segment.

Moreover, this intelligence delivers further operational efficiency gains by enabling lesser-tenured CSMs to ramp up and effectively help customers faster. Playbooks, templates, and diagnostics provide a foundation of proven tools and process that gives newer CSMs with good relationship-building skills the opportunity to succeed quickly.

In an upcoming blog, we will discuss best practices for gathering and distributing customer segment intelligence.

4 Highlights from All About the Cloud – It’s All About the Customer

If you are so inclined, most things can be viewed through a lens that turns them into proof points for the importance of a focus on customer experience. It didn’t require much effort, though, to walk away from the SIIA All About the Cloud conference with a sense that success in the cloud is all about customer experience.

Fundamentally, the SaaS business model necessitates an absolute focus on ensuring customer success and delivering positive customer experiences. Without the traditional lock-in provided by on-premise software – now that it’s installed, they’re not going to switch – SaaS companies are forced to put their money where their name is by delivering on the “service” promise. Delivering value to the customer and gaining their trust is the new lock-in.

Some conference highlights from the point-of-view of a customer success-obsessed observer:

  • Hearing about several “NextGen” companies who built their offerings with the customer experience in mind: Armor5’s value proposition features ease of end-user access and xTuple’s 5 minute rule to gauge whether the customer’s first five minutes using the application will be positive.
  • Affirmation of the idea that whoever in the organization is responsible for customer success should have financial incentives associated with that success: Servoy compensates sales people based on the revenue generated by its clients’ applications; Totango’s Guy Nirpaz suggested that Chief Customer Officers have revenue goals driven by retention and cross/up-sell.
  • Highlighting by Shlomo Weiss of SafeNet of the fact that “shelfware” – the purchased and unimplemented software either on-premise or in the cloud – is a significant opportunity for companies that drive adoption.
  • Dissemination by Nick Mehta of Gainsight of the idea that investment in retention is just as important and vital as investment in customer acquisition marketing and sales.