Understanding customer health is critical to the long-term success of any company.

It helps predict the future state of your relationship with the customer, reveals areas where your product could be improved, and shines a light on support and success processes that may be contributing to poor customer health.

With proactive monitoring of customer health scores, CX teams can identify and resolve issues that lead to dissatisfied customers before they hit the crisis point and before they have a chance to consider discontinuing their relationship with your company.

Fortunately, SaaS companies have discovered the value of monitoring customer health. In fact, SaaS companies are 30% more likely to use customer health scores than their on-premise or other industry counterparts. Almost half–46%– use customer health scores to forecast churn and anticipate renewals.(Source: https://www.csmpractice.com/customer-health-score).

But the news is not all good. When it comes to keeping their health monitoring approach current, 48% of companies disclosed that they update their health score algorithm only once per year, and 33% report they do so manually. With such infrequent finetuning and the impracticality of doing so manually, CX teams put themselves at a disadvantage. (source: ibid)

With so many support, engineering, and business insights locked away in siloes throughout most SaaS companies, it’s no wonder teams defer creating a meaningful customer health monitoring strategy.  In most companies, no one has access to all of those systems. Support doesn’t know the bugs associated with reported issues, engineering teams are blind to the business impact customer-reported issues represent, and business teams don’t know the impact customer support tickets have on customer retention.

IrisAgent unlocks siloed information across ticket management, bug tracking, and business systems to provide a 360° view of every customer in real-time. Our proactive AI-powered approach means CX and business teams have always up-to-date insights with which to prioritize customers without ever having to update algorithms or adjust manual spreadsheets. We provide an aggregated health score derived from various sources and points in the customer’s journey to provide the most holistic picture of any customer. Here’s what IrisAgent’s custom health score includes:

Support Metrics

• Number of escalated support cases

A large number of escalated can frustrate customers since they take longer to address than more common issues. Customers who wait longer for their issues to be resolved will be less satisfied than a customer with more common issues that get resolved faster.

• Number of support cases

Everyone needs a little help now and then, but the frequency with which they interact with support agents reveals a lot about the customer’s health. Customers who contact support frequently are more likely to be less satisfied.

• Time-to-resolve

Customer support teams set expectations for the time it should take to resolve a customer’s issue. When a customer’s average time-to-resolve fails to meet those standards, it is reasonable to assume that the customer’s satisfaction will dip.

• Case priority

Like time-to-resolve, most customer support teams have an internal process for establishing case priority. While not an empirical measure, understanding the “pecking order” of cases leads back to the health of the customer. All other things being equal, understanding the relative position of a customer’s issues among all active cases can be helpful. A customer with several high-priority cases can be a sign of a distressed customer, and struggling customers tend to be unhappy customers.

• Case sentiment score

The words and phrases a customer uses when submitting a request for support provide a window into the customer’s health. IrisAgent uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to assign a sentiment score for each ticket.

• CSAT

CSAT surveys reflect the in-the-moment sentiment of your customers. A single unproductive interaction with customer support may not result in an overall dip in a customer’s health score but consistent negative feedback clearly indicates there’s work to be done to prevent the customer from becoming at risk of churn.

Product Metrics

• Product engagement

Understanding the frequency and depth of a customer’s use of your product reveals how dependent your customer is on your product. This metric is sometimes described as the “toothbrush test”: Is it something your customer uses every day? Knowing which customers are active users vs. casual users helps identify customers likely to churn. In addition, insight into which features your customers use most often can help get to the root cause of a support request because you understand the context in which the issue is likely to have occurred.

Business Metrics

• Annual Contract Value (ACV)

ACV gives you a clear picture of the value of each customer by normalizing the total income over contract length. Understanding the effect your support strategy and performance have on your highest value customers should drive the approach you take to support them and reinforce the importance of keeping that segment of your customers happy.

• Renewal timeframe

68% of customers churn because they believe the company providing the service/product doesn’t care about them, and many of those losses occur at the renewal point. Companies close to their renewal dates should be monitored carefully to avoid unexpected non-renewals.

• Upsell/cross-sell potential

Excellent customer support can drive upselling and cross-selling revenue. To achieve this, organizations must build a support team that turns customers into advocates, thus increasing the confidence in your company and ultimately driving more revenue for the company.

