Measuring and Managing the Customer Experience is A Path to Growth and Profitability for Distributors
Understanding how you rank in terms of your customer experience can make a huge difference in your success
New threats – and opportunities – are waiting around the corner for every distributor:
Customers have many choices for products
Switching costs are frequently low and sometimes non-existent
Most distributors lose 20%-30% of their customers each year – and don’t understand why
Most don’t know how to stop this customer defection
Distributors have substantial unrealized opportunity in their markets (market share) and in active accounts (wallet share)
High-performing distributors have a strong differentiated value proposition that is built into their culture and conveyed through the customer experience – including operational and supply chain processes, customer touchpoints, products and solutions, services, communications and sales channels.
The Customer Experience is a primary differentiator for distributors.
How to evaluate the customer experience
But this metric is not enough.
A second system is needed – one that answers the question: “Why?”
- What do customers like or dislike about their experience?
- Why do they give you a low score?
- Why do they give you a high score?
- What would improve their scores?
Our solution: Customer Experience RX
Customer Experience RX is a diagnostic and prescriptive customer experience analytics platform. It gives you a detailed understanding of how your customers perceive their experience.
Customer Experience RX is a turnkey NPS measurement system and a powerful, flexible NPS data analysis platform for your use.
When effectively used and applied, you can identify problem areas in the business (areas that will, when improved, positively affect NPS scores). It can also suggest how those areas can be improved.
We:
- Develop the survey
- Work with you to develop a list/sampling strategy
- Analyze survey results
- Create recommendations
- Present results, analysis and recommendations to your team
- Administer respondent incentives
From start to survey results and conclusions, it takes about 2 – 4 weeks and a handful of hours on your part.
This is all delivered through an annual subscription of 2-4 surveys a year or on a “trigger” basis driven by transactions.
Key Features of Our Customer Experience Analytics Platform
Data can be sorted dynamically by customer segment, job function, title, geography and more.
Customer Satisfaction Scores
- Likelihood to recommend – Net Promoter Score
- Overall satisfaction
- Likelihood of buying again
Drivers of C-SAT for Your Company Rated by Importance & Satisfaction
- Core capabilities
- Value-added services
- Benefits
Correlations: Drivers vs. Macro-indicators
- Know how each core capability, value-added service and benefit contributes to your overall (macro) customer satisfaction scores
Scores and Feedback for Each Customer Touchpoint
- Get scores for every channel: Customer service, billing, web, sales rep, branch, etc.
Analyze and Classify Open-Ended Feedback
- We use sentiment analysis to interpret and classify feedback while making all of it available to you.
With Customer Experience RX, you can improve the customer experience at the business, segment or customer level:
Why We Built It
In Distribution Strategy Group’s role as advocates for distributors, we set out to find a way to provide tools that help distributors create world-class companies – with strong value propositions, growth and profitability.
We knew we wanted to start with a proven business tool – NPS — but we wanted to make sure we added context and depth in ways that allow distributors to adapt their strategies and operations to make a difference to customers.
We built this customer loyalty and satisfaction system with the following philosophies:
- Use NPS as a standard measure – the de facto metric for customer satisfaction and loyalty. The evidence that supports the correlation between NPS and positive customer behaviors (like customer retention and wallet share) is irrefutable.
- Support the use of other macro-indicators when appropriate.
- Provide a thorough understanding of what drives customer scores. This includes how customers feel about your core capabilities and their touchpoints with your company and how these are correlated to NPS.
- Segment to your heart’s content. Some elements of your value proposition may be a better fit for some market segments than others. Some branches may be servicing customers better or worse than others. Our segmentation parameters include customer industry, size, geography and functional role of respondents.
- Use a Goldilocks strategy for survey length and frequency. We believe there is an optimal survey length – too short and it doesn’t capture the information needed to make it actionable. Too long and it causes survey fatigue for your customers. Surveying too frequently can also cause survey fatigue.
- Serve all distributors with a powerful yet simple and affordable tool.
- Provide a turnkey solution. Our intent is to make customer loyalty and satisfaction easy for you.
We want you to come away with a strong understanding of your customers’ expectations so you can create superior customer experiences. You’ll also drive greater accountability throughout the company.
This can have a very real impact on your bottom line. A small change in the percentage of loyal customers can make a significant impact on profitability for distributors.
Reach out today to schedule an appointment to learn more.
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Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.