Customer Acquisition and Retention: Using the Customer Experience for Competitive Advantage in Uncertain Times

Accenture High Performance Business research has shown that the ability to deliver a customer experience consistently aligned around customer needs and intentions has a significant impact on a company’s ability to create customer loyalty. In turn, loyal customers have a demonstrable impact on the top line, by buying more or buying more frequently and referring other customers to the company. In a time of economic uncertainty—when customer confidence is low and customer behavior increasingly difficult to predict—mastering this ability is more important than ever.

For more Accenture insights on staying customer-focused in uncertain times, visit http://www.accenture.com/centricity.

Read more Accenture insights on customer acquisition and retention here.
Read more Accenture insights on rapid and sustained cost management here.

To receive more Research & Insights, sign up for My Outlook, your single e-mail source for all of Accenture's latest ideas and innovation, personalized specifically to your business interests and the industry issues you face.

An economic downturn offers a unique opportunity to reexamine and revamp the customer experience. An analysis of past downturns suggests that high-performance businesses use these periods to make disciplined improvements to the customer experience and enjoy significant advantage over their competitors for as long as six years after market conditions improve.

During periods of economic volatility, the risk of customer losses increases as customers reassess their service providers; they begin the process of reducing spending, sparing only those products and services from companies that they value most.

High-performance businesses respond by making disciplined improvements to their customer experience that help create competitive advantage. By taking steps to continue delivering a differentiated and valued customer experience, they are better positioned to take advantage of new opportunities, targeted at their competitors’ customers, and capture additional market share at their competition’s expense.

The hallmarks of a winning response to periods of economic uncertainty include a structured approach to change—focused on customer needs and based on insightful customer metrics—coupled with ongoing monitoring and refinement of new strategic directions. To examine new risks and opportunities within their customer base, organizations should begin by considering several key questions:

• Which competitive elements of the customer experience can you enhance or automate with minimal capital investment?
  
  
• Which cost drivers can you eliminate without degrading the customer experience?
  
  
• Are your resources strategically deployed to support the most important enablers of the customer experience?
  
  
• Is your customer experience strategy consistent, known and understood across the organization?
  
  
• Do you know who your best customers are and what they value most?
  
  
• Does your customer experience strategy support your brand promise and differentiate you in the marketplace?

Accenture recommends that organizations evaluate and refine their current customer experience strategy by focusing on several critical activities:

• Collecting and synthesizing customer research sources, including primary and behavioral research, to inform a strategy that reflects real-world customer views on the experience.
  
  
• Developing service strategy goals and guidelines that align the customer experience strategy with corporate objectives.
  
  
• Creating experience standards that deliver on the desired experiences and organizational goals of the most valued customers.
  
  
• Building experience blueprints that communicate the delivery of the desired customer experience through illustrations and process maps that support implementation throughout the organization.
  
  
• Identifying experience delivery implications and developing a road map of programs to prioritize and manage initiatives, and continually monitoring performance.

To receive more Research & Insights, sign up for My Outlook, your single e-mail source for all of Accenture's latest ideas and innovation, personalized specifically to your business interests and the industry issues you face.