Staying on top of every customer’s health is critical to the success of your company but–as the old saying goes–you can’t manage what you don’t measure. By continually measuring support, business, and product metrics, IrisAgent helps support agents tailor conversations to the customer’s product adoption journey with empathy and patience, engineering teams can understand how bugs, releases, and regressions impact customer health, and success teams can head off issues that might impact retention and upgrades/cross-sells, all from a single dashboard. To learn more, visit https://irisagent.com/customer-health.

About the author

Palak Dalal Bhatia is founder and CEO of IrisAgent. Previously, she led product management for stateful container applications at Google. She also invested in early stage technology startups while working in the venture capital industry. She began her career as an engineer at Microsoft in their search engine team. She completed her MBA from Harvard Business School and bachelors from IIT Bombay.

With a recent study revealing that 75% of UK consumers are ‘expected to buy in at least one peak event’, and 60% expected to use a laptop or PC for their purchases, there’s no doubt that the peak retail season is continuing to grow in popularity year-on-year.

How, when and why consumers buy has a massive influence on national business performance. Shopping is something fundamental to the mood and confidence of UK plc. but how we do it is constantly evolving, being driven by a perfect storm of competition, technology and changing expectations.

Nowhere is this more acute than now. Success in the festive shopping season can make or break retailers. This ‘event’ starts earlier and earlier. What was once a day (Black Friday), then a long weekend (Cyber Monday) is now a long sales frenzy that doesn’t officially conclude until we dispose of our Christmas trees in early January.

But this is set against a backdrop of high street malaise. Nearly 3,000 shops shut on UK high streets in the first half of this year and in July the proportion of all shops that are empty reached 10.3%, its highest level since January 2015. It has been widely reported that this is likely to be the bleakest mid-winter for retailers for some time. At the time of writing, Bonmarche is the latest that is being wound up. But, while much of the pressure is being placed on the high street, online retail is not immune to the threat of customer ‘walkouts’.

Retailers need to control online churn

It’s arguably easier to deal with an angry, disgruntled or disappointed customer when not actually faced with the person in question but, just because customers are now largely shopping online doesn’t mean they’re any less likely to ditch a shop or product if they’re not getting the service and personal touches they expect.

We recently polled 500 retailers on the pressures facing online digital teams in advance of the busy retail season. Our study found that, while 92% of digital teams are focused on business outcomes and delivering an omnichannel experience that delights their customers, 60% are failing to measure customer churn. This is even more shocking when you consider that of those retailers polled, around one in three (30%) have an average drop rate of 50% or more on online properties.

In an environment where every penny counts, losing this much custom is seriously haemorrhaging potential revenue. In fact, UK figures from The Institute of Customer Service suggest that customers who are treated well with “excellent” customer service can spend up to £53 (around $65) more at a particular retailer, on average. The same report found that nine out of ten people who received ‘excellent’ service during Black Friday shopping with that retailer again, 37% more than those who received ‘ok’ service. That’s quite a return on smiling, treating customers politely, and trying to anticipate their needs – either digitally or in person.

Turning to technology

Clearly, festive success depends on going beyond consumer expectations. And so, perhaps it is no surprise that in an attempt to blend the bricks and mortar with clicks and mortar to deliver seamless silver service, retailers are turning to technology. Our report found that retailers are releasing an increasing number of digital products and apps as they look to foster connections with a vast array of customers. The production of these digital products increased by 20% when comparing 2018 to this year and only looks set to continue with three quarters (75%) of UK retailers believing this trend will increase in 2020 (this rises to 87% in the US).

Outside of new products and apps, retailers are also deploying technologies such as; live chat (46%), native mobile apps (46%), and front-end web technologies (45%), which are expected to play a bigger role in how they engage with consumers moving forward. Over a third of retailers (34%) are also looking to incorporate AI to improve the digital experience for customers and, when it comes to the scale of the digital experience, 35% of organizations are maintaining five or more digital channels, and 72% measuring three or more channels.

Unsurprisingly, this is an additional pressure point comes when it comes to having the necessary skills. Our research found that one in five organizations are lacking testers to ensure they deliver an omnichannel experience which delights customers, and getting this right is critical. If historical shopping behavior has taught us anything it is to expect the unexpected and this is hyper-critical for retailers at this time of year. While over 70% of retailers deploy AI to test software and applications, being able to weave in some form of human intelligence and understanding can be the difference when the competition is so fierce.

