Lenati Takes a Holistic Approach to Customer Base Health

Customer acquisition, engagement, and retention are becoming highly advanced disciplines. Finding effective ways to measure these has become much more challenging. Lenati, a marketing and sales consultancy firm based in Seattle, has been looking closely at this problem.

“Measurement is a hot topic for a lot of brands,” Clay Walton-House, Leader of Customer Retention and Loyalty Practice for Lenati, said during his session, “Developing a Holistic Measurement Plan for Managing Customer Health,” at the 9th annual Loyalty Expo, presented by Loyalty360 – The Association for Customer Loyalty. “A lot of people are asking about coming up with better capabilities in their organizations to identify hotspots and areas of opportunity in the customer base that are not yet optimized.”

In the past, loyalty programs tended to live separately from the rest of an organization’s marketing efforts with little or no cross-functioning. Recently, though, the idea of loyalty strategy, going beyond a simple loyalty program, has begun to take hold.

“Loyalty strategy asks: ‘What are all the things we can do across the enterprise to drive loyalty as an outcome and not just manage a loyalty marketing program?’” said Walton-House. “The fullest extent of this is what we talk about as enterprise loyalty. Really mobilizing the entire organization to an understanding of what loyalty is.”

For its clients, Lenati breaks that out into behavioral loyalty and emotional loyalty, which is an affinity and a depth of relationship with the brand. The key is finding a way to effectively measure these that the whole organization can gain insight from.

“In the less sophisticated executions,” Walton-House explained, “you see organizational silos and you see measurement and reporting tools that live within departments and that live within team levels, but don’t actually span the organization or provide a lot of insight into what the customer care team is doing that might impact loyalty metrics.”

In enterprise execution, various teams and departments are integrated and looking at models that are truly holistic.

“They are cross-cutting and really looking at what drives customer behavior,” said Walton-House. “Consider all the things that might be an influence not just, for example, your loyalty marketing program.”

The reason more organizations are moving toward holistic measurement is obvious.

“To be successful in today’s consumer landscape, you have to put the customer first and have to be customer-centric,” Walton-House said. “That’s driving a lot of this thinking into ‘how do we measure in a customer-centric and not a business-centric way?’”

To do this, companies have to get out of the mindset of focusing on simply moving product.

“We live in this customer experience economy where everything about how you interact with that product or service determines how successful you are,” said Walton-House. “The bottom line is how many customers you can acquire, maintain, retain, and monetize.”

Arriving at this holistic approach requires a framework according to Walton-House.

“It’s a conceptual tool that organizes people around a way of thinking measurement and all its component parts,” he said. “What does it mean to measure something holistically? The framework is the tool we use. It informs the development and building of a measurement solution. It’s taking raw data and using a business-facing reporting tool to attain a customer health review.”

The success of this approach depends on ownership, which can either be from the top down, which is best or the bottom up, which is more common. In the former, an executive makes a commitment, while the latter approach relies on someone further down, be it an individual or team, pushing to get it done.

In either case, when a team can rally around a few key metrics, a view of Customer Health takes place and this topline approach can eventually lead to bottom line growth.

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