Quality over quantity: Why and how CX can deliver high quality revenue

Recently, there have been a lot of discussions in the customer experience sphere surrounding two specific topics.

The first originated from a Forrester report stating that CX programmes are going to be cut by 20% due to their inability to prove their ROI. The second focussed on NPS (Net Promoter Score) as a measure of experience – specifically the idea of a proposed alternative: TLM (True Loyalty Measure).

To put things into perspective, both these topics have a common link: not having a clear and compelling line of sight between experience improvement and impact on quality of revenue (not revenue).

Every business has a strong foundation if it can generate revenue that is predictable, profitable, and diverse. This form of high-quality revenue creates a sustainable competitive advantage and provides long-term shareholder value.

Every board, CEO and particularly the CFO, are constantly looking to get to high quality revenue. Each of the three attributes of high-quality revenue are directly tied to “things to get right” in delivering experiences that matter to the customers.

Let us look at this obvious connection:

Predictable

Revenue is repeatable ONLY when lots of customers are very engaged and happy with the products, services and interactions with the brand. A business is able to fix things quickly and correctly if things don’t go right for the customer. It is directly tied to retention and growth. When companies have well-engaged customers, they also provide inputs to improve products and services.

Profitable

Top line is ONLY sustainable when a business can drive lower costs in acquisition and service. This happens when a lot of customers use lower cost channels to interact and contact a business only for real complex questions and needs.

This inherently means making sure that the products and services work well. They tend to better respond to education, advice and offers – thus buying more. This is possible when “what’s good for the customer” is purposefully built into the experience, not just for the purpose of selling.

Customer diversity

Revenue diversity implies revenue is not concentrated with a few customers but spread across many. This is ONLY possible when a large proportion of your customers own and use all eligible products and services, and also bring in new customers like them to your business.

Introducing QoRE (Quality of Relationship and Engagement)

This is where I propose the concept of QoRE (Quality of Relationship and Engagement). It represents three tiers of customer relationship behaviours/signals that drive high quality revenue and outline real and actionable improvement opportunities in customer experience. This provides a clear line of sight between experience and revenue impact based on evidence of relationship. 

1. Evaluate (Tier 1)
   1. Happy with the products, services and interactions they have with the business.
   2. Use lower cost channels to interact and contact for complex issues or questions.
       
2. Engage (Tier 2)
   1. Effectively use products and services.
   2. Proactively (or through surveys) provide inputs to improve products and services.
   3. Engage in education, advice and offer related interactions.
       
3. Trust (Tier 3)
   1. Own all eligible products and services.
   2. Bring additional customers.

So, what’s new or real about these?

• Directly reflect high quality revenue attributes: predictable, profitable, diversity.
• 100% evidence based.
• Trackable at an individual customer level.
• Show gaps in experience and drive specific improvement action plans at an individual customer level.

Nikhil Datar

Is this an alternative to existing relationship metrics such as NPS, TLM or others?

No, it is not because it is not score-based on surveying a set of customers to capture the intent to recommend or do business in future.

Yes, it is an evidence-based concept to address the real gap in the industry – “What business actions and experience attributes (products, service, and interactions) improve the quality of relationship quickly and deliver increased revenue quality (predictability, profitability, and diversity).”

This can be easily turned into a scoring framework with weightages etc., but my focus in proposing this is first to remove the guesswork associated with correlating current survey-based relationship measures and its impact on predictability, profitability, and diversity of revenue. The CFO and CX Leaders should be able to understand and share this common purpose and maths!

Does a business have data about these behaviours and can track them?

Yes. Business has data about these behaviours at a customer level. It is perhaps in silos of operations, financial, product, marketing, and service. Today’s data infrastructure technologies allow a business to get a customer level view of these behaviours.

What are the business implications?

1. Target experiences and cohesive marketing, sales and service actions can be defined to drive each relationship level. For an internet service provider, this could mean:
   1. Evaluate: ensure promised speeds, prevent outages, resolve known outages as quickly as possible, let the customers know proactively why their bill has changed, make it easy to pay or contact.
   2. Engage: highlight weather patterns that could cause service outages in customer zip codes; use consumption data, and position the right level of speed to meet their true needs.
   3. Trust: benefit visualisation of bundling internet with home security services based on zip code level crime statistics.
       
2. It informs the product mix strategy – if a lot of customers are stuck to one product relationship despite all the phase two actions, it highlights the need to choose specific products and improve acquisition and revenue growth around those products, versus having multiple products in the mix.

Bottomline

Unlike the current relationship metrics, the QoRE framework provides evidence-based, actionable experience reinvention opportunities that deliver improved predictability, profitability, and diversity of revenue.

This piece was adapted from an article that was originally published on Linkedin.