The need to scale from an independent company to one that meets the needs of thousands of people causes a question to arise: how can we improve our customer experience?

Customers expect a better overall experience because the bar is being set higher by other companies, necessitating improved strategies and the ability to better understand customers on an individual level. A company can be disconnected internally when trying to meet the needs of a customer, with sales, support, marketing and consulting all attempting to understand and provide for a unique customer. When these methods are disorganized, the customer can be bombarded by different messages, leading to dissatisfaction.

As a growing company, Liferay worked to improve customer experiences, as well. With the right strategy, the company enabled employees with the right information to deliver a unified customer experience. During this process, Liferay worked toward consolidating internal business systems, using Liferay DXP to unite Support, Liferay.com, Customer Portal, Marketplace, HubSpot and Salesforce, which resulted in the creation of Dossiera.

Reaching Your Customers More Effectively

As a customer reaches the end of a contract, the impending close of their lifecycle can be brought to the attention of a company so that an employee can reach out and encourage contract renewal. However, this awareness can cause issues when various departments are not coordinated with one another. As a result, sales representatives, marketing agents, customer support, consultants and more may all reach out to a customer on their own without knowing that other departments are doing the same. The result can be a bombardment with messages, leading to confusion, frustration and even a lost sale.

Dossiera, an internal workplace built in-house by Liferay that shows the full customer lifecycle, focuses on taking information from disparate systems and bringing them together to create meaningful insights that employees may not be able to create on their own. The system manages separate accounts and separate employees, with the finalized internal workplace showing the full customer lifecycle and the many different interactions experienced by a consumer. These various customer actions can show their unique interests concerning a company and what products and services may best meet their needs.

The lifecycles of the various services and products they have purchased are shown for greater insights into the future of a customer. The goal of these many different insights is to better equip employees with the ability to provide for accounts in timely, effective ways that are informed by many different viewpoints. Liferay is continuing to focus on how analytics, personalization, customer engagement scores and more can be used to further empower employees through Dossiera.

However, the insights needed to not only work efficiently, but work effectively, can be applied to any company through a better ability to both collect and understand customer data.

Insights Concerning Customer Renewal

As highlighted by the use of Dossiera, there are three major traits that have been correlated to the renewal likelihood of a customer:

• Customer Profile: Company size, LTV, Tenure, Industry, Location
• Customer Behavior: Interactions, Events, Content
• Project Attributes: Deal Size, Duration, Issues, Sales Exec.

Interestingly, Dossiera insights showed that a customer’s tenure is correlated to renewal, with the longer they have been a customer resulting in a higher predicted probability of renewal. The continued loyalty of a customer can be seen as a self-perpetuating cycle, so long as they are receiving the services they desire. This bodes well for companies seeking long-term customer relationships and loyalty in an age of increasing competition.

In addition to the length of relationships, companies often wonder how the cost of services and products affect the chances of contract renewal. Specifically, does high cost lead to turnover? Liferay research showed that renewal amount may actually signal commitment, with the larger a deal size is, the higher the predicted probability of renewal. It’s possible that the scope of commitment within a deal, the more a company is invested in the long-term use of these services and products. Therefore, renewal becomes more likely.

Shifting Liferay’s Approach

Using these insights, Liferay was able to better understand the probability to renew for an improved ability to segment and strategize over the long term. By better understanding a target audience through tested and actionable data, companies across all industries can provide their customers with service, care and coordinated insights during not only the renewal phase, but throughout their contract timeline.