Whilst cost and cash management are crucial to achieving business liquidity, driving customer growth is key to delivering sustained increases in EBITDA in the short, medium and long term – cost cutting alone won’t deliver growth.
However, being confident that you have a foundation to achieve customer growth is dependent upon multiple factors including the available market and the breadth of product or service offering.
From a “customer service” perspective, being “match fit” for customer growth is typically assessed by measured Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) (based on how satisfied surveyed customers were) or Net Promoter Score (NPS) (based on how likely surveyed customers are to recommend the organisation to a friend or colleague). Whilst well intentioned, these measures have been proven to have a low correlation with predicting future customer re-purchase behaviour.
However, since 2010, the principal of “customer effort”, or its reciprocal, “customer ease” has existed and has shown to not only forecast future customer growth, but also provide clear direction on the areas where focus is required.
This paper covers:
- Why is new customer acquisition and retention key to growth?
- Why have historical measures failed in assuring growth?
- How do customer ease and customer effort predict success?
- How have organises grown through a focus on customer ease?
