What’s the secret to customer satisfaction?
It’s the business of client success managers to find out. And by utilizing various sets of data — including engagement, revenue, retention, usage and other such metrics — CSMs work to gain valuable, real-time insights into a client’s relative happiness. When it comes to monitoring the health of accounts, nurturing long-term relationships with clients, and preventing the dreaded churn, CSMs have the numbers you need.
For Nicole Pickens, client success manager at Ideoclick, honing strategy through leveraging data is about perfecting what she calls “simple touches” that can make all the difference in maintaining or strengthening a client relationship.
At this e-commerce consultancy company, founded to help sellers navigate Amazon’s complex and ever-changing platform, staying flexible is essential, and identifying small areas for improvement is the name of the game.
Two of the metrics Pickens measures are sales and conversion rate, which she says tend to go hand-in-hand. Whenever she sees drops in either area, Pickens is always quick to check Amazon listings for her client’s products, looking for customer questions or reviews that could reveal an issue or discrepancy.
“While Amazon does not allow you to reply directly to a review on a product page, you can email the customer that left the review under the brand tab within Seller Central,” she explains.
But Pickens has a strategy even for this outreach.
“All questions should be responded to by the seller,” she says. “This is a simple touch that makes a big impact.”
Below, Pickens discusses the data she leverages to ensure Ideoclick’s success in advising clients through a continuously evolving platform like Amazon.
What are the key metrics you track when it comes to your customers?
The key metrics that I track across all clients are sales data, which includes month-over-month and year-over-year, conversion rate and traffic. For some clients that have a strong presence in Amazon’s Subscribe and Save program, I will also track this data. If I see a sharp decline in subscribers, this is a quick way to catch a product that may have an issue that needs to be corrected.
Brand health has also been on my radar for certain accounts. I will use this to track any items that do not have the Amazon Buy Box — that white box on the right side of the Amazon product detail page, where customers can add items for purchase to their cart — due to a brand health issue or pricing. I like to keep a running list so that it is easy to explain the decline in sales or marketing spend because of the lack of Buy Box. This, combined with a list of “off-Amazon” websites with low pricing, helps the client keep track of the minimum advertised pricing offenders.
Which metrics do you prioritize when identifying accounts that might be in danger of churning?
Most clients focus on how much money they are making and what growth they are seeing year-over-year or month-over-month. The easiest metric to help identify accounts that are in danger of churning is sales. If we are consistently seeing a decline in sales, this is a huge red flag for the client.
Another metric that most clients focus on is conversion rate. You always want to see sales growth, and conversion rate goes hand-in-hand with that. If a client sees that they are losing sales, and that the traffic that we are pushing to their product is not converting, the client can begin to push back onto us and believe we are not doing what we should be in order to grow the account.
How have you used this data to tailor your re-engagement strategy?
In this situation, we would work together with the client to turn these metrics around. Whenever conversion rate drops, you want to make sure that the listing is accurate and is up-to-date with any information that may have been asked in the customer-questions sections or mentioned in the reviews. I typically review the listings and add any information that may have been missing or that customers asked about in the questions section.
From there, I check the reviews to see if there are any issues that the client can address, usually manufacturing defects or related complaints. After making those updates, we make sure our current ads are targeting the correct audience and products. Based on customer feedback, we may learn that this product should not be featured on certain item pages, giving us an opportunity to refine our strategy. We can always make changes on our end, but we are also here to educate our clients.
