Customer Transaction Equity: What Is It, And Why Does It Matter?

With the rise of e-commerce, changes in buyer environment and profiles have created a highly competitive customer landscape. For distributors, this means there’s significant value to be found in placing emphasis on adjusting and improving business processes that will boost customer loyalty. Having a full view of a customer’s buying situation and their tendency towards brand loyalty allows increased importance to be placed on ensuring customer satisfaction is maintained and the customer nurtured.

Re-examining Existing Processes

The traditional buying experience has undergone a number of transformations at each stage due to shifting customer expectations for speed and efficiency. Due to this, it is now vital to business success to examine current processes to pinpoint where improvements can be made. Bad customer experiences can cause valued customers to turn to competitors. In the competitive distribution space this is something that should be avoided. To protect against this and any corresponding detrimental impacts to profitability, more time needs to be dedicated to understanding and fulfilling customer needs. One area where significant boosts to customer equity can be achieved is through re-examining the role and function of the inside sales team.

Empowering CSRs

Moving the inside sales team away from traditional tasks associated with order processing and enabling them to provide quick and personalized customer service is a key way that the risk of losing customers can be minimized. Making use of automation solutions that eliminate manual, administrative tasks typically carried out by CSRs allows their time to be re-directed towards areas that can add business value. For example, removing the time-consuming labour of inputting purchase orders via order entry automation software supports more opportunities for up-selling and cross-selling. This means distributors can reap the benefits of faster, more efficient order cycles while knowing the inside sales team is available to deliver high quality service and resolve customer queries. Ultimately resulting in a higher level of customer equity.

In a previous post we’ve talked about unstructured data and how employing automation tools can release valuable data insights from customer emails and purchase orders. This can also contribute to higher customer relationship equity. Insights can provide increased awareness into customer purchase preferences and patterns as well as knowledge of the customers who are taking the most effort to serve.  Once these factors have been identified, key decision-makers can direct the sales team to personalize their customer service accordingly by offering tailored promotions or incentives.

It is important to recognize that data automation is the new tool to protect against competition. Distributors who choose to take advantage of the opportunities this offers to enhance customer transaction equity will be taking important steps to elevate their business success.