This short interview excerpt (Success TODAY) discusses strategies for retaining existing customers and acquiring new ones during challenging times by offering a continuum of services and adjacent offerings. It emphasizes driving efficiency through digital transformation, incremental investments (a ‘flywheel’), and use of data, analytics, AI/ML to target customers surgically and improve customer experience without adding friction.
Chapters
One of the things that's so important right now is retaining the customers that we've both got. And so I'm curious to know your thoughts on how could this be a really good moment to actually not only retain customers, but how could it actually be a good time to actually acquire new customers? What do you think the opportunities are there?
I see two things. Obviously, I think retaining the customers is vital. Right. But not to think of, even with the customers that you have, not to think of transactional items, you want to give them a continuum of things throughout their life cycle because they're going through changes in the marketplace. And you want to make sure there is a continuum of services you are giving them so they stay with you. And also the other customers also see that us helping customers during tough times, during good times, during transformation, how do we do that? That attracts other customers to come. The second thing I was going to mention is always the adjacent services that we provide, that is a good area to look for customers who are interested in some adjacent services. Salesforce does that all the time. Hey, we have got a service on CRM, but we also can provide you lots of other services that you might be interested in. I think those are two areas I think really good to look for.
Yeah, there's no doubt it's a really good opportunity when you have that loyal customer base to look for opportunities to cross sell and upsell. And that's a really good motion. In times like these, when things get a little tight, there could be a tendency to either introduce a lot of friction into your process to drive kind of deflection, or maybe try to drive a lot of automation at the same time to kind of help scale costs. So kind of what tips do you have for our audience on ways to drive more efficiency during times like these and other things that you should avoid during times like these to not degrade the customer experience.
Yeah. So the mantra within HPE is definitely digital transformation. Not only we help our customers to do digital transformation, we have been transforming ourselves, Jim. Right. And that has brought a lot of efficiency, a lot of automation, and a lot of new thinking. Right. Using technology, how do we get better? And you create this flywheel. Right. So in tough times, you have not a lot of money for investments and customers don't either. Right. So how the return on investment on everything you need to do has to be much quicker. But you create the flywheel. So you do pieces of it, get the return from it, and invest, and continuous investment makes it better. The other thing that is definitely going on in the industry and within our company as well. We use a lot of data and a lot of analytics. Right. AI and ML is across the board how to make it efficient within and how to make it efficient for the customer. So this is a great time to concentrate on those things because these things resonate with customers. Right. What you're going through is, is what the customers are going through.
I love that point. On using the data, you've already got to be very targeted, very surgical. You can drive huge amounts of value, drive good upside for your business, too. But really deliver that experience by listing your customers and using the data that you already know about them. It's a great thing.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Click the link on the screen to watch the full Success Today interview with Jim and Pradeep, available for free right now on Salesforce. We'll see you next time.
