There are several common ways to improve the existing account growth in B2B companies, including:
- Building strong relationships: Building strong relationships with existing customers is essential for growing their accounts. This can involve regularly communicating with customers, understanding their needs and goals, and going above and beyond to meet their expectations.
- Offering additional products and services: Another way to improve account growth is by offering additional products and services to existing customers. This can help to increase the value of each account, and can also help to cross-sell and up-sell additional products and services.
- Providing excellent customer service: Providing excellent customer service is also key to improving account growth. This can include responding promptly to customer inquiries, addressing customer concerns, and resolving problems in a timely and efficient manner.
- Offering customized solutions: Offering customized solutions to existing customers can help to increase the value of each account. This can include tailoring products and services to meet the specific needs of each customer, and developing specialized solutions that are not available to other customers.
- Implementing customer retention programs: Implementing customer retention programs can help to improve account growth. This can include loyalty programs, referral programs, and other incentives that encourage customers to continue doing business with a company.
- Regularly gathering customer feedback: Regularly gathering customer feedback is another way to improve account growth. This can include conducting surveys, focus groups, and other research to understand customer needs and preferences. This feedback can be used to improve the company’s products or services, and to develop strategies for retaining and growing existing customers.
They are all prescriptive. The question is, which one of these is relevant to your organization and why? That clearly depends on your current state, ground level challenges and growth aspirations. Only by implementing relevant strategies, B2B companies can work to improve the growth of existing accounts and drive sustainable growth for the company.
If you are looking for ways to improve your account growth, click here
Putting Google’s HEART framework to build your Client Centricity Program
A decade ago, Google’s researchers, Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson, and Xin Fu, published a paper on how to measure the UX of web applications. Their principal objective was to clarify how product goals can be mapped to metrics in order to improve the customer experience. This was the genesis of Google’s HEART framework.
Since then, this has gained popularity among product managers (PMs) and IT companies building products or applications. They use the HEART framework to improve UX. But I’m not going to talk about it in that context. Let’s take a step back and look at this HEART framework from the perspective of any business, and how we can use it to build client centricity.
What is Google’s HEART Framework?
HEART is an acronym for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention and Task. These are the five broad themes or lenses through which the success of client centricity and client management frameworks can be examined.
Happiness
How happy is your client? How happy are the decision-makers? How happy is the buyer of your service? How happy are the users of your services? How happy are the influencers?
While NPS is still a popular way to measure satisfaction, you can certainly explore other ways to collect quantitative data around satisfaction, for instance through referenceable clients.
Engagement
How engaged is your client in the short term? How much do users interact with a product or service?
We need to recognize that not all engaged clients are happy. For example, if they are reliant on your organization and you are failing to meet their expectations, their engagement with your organization will be high! They will have multiple reviews, too many reports, frequent visits to your site, etc.
Thus, measuring engagement alone can be misleading.
Engagement can also increase when you offer a wider range of products or services or multiple value additions. Mapping the client journey (CJM) can be helpful to improve positive engagement.
Relevant metrics would be collaboration projects, number of interactions, breadth of engagement (across different departments of the client’s organization), duration of such engagements, etc.
Adoption (Penetration)
How penetrated are your services in client’s organization? What is your share of wallet of the client’s business? How much are your existing clients willing to use your products, services, or applications? Are they regularly using it? Is it out of pressure or because they find it useful?
Relevant metrics can be the share of the client’s wallet, the adoption rate of your services, the adoption rate of new features, services, value adds, processes, integration between the client and your processes, the product ranges of clients where your services or products are used, the conversion ratio of sales, etc.
Retention
How many clients do you retain long-term?
Relevant metrics include client churn rate, contract renewal rate, cost of retention (discounts towards retention), etc.
Task
How convenient or easy is it for your clients to work with your organization? How complicated are the processes and policies? How agile is your work force’s mindset?
Prof. Clay Christensen introduced the concept of ‘Jobs-to-be-done’, where he stated that all clients and customers have jobs to be done, and it is about how we, as vendors, can make their lives easy. And clients (and their employees) would prefer those products or services that make their lives easier.
For example, your client wants you to change a design parameter for some specific reason, but your employees don’t easily accept the change. Instead, they resist, highlight difficulties, propose complicated solutions, put clients in bureaucratic loops, etc.
Metrics can be improvement in a client’s productivity (after your association), time to complete their tasks in your touchpoints, channels, or systems, etc.
I hope, by now, you can see the benefit of viewing your client centricity and client success program through Google’s HEART framework. If you are looking for any specific guidance in this area, please do contact me at Business.Support@collaborat.com
Behavioral and cultural maturity on Customer Centricity with maturity grid..
An unique attitude based organizational evaluation is used to understand behavioral and cultural maturity and can provide insights on where and what kind of attention is needed from leadership to improve Customer Centricity. Instead of dispersed efforts, they can take focused actions.
An overall maturity rating for the organization or cohort of employees will quantitatively assess current state.
A maturity grid below can give relative position and also provide a benchmark.
