In today’s business economy, just selling well is not enough for a better customer experience in 2023.
Conventional business approaches empower businesses to understand customers on a surface level to stay afloat. However, in today’s digital ubiquity, powerful micro-moments, and ever-evolving customer emotions, running a business goes beyond conducting a little market research.
In other words, peeking into your customers’ brains and understanding their feelings and expectations in real-time.
Handling customers’ phone calls or replying to support emails is now the bare minimum in customer-led service growth (CSLG). To shine in the crowd, you need to uncover the why behind people’s behavior – otherwise called customer intelligence (CI).
“What makes them tick?”
“What are their top problems?”
“How do they like your customer support?”
So, how would you find accurate answers to these questions? Through win/loss analysis.
What is Win-loss Analysis in CSLG?
A win/loss analysis is a comprehensive customer-led growth strategy that walks brands through people’s motivations and objections. To be precise, the process enables organizations to examine their efficiency against multiple variables, including competitive landscape, lead conversion rates, and customer satisfaction.
Consequently, the collected data unfolds the true reasons behind why people purchased your service/product – or why they did not.
Think of win/loss analysis for customer service-led growth as a three-step process – gather information, analyze them, and take action. The ultimate objective of a successful win-loss analysis is to continuously gain actionable insights to boost companies’ performance at all levels.
What Makes Win/loss Analysis Important in Customer Service?
Customer behavior is increasingly becoming “messy.” Decision-making methods vary drastically from person to person. Hence, the only way to know why people prefer your offerings over others is to ask them.
Win/loss analyses take a deep dive into businesses’ customer service strategies to better pinpoint their ups and downs. If done correctly, you can remodel your customer service operations and, in doing so, improve win rates and profitability.
With no proper win/loss analysis in place, your support agents will keep committing the same mistakes and not capitalize on key winning tactics.
The numbers speak for themselves: 65% of customers have moved on to a competitor (s) due to poor customer care experience. In contrast, 8 out of 10 customers re-purchase from brands that respond and fix their issues.
So, rather than banking on hunches that could fall flat and cost you tons of money, better trust well-informed decisions.
It is Not Only Limited to Sales and Marketing
Earlier, businesses have used win/loss analysis solely to evaluate and modify their sales and marketing strategies. However, they are increasingly exploring its potential in a customer service-led growth framework.
Case in point, a customer ditches a company due to bad customer service or lack of attention to their priorities. Here, a win-loss analysis of the support interactions provides insights on trends, patterns, and ongoing issues. Companies can use those valuable insights to improve customer service and, eventually, customer retention and satisfaction.
8 Steps to Collecting Win/Loss Data
If you want to take your service-led growth model to new heights, follow these steps to collect win/loss data:
01. Set Clear Goals
Everything starts with a goal, and your win/loss analysis is no exception. Ask yourself what information you are trying to gather from the research.
Do you want to:
- Build a unique selling proposition for your solution?
- Boost customer retention and satisfaction?
- Eliminate service and communication gaps?
- Dive into customer behavior?
- Plan for future development in customer service?
Establishing a goal aligns all stakeholders on a common vision and determines the impact of your customer-led growth efforts with zero guesswork. After all, it is impossible to win a race without designating a finish line.
02. Consolidate Relevant Data
Any win/loss analysis requires (clean) data to ensure accurate calculations and proper interpretation of any insights/conclusions drawn.
At a minimum, you have to recall the name and owner of each customer-facing conversation and whether it was won, lost, or still in progress. Odds are you will need more than that, for instance:
- Marketing data: Trends across people and marketing resources. Use marketing automation tools, including content management system (CMS) and/or customer relationship management (CRM) solution, to categorize the data by traffic source, age, and lead source.
- Demographic data: Build a holistic profile of each customer that incorporates details about their organization, current location, and history with your brand.
- Sales data: Gather notes about each interaction your sales staff had with customers. Skim through these notes, and you will find crucial insights about job roles, use cases, objections, and pain points.
03. Schedule Interviews
What better way to collect win/loss data than by picking the brains of people who eventually determine whether you win or lose during support interactions?
Interviews with customers and prospects provide the richest insights into customers’ decision-making process, their needs, pain points, and overall experience with your service(s). This information goes beyond quantitative metrics or survey responses.
Most businesses only want to know why they win customers or lose business with them. As such, they have an unbalanced view of their customer service’s effectiveness. This is a significant blind spot that win/loss interviews uncover.
They eliminate guesswork from the equation, put qualitative data at the heart of your efforts, and enable you to understand what is and is not working for you.
04. Prep Interview Questions
Remember those win/loss program goals you established earlier? Your questionnaire will help you unfold the data you need to achieve them.
Additionally, driving valuable responses boils down to how you frame your interview questions. While interviewing won and lost customers, ask questions that fetch intel on your service/product, market, and competition.
A few sample win/loss analysis questions include:
1) What did you like the most and the least about our customer service?
2) Which features do you find the most helpful?
3) What were the primary factors you were looking for in a service provider?
4) What made you decide to buy/not to buy from us?
5) What alternatives will you turn to if our service/product fails to meet your needs?
