In a series of qualitative interviews with channel and end user executives, the executives view customer experience as a growing, strategic focus for their companies. Moreover, all of the executives believe their companies have customer churn that’s the same as or better than industry averages. For executives seeking to understand how CX impacts customer acquisition, onboarding, retention and satisfaction, these interviews provide context.
Findings include:
- Finding 1: Customer Experience is, indeed, a key focus for customer retention. Every survey participant has a growing focus on customer experience.
- Finding 2: Sales Pipeline Development remains a challenge. The survey participants mentioned the usual laundry list of pipeline development strategies, but no single participant mentioned a breakthrough approach to sales development.
- Finding 3: Pursuing New Markets Isn’t Always A Priority. Most of our participants are plenty busy serving existing target markets, but five of the survey participants mentioned moves to scale into larger or smaller target customer sizes, new verticals, new geographies and more.
- Finding 4: Existing Onboarding Processes. All participants have at least basic onboarding processes in place. Many leverage a blend of automation and personalized customer service.
- Finding 5: Enhanced Onboarding Processes. Participants are not resting on their laurels. Most are testing or developing new onboarding processes – particularly with an eye toward video-based training.
- Finding 6: The Buyer’s Journey. The buyer’s journey has changed dramatically over the past two years or so. Self-service cloud options, voice-driven search engines, and mobile apps continue to reshape how potential customers find, consume and digest information about potential suppliers and partners. But sometimes, all the new pipelines slow down customer buying decisions.
- Finding 7: Communications and Customer Experience. Organizations of all sizes continue to extend existing communication pipelines (phone, email, Internet, business management software) for new use cases that may improve