Business outcomes bumper buyer bonanza

What is clear is that retailers are now recognizing the importance of business outcomes and delivering outstanding customer experience. And, while critical, it is not enough. Traditional high street retailers have to grasp with the enormous task of transforming their businesses to digital experiences and the digital experience needs to deliver the very best of face to face interaction.

Today consumers want the best of both worlds and retail has to find the answers. It’s no surprise they are turning to AI and new technologies to deliver an omnichannel experience that drives business growth and delights customers.

About the Author

Dr John Bates is CEO at Eggplant. John is a visionary technologist and highly accomplished business leader. He holds a doctorate in computer science from Cambridge University, U.K., and is the author of the book “Thingalytics: Smart Big Data Analytics for the Internet of Things.”

How setting up a Customer Effort Index can radically increase Top-Line Revenue.

Companies seem adept at chasing new customers while watching the churn. Why else would they spend around $500B on advertising and acquiring new customers, $50B on CRM spend, and just $9B on the call center (Ovum).

It seems that retailers are content to pour funds into loyalty schemes, money into advertising lower cost products, and then sitting back and watching the customer churn. They set out to attract new customers with price incentives while often leaving existing customers on the receiving end of poor customer service and the churn continues.

Most retailers, from big players to medium sized chains, have the technology to put in place loyalty schemes and many do. These schemes certainly enable them to gather information about customers’ buying habits in order to market new offers to them and run operations more efficiently and profitably. But consumers’ wallets are overflowing with an excess of loyalty cards for different retailers, none of whom actually has their loyalty.

It seems that customer loyalty can’t be bought, it has to be earned. The most recent research from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that consumers ranked loyalty programmes last when asked to rank factors influencing purchase decisions. Furthermore, the research found that 72% of consumers are unwilling to re-purchase from retailers which fail to resolve their issues. To stop the churn and nurture loyal customers who return time and again, it’s great customer service that is key.

An organization’s contact center is often seen simply as a tick in the ‘customer service’ box, and not as a means to actively improve the customer’s experience and reduce customer effort. But the retail industry is a prime example of where truly great customer service can drive loyalty and generate revenue.

Building loyalty is easier than you thought. So how can your contact center help you keep customers coming back for more? Well, loyalty has more to do with delivering on basic promises than it does with consolation gifts. It is all about making it easier for customers to resolve their issues or queries at the time; in other words, reducing the customers efforts when they have a sales query or when something goes wrong.

Increasing customer effort not only decreases customer satisfaction, but more importantly, decreases both customer loyalty and future spend. Dissatisfied customers look elsewhere for the same product.

Buyers are benefiting from the explosion of mobile and e-commerce technology that means comparisons of stock, comparison of prices, and delivery times for products, are a mere tap of the iPad screen away. Sellers need to exploit a new generation of customer service technology in order to reduce customer effort and to maintain the loyalty of the ones they have already attracted.

Tools are now available that help to measure Customer Effort, enabling organizations to identify and potentially eliminate which particular aspects of a customers experience are causing the most problems, rather than wait until a particular service problem actually occurs.

Build your individual Customer Effort Index

Genesys has developed a Customer Effort Audit that measures a series of interaction parameters: number of extra contacts, number of channels used, interaction durations, transfers, resolution lapsed time and total conversation time. It then scores them according to the priority given to the interaction, which varies from market to market and individual to individual. It’s important to not only count the events, but to also weight their impact based on how each affects the customer, as some events can have a multiplier effect in their impact.

Customer Effort Audits allow retailers to start to understand the customer experience from the customers’ point of view, identify which areas in particular are requiring too much effort and address these issues. They can then generate a Customer Effort Index that can be used to assess the magnitude of the effort needed to complete a request. Understanding this enables retailers to start to eliminate frustrations from their contact centers and use them as a positive force for revenue retention and revenue generation.

The bottom line? Grow your top-line!

Retailers are beginning to recognize that customer loyalty is increasingly a key differentiating factor between a sale or a non-sale. There is a strong case for them to divert some of their spend from ‘loyalty’ schemes and sales incentives into building a truly great customer experience that leaves all of their customers confident to return.

New technology is allowing new customer service disciplines to build a happier, more loyal customer base that will keep coming back, refer more and buy more. With customer frustrations eliminated and expectations met, the impact on top-line revenue could be significant.

About the Author

Keith Pearce is Vice President, Corporate Marketing at Genesys. Genesys provides enterprise-wide customer interaction, computer telephony and e-mail software solutions to more than 300 end users around the world.