{"id":19345,"date":"2023-07-14T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-14T18:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/?p=19345"},"modified":"2024-02-12T06:44:21","modified_gmt":"2024-02-12T11:44:21","slug":"the-role-of-finance-in-customer-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sage.com\/en-us\/blog\/the-role-of-finance-in-customer-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"The Role of Finance in Customer Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\"Bill\t\t\t\tBill Fuesz<\/span>\n\t\t\t<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Too often the role of finance in customer experience is undervalued or misunderstood, but the finance team has a critical role in customer success. It\u2019s not just limited to the buying stage of customer transactions but starts long before a customer engages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider this: It costs companies six to seven times less to retain a customer than to acquire a new one, and research finds that a third of customers will stop doing business with a brand after just one bad experience. With so much on the line, customer experience calls for all-hands-on-deck. More pointedly, low customers satisfaction will affect the balance sheet as revenue diminishes and cost of sales soar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this blog post, I\u2019ll look at how Finance should influence customer experience by helping to build buyer personas, tracking inventory and resource planning as related to cash flow, and building billing models that benefit both the customer and the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finance and Buyer Personas to Improve Customer Experience<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Buyer personas guide companies as they build marketing, sales and service strategies. Buyer personas describe the ideal customer\u2019s background, goals and challenges, their interests and needs and their motivations among several other criteria. As a Finance leader, you should be involved in driving customer experience before a product or service is released to help the company understand which kinds of customers are most likely to succeed with each, in terms of the industry sector, customer size, where customers are located and the like. While the product or development team should develop a customer persona, it\u2019s the role of Finance to ensure that financial obstacles to purchasing are fully understood as well as the customer\u2019s expectation from the buying experience. As well, you should have input on pricing, average revenue per customer, the number of transactions per customer, and the number of new customers and repeat customers to support the business case. These insights are critical to drive business strategy \u2013 for example, Marketing can target the most desired and profitable personas and Sales can use the information to close deals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finance should also help build negative personas to identify the types of people and companies that aren\u2019t a good fit for the business. Despite best efforts, there\u2019s always a customer subset that is unhappy with what they\u2019ve purchased or discontinue service shortly after purchase. There are often types of customers who aren\u2019t profitable to service or create more disruption than they\u2019re worth to the business. Negative personas give you the opportunity to filter out those who aren’t a good fit for your business, so you can prioritize and better focus your marketing and sales efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with buyer and negative personas, you should provide the details around total customer acquisition cost, onboarding costs (if any, depending on what\u2019s being sold) and support and service costs by product, market and persona, along with projected churn rates. These will help guide strategies for Sales and Marketing as well as Product Development and Customer Care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finance should identify areas to optimize, including implementations if applicable. Did some with similar scope and requirements take longer than others? If so, why? Did it require an implementation manager to fly out to a customer location? By monitoring when and where costs go above the norm, your team can help the organization identify trouble spots, thereby enabling the company to provide better service to customers and promote customer success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Customer Experience and Billing<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When it comes time for a customer to pay for a product or service, a frictionless process is necessary regardless of billing model. Billing issues are a major source of customer dissatisfaction and billing models can be complicated.<\/a> These models might include:<\/p>\n\n\n\n