Every business needs a dedicated customer-relationship team
How happy are your customers? I think the safest answer that we can assume is “not happy enough”. We can’t always trust official retention rates to tell us the true state of affairs, because the truth is that many customers stick with a solution – especially software – only to avoid the pain of switching to something else. That’s as true of SAP Concur as it is for any other business: our official 99.6% retention rate for Asia can’t be a cause for complacency.
After some reflection, I’ve concluded that the only way to ensure customers are truly happy is to hire people who are dedicated to looking after them – and that does not have to be only in a customer engagement role. In fact, I believe that all members of the team should be focused on Customer Success.
We’ve been steadily growing our account management team here and have tried to hire people who genuinely want to fix problems and make their customers happy. I’m constantly astounded by the enthusiasm and care our team brings to the floor every day –
Customer retention is everyone’s responsibility, but not everyone has that blend of empathy, resilience, and problem-solving skills to make it their specialty. I’ve come to believe that to offer truly excellent service, everyone needs this in their purview; but we also need a dedicated team that the customers know and trust.
First, I believe we’re accountable to our customers to deliver on what we promise them. One of the biggest gripes I generally hear from companies is after they have constructed a solid business case for a solution, and convinced the rest of the business that it’s worth the investment – the vendor drops some product on their doorstep and disappears in the wind. They feel abandoned, even betrayed, and rightly so I feel. If you want someone to buy what you’re offering, you owe it to them to make sure it works the way they want it to. A dedicated customer-relationship team has the time, and mandate, to follow through on that promise and walk with the customer to that ideal endpoint.
Even when things work well, I think we still have a responsibility to maintain relationships with our customers that go beyond the occasional check-up that nothing’s broken. People’s goals change, and so do those of businesses. A solution that was doing great a few years or even months ago may no longer entirely address what a customer needs in the here and now. Granted, they might stick with that solution because they’re locked into it – but is that the sort of experience we can take pride in?
Finally, it’s in the best interests of solutions providers to build those relationships – not with organisations, but with people. What we’ve found is that after expanding our account management team, our rate of customer references has steadily increased. That’s good evidence for how happy they really are, perhaps even more so than retention rates. In the US, SAP Concur grew rapidly because individual customers would want to bring the experience with them when they moved to new companies. When you build that trust with your customer as a person, not just a job title, you create a relationship that’s going to endure and bring in business no matter where they go.
Everyone’s talking about customer experience these days – streamlining it, automating it, making it more self-service. And despite that being a big part of SAP Concur’s value proposition and how we scale, I still feel the human connection and our devotion to satisfaction is what will keep our customers renewing, rather than just not changing. What do you think?
