Growth & Cake
What if Customer Experience was a profit center rather than a cost center?
I argue that the Customer Experience is the first place to look for organic growth and cost efficiency, especially in the short-term. It often gets a bad rap as cost additive and “the frosting” but never the cake. A nice to have, never a must-have.
In a tight growth market, a shift to operational efficiency and cost reduction makes a lot of sense to ensure that the bottom line is healthy, and the business continue to post short term gains. Unbridled top line growth through extraneous initiatives and high effort services can strain and deplete precious resources and reduce margin and EBITDA. The natural next step is to begin cutting. Removing costly customer initiatives, services, or programs in favor of retreating to the core business - doing more with less.
All makes sense, right? Unless you are the customer and then cost reduction in the wrong areas of the customer journey becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that plays out in the form of customer and associate churn.
“But what if the process of cost efficiency and organic growth began with, ‘What matters most to our customer?’ ”
How would the process change? What would be different? There are 3 themes that I often see emerge when shifting to a customer-based growth strategy across the organization that becomes valuable techniques for teams to leverage in all types of economic climates.
Objectivity relative to initiatives. It’s no longer MY initiative or budget, it’s a customer initiative and budget. If it isn’t important to the customer than it’s not important.
Narrowed field of possibilities. There are at most 2-3 major moments that matter and are key drivers of customer choice. Disciplined focus on these makes everything else about friction reduction. Confused about where AI belongs in your organization?…guess what it’s a lot easier to figure out now.
Effectively and efficiently creating customer pull. Disciplined focus on key moments will naturally create organic growth opportunities from these moments, thereby spawning more efficient streams of revenue built on shared systems vs. the addition of new ones.
