“We don’t know enough about our customers,” kicked-off Andy Allbritten, 28 year veteran of international high technology and customer services experience with companies such as Oracle, PeopleSoft and National Semiconductor, at the East Bay MashEX in Pleasanton, CA. The event was hosted by yours truly, and Chris Symank and David M. Lu, financial advisors, respectively. Below are my notes from the event.
I hope you learn something, I did (a lot).
“Most businesses don’t even know who their customers are,” Allbritten continued. “Traditionally we used our sales teams to gather customer info, but after the initial sale it stops. Then someone calls for support – and we don’t know enough about them; who they are and what they need.”
Allbritten followed talking about how some companies don’t match up who calls the help desk versus who is paying for it. Others don’t even know which products some of their customers own. Keeping track of what a customer bought and what they’re entitled to is even challenging at some of the best tech brands out there today, he added.
“Real business intelligence is knowing what your customers have bought and what they’re really using. You want to know what you can sell back into your customer base versus what they already bought from you.”
Allbritten resonated when he exclaimed, “In these tough economic times, you need to market and sell into your customer base.”
For retailers, discount cards are a great way to capture information about your customers. You can spend money to market and use it to capture information. You can also create services to market back into your customer base, assuming you know what your customers purchased and what they are using.
Unless you have comprehensive information about your customers it’s very hard to sell back into your customer base. With a new product, you need to know which person in your customer’s organization to market to. You know who purchased the product, but is that person the point person for what you’re selling now?
It’s important to “understand who the real customer is,” added Allbritten, “and creating services and products that serve that customer’s needs.” Customers can also provide you with great feedback on your competitors, and what they’re doing.
“You have to get the details,” says Allbritten. An example is “The ‘customer hierarchy’.” How is the business of your customer structured? Who owns who? Has your client’s company been bought or merged?
Who is the customer? The person that approves the products, uses the products, pays the bill – it’s all of the above. In terms of measuring satisfaction, who are you going to ask? Knowing all of the people involved is important.
Customer data goes bad at a rate of 3 percent a month. If you’ve got less than 90 percent accurate data then it’s hard to make decisions on your business. People look at data clean-up efforts, but it’s not a one-time thing – but an on-going process to keep clean.
In providing support to customers “Problem solving should start immediately,” Allbritten continued.
“I’m not a fan of moving support offshore, unless the product is designed offshore and they know it well.” One company wanted better support and waited for the Australian support team to come online to solve their problems because those support teams were “better” than the people in Santa Clara.
If you are making major changes or going through an acquisition it’s critical to put together a communications plan. You can prevent from losing any customers by knowing who the customers are and communicate with them through email, direct mail, web sites, the “portal” and what every it takes.
Where do you gather information? Excel unfortunately has become the everything and anything solution, but is better than nothing. Companies also use CRM, ERP, FMS and SFA and other systems to manage customer data. Pick one place to store customer data and integrate it all together. No one in the SMB space needs to buy software – because software as a service (SaaS) does a great job.
“What’s your single source of truth, for your customer data” was Allbritten big take-away message.
Customer data needs to be linked together, even if all of the systems are integrated together. And, what are some customer data common mistakes? According to Allbritten…
- Don’t use an IT asset management system as a CRMS
- Don’t use a trouble tick system as a CRMS
- Don’t use sticky notes as workflow
- Don’t use Excel as an SFA or customer database long-term
- Don’t wait to address the data problem
- Don’t think it is just a sales’ problem
- Don’t interact with a customer without information
- Don’t ignore the issue
You can also provide incentives for the customer to update their own information through a portal. Customers don’t always update their information with the information you need, but the incentives will help.
What you SHOULD DO is to:
- Create a process to capture and store customer data
- Continually cleanse your data
- Implement a real SFA system
- Implement a real CRM system
- Use SaaS offerings if possible
- Do image contracts if possible – get rid of those dozens of boxes filled with paper contracts
- Think globally / customers do
- Automate product data capture
- Create a “single source of truth.”
If you’ve acquired a company or merged with another, move quickly to integrate data quickly. You can use that information to communicate with customers – fast – to tell them what’s happening. You also really need to reward the forums and bloggers who are helping you support your customers.
“A simple definition of a satisfied customer:
- those who pay their bills on time
- buys more from you
- and tells others to buy from you
that’s what really makes up a satisfied customer.”
Once you have customer information, measure it for profitability. Sales sometimes sells a lot more software than customers use aka “shelfware” or customers take a long time to implement the software purchased a long time ago. But, if you know what your customers bought and how they’re using it, your company could offer advanced customer service to take better care of those customers, helping them with what they already own beyond what your customer is using today.
How are you measuring customer profitability? Costs of attaining new customers is very high - do you know which customers generate the most profit? Can you shed the others? What are your floor prices? Are you billing everything owed?
Almost everybody needs to be supported. Most CEOs & CIOs will not buy software without support. It’s important to understand an agreement gets renewed. When we put in the proper sales process for selling services, you can get renewals at a 95 plus renewal rate and have a much more “comforting” financial projection. You are the trusted advisor and partner – not the vendor – the person who is part of the vision of your customer’s company.
How well do you know your customers?
Andy Allbritten is Founder and Principal of AE Consulting. In the fall of 2006, Andy Allbritten founded a consulting practice focused on providing international operational and organizational analysis to executive management of global enterprise software vendors.
Mr. Allbritten has provided services that have ranged from global pricing recommendations to analysis of global support, services, sales, IT, and development. He identified for one client over $10m in incremental revenue and cost savings. Mr. Allbritten’s clients have included Hyperion Solutions, iSOFT Group Plc and IBA Health Plc. Engagements have been in the US, UK, the Netherlands, Germany, India, and Australia.
Prior to founding AE Consulting, Mr. Allbritten was most recently Ingres Corporation's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Support and Services. With more than 28 years of international high technology and customer services experience, Mr. Allbritten joined Ingres from Oracle, where he was Group Vice President of Worldwide Support Services Sales & Operations. Before that, he was Managing Director/ Group Vice President of Support Services, Worldwide Sales & Operations at PeopleSoft. In this position, he was responsible for PeopleSoft’s worldwide customer services organization, the global maintenance line of business and tiered services programs that accounted for $1.4B -- half of the company’s annual revenue.
He also held several other leadership positions within PeopleSoft, including Vice President of Worldwide Customer Services, Vice President/CIO of Technical Operations and Vice President of Business Operations for PeopleSoft eCenter (a hosting business), and Director of Corporate Pricing and Licensing. Before that, he spent 17 years at National Semiconductor in various operational management and production control positions.
Mr. Allbritten has a bachelor’s degree from Santa Clara University and a
master’s in business administration from the Anderson School at UCLA.
