How to Improve and Optimize Customer Lifecycle Stages Using Salesforce?
Customer Lifecycle is centred around the optimization. Enhancing the entire customer experience is a critical aspect of any CRM. The global CRM market size was valued at USD 40.2 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 14.2 % from 2020 to 2027. First, let us understand
What is Customer Lifecycle?
Customer Lifecycle is a set of tools that ensures that leads and clients receive personalized services at all times. Customer Lifecycle Management creates 1:1 customer journeys, building customer loyalty and building a better brand reputation. This transforms the leads into brand evangelists.
Customer lifecycle can be improved in many ways.
In this post, we will provide insights on optimizing each stage of the customer lifecycle
What are the Various Stages of Customer Lifecycle?
Here are the various stages of the customer lifecycle:
- Awareness
- Acquisition
- Onboarding
- Engagement
- Retention
- Advocacy
Awareness
This stage is the first occasion when the customer faces the customer. This is generated by hearing from some existing customers or view some ad that appears on social media.
Acquisition
Interacting with products or services turns the consumers into leads. The leads then enter the sales pipeline. As the leads progress through various stages of the sales funnel the businesses must showcase the product value while addressing the issues for the organization.
Onboarding
Customers who indulge in the first purchase of a product are all those who are most interested in the brand. This is the right time to understand the customers. It is important to provide data that offers a personalized outreach to the and then recommending the products, some features or services.
Engagement
The building of customer engagement is the key to building loyal customers. This is the longest phase of the customer journey. The aim is to deliver novel experience is the key to building interest in your brand.
Retention
This is where an understanding and marking the customers who are about to leave the brand. This is to identify the customers who are losing interest or even making it easier to come back in the future.
Advocacy
The last stage of the customer lifecycle comprises of creating brand advocacy who not only continues to carry out the business with the
The company as well as ensuring that the brand is promoted within social circles.
Optimizing the customer lifecycle is not that a complex process. The process requires refinement and adjustments. It is important to understand that the customer lifecycle scales as per the business requirements.
Let us now delve into the ways to deliver the customer lifecycle.
Ways to Deliver Improved Customer Lifecycle
Consult the Recent most Data
When making crucial decisions, it is wise not to just rely on old data and trends. The recent most data matters when dealing with new customers. This leaves an impact on the entire customer lifecycle stages and then shaping it as per customer requirements.
Track the KPIs
One of the best practices adopted in the optimization of the lifecycle is tracking the data. It is not just about defining KPIs and track them accordingly. Metrics such as lead volume, stage-by-stage conversion or inquiry rate are not the only way to optimize the lifecycle. Different metrics convey different things to the business. A visit-to-buy ratio is important eCommerce brand but on the contrary, cross-selling opportunities is more important for a software company.
Build Custom Messaging
Customer relationships is one of the critical aspects of an optimized lifecycle, Maintaining the same level of engagement, transparency and support are crucial for an optimized lifecycle. One of the easiest ways to create custom messaging is by understanding the resources required. This is to understand whether the products or services have compatibilities with the business requirements and then building the resources that help in highlighting the obstacles and offer a suitable solution. Eventually tailored messaging is created for the purpose of retention.
Streamline Customer Data Sharing
Each and every customer interactions is important for deriving actionable insights. The insights gathered from customer interactions must spread across the entire organization. What is critical to harness the interactions to create a customer experience throughout the sales funnel.
Prepare Campaigns
The customer lifecycle is a journey but it has to be seamless. However, decision making and on-spot decisions are critical aspects to cover. Messaging must avoid redundancy at any cost. The same messaging is not relevant for the onboarding and retention stages, While onboarding, messaging provides amazing customer experience to covert the prospects. On the contrary, at the retention stage messaging can be used to retain the customers.
Locate the Loyal Customers
It is critical to understand the identify the churners and turn them into loyal customers. These valuable insights provide inputs on what works out and whatnot. Whether the customer is loyal or not is important. KPIs are of much importance. Repeat purchase is critically important for any e-commerce brand. The retention strategies need to be changed if there are customer churning, only after one or two purchases. Redefining the customer lifecycle then becomes important.
Reevaluate the Stage
Any growing company’s aim is to offer complex solutions. Some examples are targeting a different audience or implementing marketing process that is not compatible with the current lifecycle.
Conclusion
The optimized customer lifecycle is a critically important aspect. The end result is to deliver an extraordinary customer experience. In order to deliver an extraordinary level of service, it is imperative to adopt CRM technologies. As the leads enter the sales funnel, the CRM technology enables to gather, analyze and then store huge amount of data and then use this data to create the precise customer profile and provide the sales team of your organization an added advantage. Moreover, lead tracking starts here only and helps to understand the stage of the lead and the actions taken to achieve the progress.
