Establishing company-wide processes that align employee success with customer success has a significant impact on a company’s growth and profitability. Not only does this drive Sales, it also gets woven into the fabric of your company culture. To create a great workplace environment, you need to set an organizational foundation that results in high-quality customer experiences and employee satisfaction.
I bootstrapped my company in 1991 without taking any VC backing and have seen continued growth year after year. With the fundamentals below, I was able to scale the business to more than 1,800 customers and three million users while creating a customer-centric culture that ignites sales and a healthy bottom line.
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Customer Service guarantee
Building a culture that connects the success of every member of the organization with its customers plays a key role in ensuring profitability. For instance, at Agiloft we offer our customers something unique in the industry: a 100% satisfaction guarantee on both the software licenses and services. If a customer is not delighted with the results or wants to cancel for any reason within 90 days of purchase, they pay nothing. Over 27 years and thousands of implementations, the guarantee has only been invoked three times.
Share Sales commissions
Traditional sales incentives, such as year-end bonuses, are an antiquated way to approach performance goals. Bridging the divide between sales and the rest of the company by aligning compensation in way that allows everyone to have “skin in the game” ensures all teams are working towards the same end goal. At Agiloft, we give Sales bonuses to the entire company, not just the Sales team. We pay the bonus not when we close a new deal but after we successfully complete a customer implementation. By giving every employee a vested interest in the health of our business, we’ve achieved a 99.6% customer satisfaction rate, which has translated to more than 40% year-over-year revenue growth and 200% channel Sales growth in 2018.
Consistency in the Customer Service team
Guaranteeing a consistent experience across the customer journey is the key to making customers happy. At Agiloft, the customer’s implementation Project Manager becomes the Customer success Manager and the single point of contact for the client going forward. This approach means the client can trust that their Agiloft representative is thoroughly familiar with their circumstances and facilitates the building of a genuine relationship.
The company has emphasized our commitment to nurturing these customer relationships by growing the Customer Service Department by 75% in the last twelve months. One of the department’s foundational tenets is complete transparency in estimating project complexity and costs. To that end, the group provides detailed project plans that account for almost all contingencies. As a result, during the last two years, 98.5% of customers went live at or under their original budget.
By providing clients with a consistent customer experience, supporting and celebrating the success of your employees, and offering customers guaranteed results, you’ll be well on your way to building a customer-centric culture that drives sales and scales your business.
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