By necessity, companies break up tasks into departments and teams. Marketing handles outgoing messaging, sales handles incoming leads, and customer service handles before-and-after care. Each has an in and outflow and duties defined by their roles. However, the customer journey itself travels through all three of these separate departments. With different department heads and different teams handling the customer journey, who takes a big-picture view of shaping the customer experience? This is the role of RevOps.
A RevOps team is not marketing, sales, or customer service but a task force that unites the three departments in a single purpose: improving revenue through customer satisfaction. Through this goal, RevOps may plan for a number of achievements. They may seek to extend customer lifespan, improve value-added, reduce customer turnover, or speed up the sales cycle time. The customer journey should be a compelling and satisfying experience. RevOps was designed to make sure that's true.
The Three-Stage Customer Journey
- Rev Ops Customer Experience
- Marketing
- Sales
- Customer Service
RevOps was developed to focus on the one thing that corporate management has broken apart: The customer journey. Each customer builds a unique relationship with the company based on how they approach the brand and how they are treated as a lead and as a customer. Marketing, Sales, and Customer service each handle their stages separately. Marketing makes promises about the customer experience. Sales must follow through to maintain consistency. If the Sales phase fails, then Customer Service hears about it. But who coordinates them?
Leads traveling through the customer journey experience all these services in a sequence, not broken into departments. Someone must look at the journey from the customer's point of view and make those unique adjustments that will smooth out the transitions, increase the appeal, offer more value, and heighten the experience.
Someone has to ride the ride, then coordinate teams to make it better.
Rev-Ops Streamlines the Customer Journey
The process of Rev-Ops was designed to streamline the customer journey. Rev-Ops professionals focus on how the customer views the entire buying experience. They may start their examination at seasonal banners and advertisements, then examine the experience from the first website click to checkout completion. What is frustrating? What is unclear? What could be better, bolder, or more unified in the theme?
These basic principles are combined with a list of hard metrics that can prove Rev-Ops success.
- Annual Recurring Revenue
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Customer Turnover Rate
- Sales Cycle Time
- Win Rate
By aiming for these goals and focusing on the customer experience, Rev Ops can produce more sales, more satisfied customers, and greater customer loyalty. The best part is that Rev-Ops rarely complicates the selling process. In truth, the changes required to smooth the customer experience can also streamline your selling process.
Coordinating Marketing and Sales
It has always been critical that marketing and sales be on the same page. After all, marketing can't advertise a sale unless sales are really offering discounts. However, all too often, marketing and sales will become disconnected in brand personality and customer experience. While marketing may strive to keep up with buyer personalities, sales builds a system and sticks with it. Customers often pass from trendy, inviting advertisements into a typically rigid online web store. Sometimes, the drop-shock is enough to lose a few leads.
Rev-Ops focuses on keeping marketing and sales aligned through more than the sale calendar. Customers promised an experience by marketing assets should receive that experience in the selling phase of their journey. This both limits marketing and encourages sales to advance their style to fit marketing's customer research. Together they can craft a unified customer experience that transitions smoothly (and enticingly) from marketing assets to an expectations-fulfilled buyer experience.
Aligning Customer Services in the Rev-Ops Plan
Looping customer service into the customer journey is the natural next step. Customers who A) need help deciding, B) Are dissatisfied with their product or C) Have a lingering question will all find themselves talking to your customer service. You want this experience to be consistent, matching the personality and priorities of what the customer has come to expect. For example, if your brand emphasises fast service, a slow customer service system hardly fits. If your brand emphasises happiness, cheerful chat techs maintain your brand personality.
At the same time, customer service also builds long-term customer relationships. Use previous notes and transcripts to ensure each new call is treated as the next part of a long conversation with the company. Make customers feel at home as if they are remembered and important.
The Return Customer and Loyalty Cycle
Lastly, Rev-Ops helps you increase loyal and returning customers. Your marketing team doesn't stop after purchase, and neither does Rev-Ops. Follow-up emails and personalised loyalty deals should all be aligned in customer experience using Rev-Ops techniques. Then you can focus on how to optimise your follow-up marketing to best promote satisfaction, customer loyalty, and return shopping.
By examining how customers interact with the company after their first purchase, they can be better pleased and promoted to return. Rev-Ops can also focus on encouraging referrals and more frequent return shopping by optimising loyalty rewards and opportunities.
RevOps with Hubspot
A platform like HubSpot is the ideal tool to facilitate your Revenue Operations. Rev-Ops focuses on metric-proven results for honing the customer journey. Hubspot gives you a complete and transparent insight into how customers use the site and much more. Working with HubSpot provides the insight to understand the customer journey, what your customers are thinking as they shop, and how to improve the entire experience for each customer in the future.
To explore more on using HubSpot to direct your Rev-Ops procedures, contact us today. Our team understands the HubSpot platform intimately and can help you direct a microscope lens to your customer experience. Find the bottle-necks and opportunities to improve that improve the customer journey and can ultimately boost your revenue and conversion rates.
