Build Customers for Life with CX and Lifecycle Selling

We all know how vital delivering great experiences can be to your customers these days. But a good experience doesn’t just make the end customers happy; it also dramatically affects your bottom line. Indeed, companies that offer a good customer experience (CX) are more likely to see their revenue grow faster than those that don’t make customer experience a top priority.

At the same time, many savvy solution providers have adopted the concept of lifecycle selling or providing value by focusing on business outcomes and helping customers achieve their business goals over time through strategic IT investments.

By combining lifecycle selling and a focus on CX, you and your customers can benefit.

CX and Lifecycle Management

What does the combination of CX and lifecycle management look like? Simply, it’s ensuring customers get what they need out of the solution they purchased. As solutions become more robust with various features built into them, CX ensures that customers understand how the solution meets their individual needs.

It’s all about focusing on the business outcomes of your customers. You do this by making a concerted effort to talk to your customers about their business outcomes. Once you understand the desired business outcome of your customer, you can help them integrate the solution within the fabric of their workflows.

Uncovering needs isn’t something that only occurs at the onset of a project. Instead, you should be working with the customer throughout the project’s lifecycle to identify needs, educate on opportunities to use the solution in powerful ways, overcome adoption barriers and continue to build the relationship. In the end, you’ll have improved the customer experience for your customer by helping them meet their needs. You almost guarantee ROI on the technology investment and gain a satisfied customer when that happens.

CX Strategies

Customer experience isn’t a one-size-fits-all concept, but some best practices apply to most solution providers.

CX must be a top-down approach within your organization. The top people within your organization need to understand what it is, what it means to your organization, and what it means to your customers and the solutions you’re selling. The mindset has to cascade down to all areas of the business so everyone understands the value and goals.

Many solution providers are already making CX motions today, but they’re not calling it CX. While what we’ve traditionally referred to as “good business practices” and “taking care of the customer” is still valid, we’re now providing structure and repeatable processes (focused on customer success). Systems and procedures must be installed to ensure your entire team delivers the same experience to customers.

If you’re looking to make your business more CX-focused, companies like Ingram Micro and Cisco already have CX initiatives and best practices in place, which can give you a head start. Contact Ingram Micro’s Chris Blackwell, Evan Main or the Cisco CX team.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.