Love Your Customers with Integration
Posted by Integration Man on September 1, 2009
We have a saying at Hubspan about customers: “Bring them into the family and love them to death.” Corny? Perhaps. But every employee at Hubspan knows this as a key component of our culture. And today more than ever, knowing your customer, understanding your customer and, yes, loving your customer is paramount for every business. Because, if you don’t love your customers, someone else will, and that someone else will be the competition. Using integration technologies is one way to keep your customers close and build a stronger and more profitable relationship.
The current economic climate is making it even more vital for companies to protect their existing customer base while increasing top line revenue. Keeping your customers happy and protecting that revenue base is crucial to not only growth, but in many cases, survival. Research has found that during times of uncertainty there is increased anxiety that causes a change in customer attitudes. Customers are more likely to search for alternatives. Customers then compare their current provider against the results of their search for alternatives. It is inevitable that this will happen to nearly all companies. As part of this, the customer experience becomes even more important, as it is one of the top reasons customers choose one company over the other.
Now more than ever, companies should make sure they are doing everything possible to strengthen and maintain relationships with existing customers. The cost of acquiring new customers is significantly higher than the cost of maintaining a current one. So while new sales efforts should not come to a halt, you need to be laser focused on your existing customer base.
Take Amazon.com, the leading etailer, as an example. The customer is paramount at Amazon.com, and every job and technology investment are about improving the customer experience and making it easy to find everything they need to buy online. In Q4 of 2008, when most retainers were suffering one of the worst holiday seasons on record, Amazon.com achieved sales growth of 18% for the quarter.
Past economic downturns and research have proven that:
- Companies that compete and win based on customer experience are rewarded with customers who are loyal and spend more money today and in the future
- Opportunities exist by delivering a valued customer experience targeted at both current customers and competitor’s customers
- Opportunities exist by delivering a valued customer experience targeted at both current customers and competitor’s customers
- Focusing on the customer and doing business “their way” creates a competitive barrier and a tendency towards long term loyalty
- Actions taken today to secure and grow existing customers will be invaluable to secure and grow new customers in the future
So what can you do from a business and IT perspective to make sure your company is putting the customer first and retaining that vital revenue base? There are three key things you should be doing:
- Investing in simple, affordable technologies that focus on tightening and strengthening relationships and deliver value to the customer
- Automating key customer processes to drive out costs for you and your customer
- Prioritizing projects that deliver quantifiable value to the customer within 3-6 months
One of those technologies that tighten and strengthen customer relationships, while at the same time delivering value to the customer organization, is business integration. Integration strengthens customer relationships and increases the “stickiness” to your company, as switching costs become higher. This, at the same time, creates a barrier to entry for the competition, since your customer is closer to you. With integration, you have greater visibility into your customer’s business and can often be proactive in identifying ways to further improve processes or find issues in transactions.
Most importantly, business integration allows you to say, “yes”, when a customer asks you to do business their way.
Several of Hubspan’s customers have experienced the value of business integration firsthand. For example, a leading Web commerce company used customer integration with Hubspan to manage its b2b e-Commerce operation and e-procurement process. The results were not only increased automation and fewer manual processes, but more importantly, higher revenues and 100% customer retention.
Hubspan Solution: Web Commerce Customer Integration
Results:
- Captured 20% more business with existing customers
- Automated nearly 95% of all orders
- Significantly cut order costs
- 100% customer retention of integrated accounts
VIEW BARNES & NOBLE CASE STUDY
Another Hubspan customer in the biotech industry used integration to seamlessly connect their online catalog and ordering system with their customers’ systems. To achieve this, the company needed to work with a variety of protocols and applications in their customer community.
Hubspan Solution: Customer Integration for Order Management and Catalog Synchronization
Results:
- Grew revenue 25% with integrated accounts
- Increased profit margin 10%
- Improved order accuracy to 99%, which in turn improved the customer experience and account retention
VIEW INVITROGEN CASE STUDY
As you look at your business plan for the rest of the year, think about how business process automation and deeper integration of customer-related processes can help. Customer integration can play a critical role in helping your company maintain strong customer retention, secure new customers, increase sales volume and drive fast time to value for customers. The current economic climate is making it even more vital for companies to protect their existing customer base while increasing top line revenue.
[...] CEO has a mantra of ‘love your customers’- something as an Account Manager at Hubspan I try to do every day in some form. One of the great [...]
Pingback by Hubspan Teams with Customer on Massive Partner Migration – Hubspan — March 4, 2011 @ 9:12 am