by Sam Klaidman | Jul 7, 2014 | Growth
In my experience, for B2B, high tech businesses that have been selling contracts for a number of years, the typical service contract renewal rate is about 90%. This means that every year, 10% of your contracts are not renewed. Think about what this 10% means to your...
by Sam Klaidman | Jun 23, 2014 | Customer Loyalty
In most B2B service organizations, the key performance indicators (KPIs) are based on reducing customer interaction time or making money. The thinking is that short interaction time means higher customer satisfaction and less cost, which is correct. But eliminating...
by Sam Klaidman | Jun 16, 2014 | Growth
Corporate culture describes and governs the ways a company’s employees think, feel, and act. Sometimes the culture makes the business customer-centric (e.g., Zappos and Disney), and sometimes it focuses on employee compensation (think AIG during the Great...
by Sam Klaidman | Jun 9, 2014 | Customer Value Creation
Value is the driver of customer retention and growth My friend Doug Morse says, “The value of a product or service is only in its intended purpose.” I further believe that: Value is expressed in currency units like $’s. Value is not created until the buyer starts...
by Sam Klaidman | Jun 2, 2014 | Growth
Introduction After writing over 90 posts about service revenue and customer retention, it is time to show why these subjects matter. I will tell this story using publicly available data of service revenue as a percent of sales for the company. This data is from a...
by Sam Klaidman | May 26, 2014 | Growth
Remember the old expression, “You only get one chance to make a first impression”? Well, it is still valid with both employees and customers. While the steps to successful on-boarding are different for each, the success of this process is critical to forming...
by Sam Klaidman | May 19, 2014 | Growth
We recently concluded a service contract design engagement with an established equipment manufacturer who did not yet offer service contracts to their customers. We followed the following process and arrived at a recommendation for a series of focused agreements to...
by Sam Klaidman | May 12, 2014 | Growth
Why customers (or prospects) contact your business When a customer contacts your business, she has a need or wants; she is not contacting you because she is bored or wants to know the weather in your part of the world. She reaches out to you because she assumes you...
by Sam Klaidman | May 5, 2014 | Growth
If you are responsible for service revenue and profit and suffer from declining service revenue, how badly are you screwed? That depends on two questions… How long have the revenue and profit been declining? Over that time, how much have they declined? If the answer...
by Sam Klaidman | Apr 28, 2014 | Customer Loyalty
In many companies, the field service engineer has the most ongoing influence over her customers. She is their trusted adviser, is expected to make all problems disappear quickly, and is expected to shield the customer from home office mistakes. In the overall scheme...
