The New ROI Measurement-Communicating with CARE

It is hard to avoid the buzz around “The Cloud” these days, and for good reason. Using the cloud to access information, storage and services can dramatically lower your costs, improve flexibility and workflow, and bring about better business performance overall. As a result, more than half of U.S. businesses now use cloud computing. Analysts predict that cloud-based services will account for over 50% of the demand for managed IT services in 2013. Companies find immediate cost savings with the cloud because there are no up-front costs, and as business grows, the service infrastructure grows with demand.

Taking better care of your customers ultimately translates in to better business success. In the rush to acquire new customers it can be easy to overlook the critical need to maintain and maximize relationships with existing customers. Ironically, it cost six to seven times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing customer. And the average spend of a repeat customer is a whopping 67 percent more than a new one. Cloud CCM helps build a social community of customers that are happy with their experience with your company, will likely come back again, and are more apt to refer your company to friends, family and coworkers.

How do you build business ROI with cloud CCM?  One way is through the CAR²E model, a pattern for strategic activities using cloud CCM. OMI has created this return on investment model to measure the success in the following five areas:

Business revenue depends on consumption. In the end, customers must “consume” something: products, services, information or technology. Attending to consumption means ensuring that you have a product people want to buy, and you are maintaining the demand of customers to consume it.

Once customers have a reason to consume your product or service, it is important to drive further adoption. In other words, driving the continued purchases that take your company beyond the initial customer need.  That activity flows directly into the next phase of the CAR²E model: retention.