In today’s challenging sales landscape and tight budgets, architects play a pivotal role in supporting sales and business stakeholders. Bridging the gap between technology and business, architects can evaluate customer account health to identify and mitigate potential risks affecting the company’s bottom line.
- Understanding End-User Choice or Control: Assessing the degree of user engagement by choice rather than mandate.
- Mapping Organizational Structure: Identifying key personas and understanding their roles within the organizational structure.
- Capturing Frontline Feedback: Gathering feedback from users to measure their self-reported success with the solution.
- Calculating Share of Wallet: Evaluating the percentage of the solution sold into an account compared to competitors.
- Tracking Peer Recommendations: Investigating if customers actively recommend the solution to peers.
Beyond attrition, indicators of dissatisfaction include equipment downtime and delays in decision-making for additional purchases. Architects can assess satisfaction by monitoring usage patterns, integration efforts, engaging stakeholders, and analyzing communication with sales teams.
In the complex B2B environment, product bundles can either be a competitive advantage or a liability. Architects can navigate this complexity by ensuring well-integrated bundles, fostering customer trust, and considering the impact of generative AI on system complexity.
MIT lecturer Renée Richardson Gosline emphasizes the need for simplicity in AI systems, especially in processes with multiple outcomes. This approach aligns with the importance of assessing customer satisfaction through nuanced measures rather than surface-level data.
A realistic customer scorecard involves measuring product or service usage across diverse user groups. For example, Salesforce evaluates new users, established users, and those with a choice differently to ensure a comprehensive understanding of customer health.
In conclusion, architects can redefine the role of attrition in understanding customer health. By expanding metrics beyond simple measures, adopting a nuanced approach based on user type, and using data to improve outcomes, architects can identify upsell opportunities and determine if customers stay due to complexity or genuine satisfaction with products and services. This approach not only enhances customer retention but also lowers operational costs for sales teams.
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