Escape the Acquisition Trap: Prioritize Customer Experience After the Sale

Does your business spend more time and money acquiring new customers than keeping them happy?

Many businesses fall into that acquisition trap. A recent survey of B2C marketers found that 54% of respondents allocated more than half their marketing budget to acquisition, while only 13% spent more than half their budget on retention. That distribution of resources can become a costly mistake that leads to losing customers. The world’s most successful growth companies generate the majority (80%) of their value by tapping into new revenue streams from their existing customer base. To capitalize on the relationship with your current customers, you must retain them. That is often easier said than done.

Many traditional businesses lose customers to digital-first brands that lure customers away with enticing offers and flashy digital tools. When companies don’t invest in customer experience after the sale, customers who are fed up with poor service take their business elsewhere. Many marketers’ response to losing customers is “We’d better go out and get more customers.” They invest in marketing technology (Martech) software and kick off a bunch of email campaigns. But that approach is like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound—a short-term fix that doesn’t solve the underlying problem (churn).

The key to long-term success isn’t what you do to acquire new customers; it’s how you treat existing customers. Companies that invest in delivering great customer experiences achieved more than double the revenue growth of “CX laggards” between 2016 and 2021, according to McKinsey.

To escape from the acquisition trap, you must prioritize post-purchase customer experience and invest in a solution that makes it effortless and pleasant to do business with your company. To deliver exceptional customer experiences, you need a system that is purpose-built to improve CX throughout the customer lifecycle.

What Is the Acquisition Trap and Why Is It Harmful?

The acquisition trap refers to focusing on short-term customer acquisition tactics, with insufficient investment in customer engagement and retention. Many businesses invest in the wrong technology solutions, spending most of their CX budget on acquisition tools—Martech software such as customer relationship management and campaign management systems.

Acquisition tools are made for broad universal or segment contact. While Martech solutions are useful for reaching a large, wide audience, they have limited impact on CX—especially after the sale. Martech tools are business-centric (i.e., designed to achieve a specific business outcome, usually making the sale), not customer-centric (i.e., focused on helping customers meet their needs). Campaign management systems are designed to send emails to large, segmented groups of people, often based on demographics—not to individuals with unique needs and preferences. This impersonal batch-and-blast approach often bombards people with irrelevant messages that get ignored or cause people to unsubscribe.

Acquisition tools come from a world where it is OK to get the message wrong 99% of the time. There aren’t many negative consequences when promotions miss their mark. Nothing terrible happens if most email recipients (single women over age 55) are not interested in a car loan, redecorating their house, or a new internet/streaming bundle. However, if you get customer service interactions wrong 99% of the time, many customers will become frustrated and abandon your company for one with better service.

Superior CX Requires More Than Martech Tools

To acquire you as a customer, Martech vendors try to convince you that their acquisition solutions can deliver great customer experiences.

They cannot. Traditional MarTech and feedback tools can help organizations gain new customers and collect feedback, but they can’t coordinate personalized, real-time post-purchase interactions that help support and please customers—and save them when they intend to churn. Great experiences come from treating customers as individuals, answering them on whatever channel they choose, and assisting them with whatever journey they are on – not pushing them down your acquisition or marketing funnel.

To deliver exceptional experiences, you must get customer communications RIGHT 99% of the time, not WRONG. If you don’t send the right messages, customers will be dissatisfied. If they can’t resolve their issue using self-service digital channels, they will call your contact center, increasing their frustration and your costs. If customers are unhappy enough, they will choose another company that takes better care of them.

Are You Caught in the Acquisition Trap?

Think about the customer interactions that come after the sale.

• What does your company do when a customer needs help?
• What tools do you use to support customers?
• Are they the same tools you use when you want something from the customer?
• Do you use the same tools to communicate with customers before and after the sale?
• Are you chasing the sale with 10 emails and text messages?
• Do you ask for feedback after every interaction?

If you’re relying on your Martech and feedback systems to deliver great CX, you and your customers will be disappointed. There’s a better way.

Break Out of the Acquisition Trap: Invest in a Customer Journey Management Solution

A customer journey management (CJM) system improves CX at every stage of the customer lifecycle:

• Discover (research products and services)
• Buy (purchase products or services)
• Onboard and deliver (receive purchased products, activate cards or services, schedule medical appointments)
• Use and manage (change account details, report suspicious behavior, receive alerts about suspicious behavior)
• Support and resolve (pay bills, return a purchased product, schedule service appointments, receive proactive outage notifications)
• Grow (receive targeted offers, renew and upgrade contract)

CJM improves CX by:

Determining customer needs. Customer journey analytics tracks and measures every interaction with your brand, helping you understand customers’ needs, interests and behavior. Journey analytics allows you to personalize customer experiences based on who customers are and what they need at any given moment.

Delivering effortless experiences. Timely, relevant reminders, alerts and notifications make it simple for customers to pay a bill, report suspicious account activity or confirm a medical appointment.

Communicating with customers via their preferred channel. The CJM system sends notifications via the channel(s) on which the customer is most responsive.

Taming communication chaos. By combining digital communication with a decisioning engine, CJM sends the right messages at the right time, without sending too many or irrelevant messages. A customer-centric approach means helping customers complete their task, without sending messages to push the business’s agenda. If a customer is reporting an internet outage, help them diagnose and solve the problem. Don’t try to sell them an upgraded package while you have them on the phone.

Providing proactive, preemptive customer service. Contacting customers before they even know there’s a problem pleases customers and reduces contact center calls. For example, immediately notifying customers about an internet outage in their neighborhood, and providing frequent status updates, prevents the frustration of calling the contact center, waiting on hold for 20 minutes, and then waiting four hours for the technician to arrive.

Escape the Acquisition Trap With CSG Xponent

CSG Xponent is an intelligent customer experience platform specifically designed to respond quickly and appropriately to customers when they need help. Xponent analyzes real-time customer data to personalize every interaction. Powered by a decisioning engine, it coordinates communications across departments and channels, anticipating your customers’ needs and delivering the right message, at the right time, on the right channel. Proactive next-best-action recommendations and unified communication across channels enhance customer engagement and CX.