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With the growing complexity and competitive landscape in capturing prospective buyers' attention, it is more critical than ever to focus on deepening customer relationships.  As customer experience (CX) professionals positioned at the heart of a business, we have a huge opportunity to make a lasting impact by collaborating effectively across all teams to create a customer-centric organization with the objective of increasing conversions, improving customer loyalty, and lowering churn.

This extensive publication, “Effective Collaboration Between CX and Sales, Account Management & Customer Success”, outlines the roles played in crucial customer touchpoints; Before the purchase, during acquisition. and the experience a customer has after purchasing.

I’ll touch on a few top-level highlights, although I highly recommend you read the publication in its entirety in order to gain a deeper understanding of the importance these roles play in collaboration with CX.

Let’s start with the beginning, conversion.

Sales

With each department providing crucial services to the overall financial health of a company, it is the Sales Team who ultimately sets the tone and expectation for a customer’s journey.  Sales is typically considered the revenue engine to the business, but maintaining a customer-centric mindset is key to ultimately achieving customer loyalty.  This is where CX collaboration presents an opportunity by leveraging feedback in order to fill any gaps and improve processes.  If we view the customer journey as stages, with each function playing its part, we are able to garner feedback from each stage and ultimately loop back to the beginning (the sales function) with a new enlightenment for improving the customer experience.

The handoff.

Account Management

In which it is the sales person who cultivates a lead and begins the relationship during the conversion process, it is the Account Manager who must seamlessly take the handoff to ensure the customer’s product understanding. This can be considered a make-or-break moment for the relationship with a company.  The CX collaborative efforts will be an early indication of whether the business is able to rightfully set, manage and fulfill (and hopefully exceed) expectations.  It is the responsibility of this team to manage the client relationship and nurture it for long term success, and with the support from CX it can align operations and communication towards ensuring a customer’s satisfaction.

Customer Success

With sales bringing in the new customer, and account management ensuring a smooth transition, it is the Customer Success Team that drives product adoption, communication cadence, and creating customer advocates for your business. Collecting customer feedback in collaboration with CX helps to aggregate key findings and metrics to be used to improve the overall journey from a customer’s perspective as well as the handoffs; Before the purchase, during the purchase, and after the purchase.                                             

Here are some key success metrics shared to be leveraged by all functions;

• Customer health score: Combination of engagement and usage metrics

• Net promoter score: Loyalty

• Qualitative customer feedback: Comments, calls, complaints, reviews, etc.

• Customer churn rate: Rate customers are leaving you

• Monthly recurring revenue: Total revenue generated by your business from all the active subscriptions in a particular month

• Customer lifetime value: Average purchase value over the account tenure or individual customer

• Customer retention cost: All costs that the organization spends to retain customers

• First Contact Resolution Rate: Call center metrics if the issue is resolved at the first call

A couple other important elements to consider within this publication are the supportive tools provided by CX that will increase the likelihood of success, as well as common pitfalls that should not be overlooked.

To truly understand all this encompasses, I encourage you to download and read “Effective Collaboration Between CX and Sales, Account Management & Customer Success” front to cover.

In Conclusion

It is paramount that every team comes together in developing a customer-centric approach that analyzes how you are solving the problems for your customers at every step.  Collectively identifying gaps in the process to design an experience that drives a positive impact for the business.

Customers expect companies to engage with them — anytime and anywhere. To ensure that the business does not miss any opportunities to deliver convenient, personalized, and effortless experiences to customers, sales and CX must be aligned.

Spencer Tyler is the Director of Customer Retention at Investor's Business Daily, and a winner of CXPA's 2022 Emerging Leader Awards. The book Effective Collaboration Between CX and Sales, Account Management, and Customer Success: A Guide to Strengthening CX Together, is available for free online reading to CXPA members at www.cxbookstore.com. Not a member? Learn more and join today.