Questions 1-2 reveal customers’ pain points and how they elaborate on them.
Questions 3-4 dig deeper into the customers’ purchasing preferences and uncover buying objections you have not thought of.
Question 5 offers a deeper assessment of the competitive landscape. Follow up with questions to better understand your rival (s). Case in point, “Why did you choose this service?” or “Which features do you use the most often?”
Update your competitive battle cards accordingly.
05. Build your List of Interviewees
You must invite a good chunk of your focused groups to conduct interviews.
But who will you interview? Old customers? Prospects? Or loyal customers? Again, this decision will rest upon the initial goals you set for the win/loss analysis.
For instance, if you want to understand the problems people might be encountering during their buying journey, the experience should stay fresh in their minds. Particularly if you have recently modified your customer support funnel, connect with prospects who will remember their journey.
Besides, aim for an even split of won and lost opportunities instead of inclining more toward the former. Learning why a prospect converted is just as crucial as knowing why they did not. Better seek out decision-makers as they were the ones who eventually called the shot.
Furthermore, schedule more interviews than you need. More often, lining up the exact number of interviews you need will lead to several last-minute cancellations. So, to avoid this, invite 4-5X more people than you plan to interview to get sufficient responses.
06. Send Surveys to Customers
Surveys offer a systematic approach to gathering customer feedback and can be conducted at scale. When creating surveys, include the following types of questions:
- Demographic questions: Basic customer details such as gender, age, location, or industry, to segment and examine the data properly.
- Win/Loss specific questions: Targeted questions related to particular customer-facing interactions and outcomes. Ask what makes customers stick with your brand or turn to your competitors.
- Open-ended questions: To let customers share their particular experiences, suggestions, or concerns about your customer service in detail.
Send these surveys via email invitations, customer portals, online survey platforms, or embedding them on your website.
07. Employ Secret Shoppers
Assign some of your agents to disguise as secret or mystery shoppers to subscribe to your competitors’ services or products and test them for a few days or weeks.
Based on their analysis, they highlight crucial insights. Case in point, the overall quality of your competitors’ customer service, how professional their agents were, and their knowledge about the service/product.
Use these findings to examine your own customer service strategies and compare them with those of your rivals. See where you outshine and lag behind them. Accordingly, make necessary changes in your customer support frameworks, identify areas for improvement, and train your agents for a better customer experience.
08. Organize and Apply the Findings Far and Wide
You are halfway through the race.
Now that you have collected your customers’ honest feedback, pile up all the responses and bucket all the key learnings into underlying themes highlighted across every interview.
Share the results with your customer service, marketing, sales, and product teams, in particular. Then, identify common patterns and use them to build action items to foster your customer growth and retention strategies.
Let’s say many respondents said that your solution helped them save 4 hours of work a week – but you are not flashing that anywhere on your website. If so, front-load this selling point or highlight it in your next customer service strategy.
4 Ways to Analyze Win/Loss Data
Whether you depend on CRM data, interview data, or both, be prepared to manage a mountain of unorganized data. To overcome the challenge, follow these best practices to analyze win/loss insights effectively:
01. Categorize the Data
Categorize the win/loss data based on multiple factors, including customer demographics, location, industry, sales cycle stage, and reasons for choosing/not choosing your brand. This classification will help you highlight trends and patterns in the win/loss data.
For instance, if a particular word/phrase occurs repeatedly across different responses, consider that a trend worth focusing on.
02. Underline Key Trends
Identify patterns and trends in the win/loss data to determine common factors and themes that shape customer decision-making. Look for commonalities in why people preferred your company or a rival, such as quality, customer service, price, or product features.
These could be trends that cropped up most often – but not always. If a trend does not appear as frequently as another but is more persuasive to your business or more aligned with your primary goals for win/loss, keep it on your radar.
03. Limit your Recommendations
Using the goals you defined at the beginning of the win/loss research as a North Star, sum up your findings in a few (2-3) recommendations for action. These recommendations will likely apply across the board. However, tailor them according to the department — especially to the C-suite.
If, for instance, your primary stakeholders are your C-level execs, do not shoot a dozen things at them. Rather provide them with the top three insights of what you learned from the win/loss analysis and why they matter.
04. Measure your Findings Based on Metrics
Create a metric-based scale to measure success and failure to make your win/loss analysis reports more effective and streamline processes, including post-decision interviews.
Case in point, score won or lost customers on a scale of 1-10 for their perception of your brand’s offerings, sales cycle performance, and competitive advantage /disadvantage.
Having a metric-based scale helps your agents develop crystal-clear outcomes to pursue, and help you set the tone for future pitches to prospects.
7 Ways to Use Win/Loss Data for Improving Customer Service in 2023
01. Identifying Pain Points
By assessing the responses from lost customers during interviews, you can underline common issues they face with your service. This can be related to difficulty connecting with a customer service agent, long hold times, or dissatisfaction with the quality of ticket resolution.
You can categorize and prioritize these pain points based on their impact on business objectives and customer satisfaction and develop support solutions that deal with the most significant issues first.
