How One B2B Cultivates Loyalty in an Emerging Industry

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Wireless charging solution provider Chargifi launched in 2013, and while acquisition is of course critical at this time, creating loyal customers is kept front and center. Irvin Gray, Chargifi's head of marketing, spoke with eMarketer's Caroline Cakebread about why the company implemented its loyalty strategy from the get go, and how it illustrates and delivers value for customers in all stages of their journey.

eMarketer:

Chargifi is in the early growth stages. How does that affect how you think about customer loyalty?

Irvin Gray:

It’s something we’ve been thinking about since our first customer deployments. We want them to have a good onboarding experience and be successful because we know it’s harder and more expensive to recruit new customers than it is to keep and upsell existing customers. Satisfaction is something we keep front and center at all times.

Once you have your customer, the focus needs to be on making them sticky, which by its very nature means delivering more value so they stay, spend more and become advocates of your brand. Ultimately, that’s what we are trying to do with our customer loyalty strategy.

Right now, it’s a lot more about understanding customers, getting reference cases and working out how we can deliver more value to them to make them stick.

eMarketer:

What are the main tenets of that strategy, and how will they change as the business grows?

Irvin Gray:

Listening to and researching them so that you really understand them. That could be in the form of social listening, general user groups or broad-brush market research. We need to gather enough data so we can understand what they need at certain points in their journey and be able to deliver to and propel them by providing the right tools and touchpoints.

Right now it’s a lot more about understanding customers, getting reference cases and working out how we can deliver more value to them to make them stick.

eMarketer:

Which parts of this is marketing responsible for?

Irvin Gray:

Part of marketing’s job is giving new customers tools to see companies like theirs getting a certain value out of our solution and inspiring them to use the system in a more sophisticated way. People come in at different stages—some are just at the bottom trying to survive wireless charging, but ultimately we want to get them toward integrating other things so they can offer more value with our solution.

We need to provide sales enablement material that’s super relevant to particular audiences and shows our value proposition in a strong way.

Since we’re in an emerging market, education is also important. We have to demonstrate that our solution isn’t just a glorified power outlet, and it can deliver value to their customer's experience.

We have lead measures that influence an overall net promoter score we can measure on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis to see if we’re progressing.

eMarketer:

What kind of metrics go into making sure you’re delivering value?

Irvin Gray:

We have lead measures that influence an overall net promoter score we can measure on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis to see if we’re progressing. We also have milestones for how we expect to achieve with the lead and lag measures along the way. Another lag metric would be the churn rate and ways of reducing that.

Overall, it’s important that this information goes back into how you innovate your offering. To be successful and move the needle, objectives need to be clear and produce key results.

Interview conducted on September 27, 2018

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