Want Higher Revenue? Improve Customer Satisfaction and Increase Retention

What is one of the key factors of a company's valuation? Growth. Stagnant companies are...well, boring. They also lose value compared to their high-growth competitors. While it varies from industry to industry on how much growth is valued, any executive team can agree that higher revenue equates a better company.

But is all revenue equal? No, some revenue is more equal than other.

In our previous posts from this series, we've noted that acquiring customers is more than 5 times as expensive as retaining an existing customer. Further, in certain cases like SaaS companies, more than 70% of their revenue could come renewals and upsells[1]. This means that a company's bottom line will be significantly lower if they are just adding "net new" (or brand new customers) revenue and ignoring existing customers.

To achieve this, companies must embrace a topic that GoodData has blogged about before: customer success. Customer success is all about the marriage of great customer service with proactive monitoring. While most companies don't have dedicated customer success teams, all organizations can implement the mentality. Companies can start with a few important steps:

1. Proactively identify and reach out to at-risk companies by looking at a high number of support tickets
2. Obtain usage data of those customers to understand their issues
3. Leverage information from previous churned customers and apply solutions to their issues

If you make sure that a customer has a good experience with your product or service, you will be able to improve customer satisfaction. A Forrester survey found that 81% of customers are likely to repeat business to firms that have exceeded their expectation.

Using analytics will help your customer service organization become more productive and efficient as well as understand your company's customer better. Your organization will be able to track and measure customer satisfaction, and this will ultimately, lead to higher revenue and a more successful company.

This piece is part of a four part series on how your organization can use analytics to maximize their customer service organization's effectiveness. Check out other parts of this series:

• Part 1: Have You Embraced Customer Service Analytics?
• Part 2: Top 10 Key Performance Indicators for Customer Service