Why We Created CXology: Customer Retention Strategies Work

Companies spend a lot of time, energy and money on Sales. It would seem obvious they would deploy equivalent resources to customer retention strategies – right?

As the magic 8-ball says, “Don’t count on it.”

But why?

Delivering a customer experience designed for retention is in everyone’s best interest. An experience that focuses on longevity, expansion and more. This is especially true for business-to-business SaaS companies, where customers usually don’t become profitable until well after the first point of renewal.

It is confounding but true that most companies are still treating their Customer Success and customer support teams like cost centers vs. the growth engines they are in reality.

Customer Churn Negatively Impacts Companies, Customers and Employees

When companies hyper-focus their energy on Sales and lead generation at the expense of customer retention as a driver of growth, everyone loses.

Companies lose because they miss the long revenue tail of customer lifetime value. Opportunities to go deeper into a customer’s world and find additional revenue-generating moments get buried when companies hone in on front-end sales vs. long-term relationships.

Customers lose, especially when they genuinely need the products and services those companies bring to the table. Without effective customer retention strategies, companies miss their moments to upsell, cross-sell and otherwise serve the customer’s deeper needs. As a result, customers don’t get value and don’t feel valued. So they leave.

Employees lose when they feel unsuccessful because they’re dealing with a parade of unhappy customers. When employees are not given a clear path for success in their jobs, frustrations can leak into the customer experience. Unhappy employees beget unhappy customers, which further exacerbates the potential for churn (with both customers and employees).

Why We Created CXology

The solution to churn is not easy, but it is simple.

For companies, customers and employees, the steps to overcome these challenges are driven by the same need. Namely, the clear and consistent processes that align teams for retention and growth.

Serving this need inspired us to create CXology, an online training program for customer retention strategies. At CXology, we care about the positive outcomes that stem from better customer experiences. 

CXology provides the clear and consistent processes companies need to convert the lose-lose-lose of poor customer experiences into a win-win-win. We also happen to be passionate about working with companies to achieve those wins for companies, customers and employees.

• Companies win by earning more revenue from the customers they serve.
• Customers win by getting better solutions for the challenges they face.
• Employees get clear direction so they know how to be successful in their jobs and aligned across teams and departments.

Each instance of churn is expensive, so the upside for every company is substantial. CXology is the solution that guides companies to capitalize on the financial upside of post-sale customer experience.

What is CXology?

CXology is a competition-crushing, guided-learning customer experience program for organizations that rely on recurring revenue for growth.

That’s a mouthful. Let’s break it down.

Competition-Crushing

When people use CXology’s proven methodology for customer experience, they get results. Sure, they see higher levels of retention. More referrals. Additional revenue from upsells and cross-sells. The magic happens when companies deliver an experience that’s aligned from beginning to end.

At a recent conference, CEO Gabby Wong of FranConnect said, “You cannot have a successful customer experience if your employees are not part of it.” Success means companies must align employees and culture with customer experience, “It’s all about alignment.”

With alignment, your team has a clear path to success, so they know exactly how to engage with customers at every step of their journey. Consistency means that your team is both proficient and confident.

Proficient employees enjoy the benefit of becoming experts at delivering great customer experiences. The more they deliver those consistent processes, the more their expertise grows.

Once a team member provides that great customer retention strategy enough times, they gain confidence in their approach. Confidence is attractive to customers. It reinforces their sense that your company knows what they’re doing.

All that, in combination, sets you apart from your competition. Customers with your company longer and don’t even consider going somewhere else because your team demonstrates the customers made the right choice by coming to your company. With that foundation, customers are more inclined to spend more. Plus, they tell their friends.

That’s a competition-crushing combo – and it all starts with those clear and consistent processes for customer engagement.

Guided-Learning

Guided-learning means CXology offers a combination of DIY training and live coaching. The DIY training includes videos, audio, downloads, templates, worksheets, case-studies and more. These are available asynchronously, so team members can consume them at any time of day or night.

Asynchronous learning also means CXology members can go back and reinforce their learning whenever it’s convenient for them.

Here’s another benefit of DIY training: every team member, no matter where they are in the world or when they joined your company, is delivered the same training. Your team gets a shared vocabulary for talking about customer experience best practices.

At CXology, we pair the asynchronous learning with live-virtual coaching via working sessions. At working sessions, your team members can ask questions, hear from other customer-facing teams, and share stories from the trenches. In addition to working sessions, the CXology Community provides additional opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and engagement.

Customer Experience Program

At CXology, we differentiate between “customer experience” and “customer success.” Customer Success is a department that is charged with making customers successful with the products and services they purchased. Sometimes Customer Success (CS) is only one of many teams that help customers become proficient. There may be onboarding teams. Enablement teams. Renewal teams.

All departments that engage with the customer’s journey with your company work together to deliver an experience. A customer experience. So “Customer Experience” is the overall, aligned approach to customer engagement. It’s not a department, it’s holistic and cross-functional.

Organizations That Rely On Recurring Revenue For Growth

At CXology, we focus on companies that work with customers based on cycles of renewal – in other words, recurring revenue. Your customers may be month-to-month, annual or multi-year, but your company has a predictable time frame until the next purchase event.

All companies need great customer experiences. We created CXology for companies that rely on a recurring revenue model. You can’t be everything to everyone. This is where we play.

At CXology, we’ve seen our members apply the lessons of CXology successfully, with amazing results. One recently called it “transformative.” Want to see for yourself?

Check out CXology today at cxology.co.