Revenue Operations, better known as “RevOps,” takes all of your processes in your business and aligns them all with the central goal of your business, which is to serve customers first and generate ongoing cash flow and growth second. However, investing in RevOps without doing the same for user experience (or “UX”) is a waste of time, because you can’t optimize income and cash flow without first focusing on your customers’ needs, perceptions, and expectations.
In a recent survey of 6,000 people, researchers found that 76% of consumers expected companies to understand their needs intuitively. Aligning your sales, marketing, and customer service teams toward the same goals and attitudes can improve the user experience, but only if you utilize a customer-first approach in all you do under your roof.
As you look at your RevOps systems, take the time to ensure they all align with a positive user experience for your customers or clientele. Some of the things you’ll change will naturally improve user experience, such as maintaining better communication streams between multiple departments. Other elements may need more attention to benefit your customers and improve their levels of engagement.
Below, we’ll discuss some ways to ensure you accomplish both efficiency and customer experience simultaneously and prioritize both as you move forward and grow as an organization.
1. Use a Venn Diagram
Your first logical step is to figure out where your customer experience intersects with sales, marketing, operations, and other foundational business processes. As you work to improve each area, think through how the changes are likely to impact your audience and their experience with you. For example, if you raise your prices or change how or where you manufacture something, how many customers do you risk losing? What’s the potential impact and tradeoff of a proposed change or addition?
When revamping your sales or customer service departments, look at the complaints and recommendations your customers lodged with you in the past. Survey subscribers to your mailing list and ask them how you might improve their experience in the future. What would they like to see added, amended, or removed?
When you use a Venn diagram, you can easily see how a change in one area of operations impacts other factors of your business.
2. Work Harder to Keep Your Clients
Customer churn can hurt your business and prevent ongoing growth. It reportedly costs seven times as much to convert a new lead into a new customer as it does to keep a current client instead. Studies even suggest that a mere 5% increase in customer retention can equate to a 95% increase in profitability. Retain the customers you have to see consistent long-term growth and generate excellent, ongoing word-of-mouth marketing.
Before you add or overhaul any processes, think through how it impacts your current customer base. You may even want to run ideas past them and see what the reception might be like if you follow through. If your customers don’t like a change you propose, then it is best to think through a different solution. Don’t be afraid to work through multiple iterations until you strike proverbial gold.
3. Choose the Right Software
One reason why sales, marketing, and success teams don’t always align as they should is the underlying processes used within the company. You can quickly improve your business’s health and prospects simply by changing what software you use for project management.
Give teams access to the information they need to align with the rest of the brand. Hold daily scrum meetings to make sure everyone has what they need and ensure goals are kept in mind throughout the day. Making project management a more visual process for all stakeholders will yield dividends you and your clients will be able to perceive and measure for years to come.
4. Align Your Metrics More Thoroughly
If you want to design a successful RevOps system, you must align the metrics across different departments in your organization. That means putting yourself in the shoes of the average customer you encounter and serve. They come to your site and gather some information. After that, they engage in a live chat with a customer service representative. Then, unfortunately, the information from the different sources isn’t consistent. What now?
When you align your metrics and measure the same variables across different areas of your company, you increase the chances of creating a consistent user experience for everybody, every time. In turn, this generates goodwill among your clients and underscores the feeling that you can be trusted to meet their needs, no matter which team they get in touch with, or the channel they use to do so, or the time of day or week.
5. Improve Internal Communications
Make sure each department in your company communicates effectively with the other branches. Excellent communication helps you meet customer expectations efficiently and without the user having to repeat themselves each time they make contact with another person or team in your organization.
With RevOps, the sales team becomes one touchpoint in the customer journey. When communication falters or the customer isn’t fully satisfied, it is much easier to trace where the dialogue broke down and fix it for future interactions. This makes it a tool not just for internal improvements, but also to track down instances where customers may need to be followed up with.
6. Create an Organizational Chart
Your top clients need a point of contact to make their experience the best it can be. Creating an organizational chart helps you to see who is in charge of what and send your customers to the correct person for the next steps to take.
A chart starts with the head of the company and goes down through the leadership channels. So, for example, you might have one circle at the top of the chart and then circles branching off that each represent department heads and other company leaders. Move down through the ranks until each role in your organization has its own defined circle.
A chart also helps you divvy up tasks and figure out who should be in charge of which responsibilities. You won’t have any more situations where someone falls through the cracks due to being sent to the wrong department or specialist.
7. Keep Track of Your Data
When applying RevOps to your organization, it’s natural to look at data storage and processes. However, as you make things more accessible for all people in your company, you also must consider the user and how to keep their personal information safe.
Rules such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) require companies dealing with people living in certain territories to comply with strict security measures meant to prevent hackers from gaining access to sensitive information.
The state of cybersecurity today is your reminder to add security measures, to only keep the information you must have on hand, and to notify your customers of the ways you’ll utilize any data you collect. Transparency in this area has become paramount in the era of savvier and more informed citizens. It is every company’s responsibility to prove why there’s value in collecting personal data, and to do so in a way that’s ethical, organized, and transparent.
Improve Your Company
RevOps systems improve your company and its prospects. Rather than focusing on one area, such as sales or communications, RevOps looks at how everything functions together holistically to create a positive and cohesive experience for your customers. The goal with RevOps is to scale up easily and bring clients back for repeat sales.