Customer Centricity Maturity Levels
To arrive at this maturity level:
- Customer Centricity of an organization across 8 dimensions is assessed and outcome will be an overall Customer Centricity Score against 4 maturity levels.
- Unlike traditional assessments, in this survey participants’ attitude is evaluated by giving them 8 random scenarios and they have to select what they will do or feel in each of the situation. This way, it eliminates respondent bias.
- Outcome is compiled in an interactive Customer Centricity report – a dashboard
Access Customer Centricity Maturity Interactive Dashboard here
For organizations of employee headcount (20 – 80) this Customer Centricity Evaluation is free.
Inspiration is contagious like COVID!
I’m an artist at living – my work of art is my life.
– Suzuki
Be passionate about designing customer experience. Take personal interest in finer details of your product/service, even if its too insignificant for your role.
| If a picture is worth 1000 words, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings. |
| – Tom & David Kelley |
It’s best to create a culture to experiment, test & pilot the hypothesis rather than deliberation, debate & finalize!
| Mind is never a problem, mindset is. |
| – Narendra Modi |
All employees are good, any mind-block that makes someone pro or anti to a change is due to lack of clarity. Communicate beyond barriers to build strong bridges and change mindsets.
| The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing. |
| – John Russell |
| Set it as your personal target to interact with at least 1 customer everyday, even if it is in an informal manner. |
| _____________________________________________________ |
| A little rain each day will fill the rivers to overflowing. |
| – Liberian Proverb |
| Leaders need to repeatedly and regularly connect with employees to emphasize the importance of customer experience. It’s not a one time fan fair event. |
| _____________________________________________________ |
| The customer is not always right, but they are always your customer! |
| – Shep Hyken |
| It doesn’t matter who’s right, any way. Not all customers will fit into ideal customer profile. This agile mindset is the starting point for customer delight. |
| _____________________________________________________ |
| Don’t confuse customers who are to your company with customers who are loyal to your loyalty program. |
| – Sky |
| Not all customers are loyal. Don’t get misled by rewards redemptions and impressions rates to gage customer engagement. |
| _____________________________________________________ |
| Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules. |
| – Nordstrom’s employee manual |
| Processes, control measures, audits & automations should empower your employees to serve customers better and not meant to turn employees into robots that follow rule & script books. |
Customer Experience Quotes
Here is one of the most inspiring Customer experience quotes to delight customers and develop superior service attitudeThe world is his who does his job with compassion.
– Tiruvalluvar
Take away for CX Professionals
Serve customers with compassion, and success will follow naturally.
Customer Experience Quotes
Here is one of the most inspiring Customer experience quotes to delight customers and drive customer experience changeBreaking rules is not always bad.
– (Neil) Nilakantasrinivasan
Take away for CX Professionals
Process, policies, company rules, etc are all just guidelines.
Author is an expert in customer experience change. If you are looking for Customer Experience (CX) firm in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and across India, contact us.
Customer Experience Quotes
Here is one of the most inspiring Customer experience quotes to delight customers and drive customer experience changeEmpowering employees is less riskier, than not doing so.
– (Neil) Nilakantasrinivasan
Take away for CX Professionals
Employee empowerment pays off, both in short and in long term.
Author is an expert in customer experience change. If you are looking for Customer Experience (CX) firm in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and across India, contact us.
Customer Experience Quotes
Here is one of the most inspiring Customer experience quotes to delight customers and drive customer experience changeUnengaged employees don’t create engaged customers.
– Bruce Temkin
Take away for CX Professionals
No CX change program will be successful if employees are not engaged.
Author is an expert in customer experience change. If you are looking for Customer Experience (CX) firm in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and across India, contact us.
Customer Experience Quotes
Here is one of the most inspiring Customer experience quotes to delight customers and drive customer experience changeFix process, not people.
– (Neil) Nilakantasrinivasan
Take away for CX Professionals
When things don’t go well, don’t witch hunt.
Author is an expert in customer experience change. If you are looking for Customer Experience (CX) firm in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and across India, contact us.
Customer Experience Quotes
Here is one of the most inspiring Customer experience quotes to delight customers and drive customer experience changeThings fall apart; the center cannot hold.
– W.B. Yeats
Take away for CX Professionals
A great CX vision & strategy cannot compensate for weak execution.
Author is an expert in customer experience change. If you are looking for Customer Experience (CX) firm in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and across India, contact us.
Customer Experience Quotes
Here is one of the most inspiring Customer experience quotes to delight customers and drive customer experience changeLearning the tactics from an expert is the best way to do an act.
– Tiruvalluvar
Take away for CX Professionals
Engage an expert if you want to deliver world class CX.
Author is an expert in customer experience change. If you are looking for Customer Experience (CX) firm in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and across India, contact us.
Customer Experience Quotes
Here is one of the most inspiring Customer experience quotes to delight customers and drive customer experience changeThe reform rabbit can become a turle, which can become a rock.
– Robert D Blackwill
Take away for CX Professionals
Caution : CX improvement initiatives water down as time progresses.
Author is an expert in customer experience change. If you are looking for Customer Experience (CX) firm in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and across India, contact us.
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