02. Spot Key Areas of Improvement
Comparing feedback from lost customers with won ones provides insights into how you stack up against your competitors. Determining why people preferred a them to your company helps pinpoint areas where you are lagging behind in the competition.
For instance, if you are increasingly receiving complaints about a specific problem, there may be a systemic issue that needs immediate attention.
That way, you can single out the areas in your customer-led growth strategies where there is scope for improvement to better meet your customers’ needs.
03. Explore Growth Avenues in Other Departments
Similarly, you can tap into lucrative opportunities in other departments as well with win/loss data.
Case in point, in the operations division, win/loss data can help you identify inefficiencies in particular operational processes that are leaving customers frustrated. Suppose customers consistently complain about long hold times for support. Such a situation indicates the need to fine-tune support operations or onboard more agents.
Besides, in marketing, you can use win/loss data to figure out where your brand’s pricing or policies are shooing customers away to your competitors. By delving into the factors that shape customer purchasing decisions, you can tweak your product/service’s pricing structure to keep buyers within your orbit.
04. Deliver Hyper-personalized Interactions
With win/loss data, you can stay ahead of customer needs and proactively deliver support. Moreover, you can single out certain features of customer service that irk people while interacting with your agents.
Case in point, if a particular issue has left a customer frustrated in the past, your support teams can proactively offer assistance before the problem resurfaces.
Apart from that, win/loss analysis provides insights into how customers prefer to reach out to your support agents. While some customers prefer to interact via email, others prefer chat or phone calls.
Understanding these preferences will empower you to offer a hyper-personalized customer experience in 2023 tailored to each customer’s preferred communication mode.
05. Product Development
The data compiled after interviewing respondents will help you determine your products’ critical strengths and weaknesses. They offer a holistic idea of what customers seek in a product and how their preferences and needs are evolving over time. Additionally, the inputs bring your attention to the product features that are most important to users and which ones are lacking.
You can utilize these insights to inform product development and make necessary changes to tick all customer satisfaction boxes. Plus, focusing on the features that matter to your customers most will enable you to improve your product’s value proposition.
06. Optimizing Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing teams can use win/loss data to examine the factors common among failed lead conversions and pinpoint where their strategies are falling off-path. With these insights, they add new rules or behaviors to address poorly performing aspects of the sales and marketing strategy.
Win/loss analysis helps brands better understand their focus groups and tailor their sales and marketing efforts accordingly. Additionally, you can identify and capitalize on emerging industry trends and changing customer demands. These insights will help you determine which support interactions often win you more customers and which ends in losing customers.
This will enable you to build effective customer growth and retention strategies.
07. Update your Battlecards
Share successful customer service strategies and methods on the battlecards. This includes effective ways to handle escalated situations, examples of excellent service delivery, or techniques to build rapport with customers. Featuring a “win” story in your battlecards offers your customer service agents practical advice on how to actually beat the competition.
However, not all stories end on a happy note. So, ensure you include loss stories alongside the winning ones. As such, your agents can identify the common, real-world challenges they can face when selling against a competitor.
Maximize your Wins, Minimize your Losses
People show diverse sentiments (positive or negative) while engaging with a business. These emotions reveal whether they will likely revisit the brand or junk it altogether. So, developing a win/loss analysis to understand why people purchased from you/defected to your rival is critical more than ever.
Because with that knowledge comes the ability to consistently make intelligent decisions regarding customer service-led growth strategies. When you understand how well or poorly you perform against specific variables, you are well-armed to take your business through the correct path.
That could imply doubling down on a certain domain, reconsidering your vocabulary/language during customer-facing conversations, or gathering competitive intelligence. Whatever it is, you are far less likely to make a wrong move when you have data on your side.
So, implement the steps explained in this article to have a fresh appreciation of your customer needs, and inch closer to your target mark.
Remember, brands that put the customer at the center of customer support-led strategies outsmart their non-customer-obsessed competitors.
Connect with Helpwise (14-day free trial) today to win more customers and drive customer service-led growth.
FAQs
What is win/loss analysis?
Win/loss analysis is the discovery process that helps brands determine why people have chosen to do business with them or go elsewhere. You can gather these insights via surveys, interviews, or online reviews.
A thorough win/loss analysis in helps you:
- Gain vital information about competitors’ go-to customer service strategies
- Get a clear picture of how people perceive your services/products
- Determine the efficacy of your customer service-led growth tactics
- Determine your unique selling propositions
How can businesses gather win/loss data?
To collect win/loss data for customer service-led growth, follow these steps:
- Define your purpose behind conducting a win/loss analysis
- Accumulate relevant data sources
- Plan large-scale interviews and surveys
- Prepare interview questions that help you fetch the necessary insights
- Invite people only from your target audience
- Send your employees as secret shoppers of your competitors’ products/services
- Analyze the data and share the findings with relevant stakeholders
How can businesses use win/loss data to boost their growth?
The information collected after conducting a win/loss analysis can be used in the following ways:
- Underline the troubles people face while contacting your support agents
- Identify important areas for improvement
- Discover growth opportunities in other departments
- Refine sales and marketing effort
- Inform product development
- Offer at-scale personalized customer service
