What Role Does Automation Play in Periodic Customer Health Checks?
What you’ll learn
- Learn about periodic customer health checks and how they can help finance teams to approach their customer better
- Explore the best practices for carrying out healthy customer account checks
- Learn how adaptive Accounts Receivables (AR) solutions help to improve and fast-track periodic customer reviews
Introduction
Most mid-sized businesses take a reactive approach towards customer relationships, in the sense that if it is not broken, they do not feel the need to fix it. Most of the time, they view periodic calls with the concerned customer as a failure to an agreement. However, these businesses are losing out on a chance to differentiate themselves as a customer-centric organization. Customer satisfaction is key to the success of a business. A company that can periodically nourish and retain customers, without spending too much time with them, can be viewed as ever-growing. But how can one ensure this periodic nourishment is followed through? Read ahead.Periodic Health Check. The What and the Why?
A customer health check or account health scoring is a periodic act followed by businesses to keep a note of how their customers are doing. This is based on a series of questions or data points. These questions must have historically helped customers and enable them to feel valued by the organization. In other words, it’s a metric that says if a customer wants to renew or discontinue their partnership with the organization.
Health checks are vital. This helps businesses determine their importance and relevance in the minds of their customers. For any customer success team, customer experience is paramount. Very much akin to a lead scoring strategy, health checks provide thorough insights if the customer is satisfied enough to be retained for years to come.
An equation with customer satisfaction
There’s no limit to the number of customers a mid-sized business is dealing with. But there could be a paucity of periodic health checks, which leads the customer to feel that they are not cared for. In short, they choose someone else to fulfill their requirements. To put it logically, customer retention is directly related to customer satisfaction.
Customer retention is partially or almost entirely connected with customer health checks. The more strategic an organization is in carrying out health checks with the customer, the more likely it is that the customer will stay associated with the company for years to come.
Account health checks are done manually
In most mid-sized businesses in the USA, account checks are never done periodically. But when it does happen, it’s done manually over phone calls or in the form of email correspondence.
Since this is carried out manually, there are many limitations:
- Takes up a lot of time and resources
- The scoring criteria are very subjective, they may not follow organizational norms
- The customer data is dynamic, but it is updated statically
- With an increase in customers, scoring becomes tedious
- Without investigating, it’s hard to accept the account health for a particular customer
- CFO’s won’t be confident in the customer data to plan out a definite cash forecast for their business
Forge ahead successfully with automation
Mid-sized businesses can automate redundant manual systems. An integrated system would help businesses to reach out to all the customers. Their health data would now be investigated periodically, without the issue of data inconsistency.
Best practices to ensure efficient customer health checks
In many successful businesses, there’s a set of industry-approved best practices that are followed to categorically improve customer health checks. Bear in mind that the number of customers is ever-increasing.
Nonetheless, these few points would help any mid-sized businesses provide value for money for any number of customers. Not only for customers but also for analysts, where their work is much more streamlined. Here are some pointers to remember:
Standardized worklist for periodic reviews
Employees want their workdays to be streamlined. From the office of the CFO, it’s highly recommended that a standardized worklist for every employee is initiated. With the help of an automated system, CFOs can implement standardized rules. After which, the system automatically populates the employee’s system with the relevant customer contact information and customer health details. This increases their resourcefulness and allows them to reach the customers without much hassle. Such a measure would increase the number of delinquent customer reviews.
Multiple customer health models
The evolution of customer health reviews has been long and arduous. Since in most organizations a single model for periodic review is followed. For CFOs to do accurate cash forecasting, it’s necessary to have at least two forecasting models for periodic reviews. This makes sense, where new customers are properly segregated from the old customers.
Automated software will help properly strike a balance between high-touch strategic customers and no-touch self-service users. With two models in place, there will be high accuracy in cash forecasting, through better and punctual health reviews. With multiple models in place, the channels of inquiry become much more potent and communication with customers remains consistent.
Asking the right questions
Questions can sway high-valued customers into being long-term partners or short-term customers. Here are some elements that employees and CFOs can include in their periodic customer review assessment:
- Overall product feedback
- The standout feature of the product
- Depth of usage: average or percentage of use in a day
- Growth of the account or customer
- Survey and reports of successful customers
- Overall relationship and support
- How often do C-suite users login to the product
The number of questions in a periodic review is purely subjective. In the longer run, businesses should focus on applications that can significantly automate the review process. Marginally for the top 100 customers of any mid-sized business, a manual periodic review is essential. With the right set of tools, one can then reach out to the rest of the customer base, to shorten the review cycle.
Taking help of inbound analytics
Analytics can help mid-sized businesses mitigate further risks with their delinquent customers. An automated dashboard can give personnel a high-level overview of all their customers that require periodic reviews. With detailed reports, employees can improve and properly handle any risky customers.
What is the perfect solution? RadiusOne
In the absence of a proactive approach to managing important customers, mid-sized businesses may be at the risk of being left behind.
Introducing RadiusOne AR Suite For Periodic Customer Reviews
With RadiusOne AR Suite, it will be possible for any mid-sized business to automatically create a prioritized worklist and generate detailed reports on customers. Employees and analysts would then proactively approach customer reviews and follow-ups without worrying about data integrity. Empower your company now!
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