It costs a lot more to win a new client than to maintain and grow an existing one – five times more in fact, according to both Forbes and the European Business Review. Your existing customers have already bought into your brand and the goods or service you’re providing for them. Now you need to hold on to them, delight them and secure their loyalty. But if your delivery team is spending all their time fighting with your tech and if your customers hate using your systems, how can you possibly focus on growth with this newly acquired captive audience?  And, if there is a genuine technical problem how do you quantify it?

You can use NPS (Net Promoter Score) to help benchmark this; it’s a metric used in the business world to measure CX (customer experience), customer retention and everything to do with the relationship you might have with your customer.  You can use the feedback gained from customers to benchmark your performance against industry standards. You’ll then be able to identify which industry standards your organisation is aligned with and where there are opportunities for improvement.

Once you’ve got your NPS scores, adapting your IT systems to enhance your customer retention will be a key priority. Your IT systems should be the unsung hero in your organisation – it does its job without setting off any alarm bells. It just delivers – allowing your people to work efficiently which makes your life easier. Better still, it enables your people to grow your CX and UX through their interactions, and it does that without making a fuss.

If you don’t regularly review the performance of your IT systems, you risk a drop in productivity as your organisation grows and user preferences change. These changes will impact on customer retention because your team will spend time struggling with a system which isn’t fit for purpose, instead of focusing on your business.

The fact of the matter is, you will eventually find yourself having to deal with the problem in a reactive rather than proactive way – with disgruntled users to boot!  It’s better to start the process early and sustain it with continuous improvements – little and often trumps big and disruptive!

It can be daunting knowing where to start when you are faced with an overhaul, but it will help if you break the process down to these three distinct steps:

1. Audit what is working and where improvements are needed amongst users/customers
2. Plan your roadmap of improvements and test them
3. Roll-out your improvements across your IT systems and measure the outcomes

Once you’ve gone through the process of optimising your IT systems, it is important to find out if the improvements are working and measure their impact. One indicator will be that your staff stop moaning about your tech and your users/customers focus on the value you deliver them rather than the clunky method of delivery! However, you can also get user feedback and use NPS to benchmark the impact on customer retention whilst monitoring the impact on your bottom line.

Once you’ve audited, planned, and rolled out your IT systems improvements, you should develop an IT strategy if you don’t already have one. A robust strategy and the infrastructure which allows for this to be stress-tested regularly is crucial when considering customer retention because you cannot focus on CX whilst your tech is tripping you up.

By optimising and reviewing your IT systems regularly, you won’t wake up one morning to a nasty surprise, which leaves you free to get on with engaging and delighting your customers. 

Find out more about the AzteQ CUBe framework  which can help you optimise your IT systems.