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TrustRadius Traffic Data Shows the Best Recession-Proof Strategy is to ‘Focus On Your Customers’

Vinay Bhagat
September 28, 2022
Blog, Customer Marketing & Advocacy, Product
13 min read

TrustRadius Traffic Data Shows the Best Recession-Proof Strategy is to ‘Focus On Your Customers’

As a recession looms, retention of customers is even more important than acquisition. To succeed in today’s market, vendors need to hold on to customers by ensuring that they are happy. In the words of our Founder and CEO Vinay Bhagat, “In times of economic uncertainty, customer retention and expansion becomes more important than new logo acquisition. Ensuring that the customer experience is delightful is critical to drive customer loyalty, insulating businesses from losses and creating stability that could be the difference between surviving or thriving in a bear market.”

Why customer retention matters

According to Totango, “While acquiring customers is a necessary expense, it tends to cost three to six times more than retaining customers. This makes it much more cost-efficient to prioritize customer retention than to focus on acquisition at the expense of high attrition.”

But, how does this work, in numbers? Shopify put together a simple illustration to show the impact of selling a $10 a month product to existing customers. They compare a 5% retention rate to a 10% one.

customer experience

As we can see, the impact of just a 10% retention rate is huge. And it’s hard to beat with any type of acquisition efforts! 

Customer experience as an emerging trend

There’s a lot of evidence that today’s companies are really honing in on strategies to elevate and listen to their customers. We especially see this in the growth of the Customer Experience (CX) discipline. 46% of companies in a SuperOffice survey said that CX is their top priority for the next five years—prioritizing it over pricing or product growth! 

But what is customer experience? In a nutshell, it means looking at the end-to-end experience that your customers have with your brand, and working to improve it. It’s often up to the Customer Success team to improve CX. In a recent TrustRadius Trust Talks, Nick Mehta, CMO of Gainsight, stated “The best way to activate customer insights across an organization is to appoint someone to do it.” In an ideal situation, organizations would hire a customer experience (CX) point person and that role would report to a chief customer officer (CCO). CCOs are usually over the customer success management, support, professional services, training, and operations teams.

CX teams mainly focus on improving how the business listens to their customers’ needs, then makes changes to align with these needs. Their main goal is to optimize the customer journey. CX performance is measured with stats like Net Promoter Score (how likely customers will share their experiences with others) and Customer Satisfaction (how satisfied customer are with the brands’ services, based on survey results). On rare occasion, companies like DataStax will use systems like call logging and gamification as a gauge customer satisfaction (CSAT).

When a company focuses on the customer experience, it can make a huge impact on its revenue, growth, and profitability. Here’s the proof:

    • 89% of companies that lead with customer experience perform financially better than their competitors. (Qualtrics)
    • 91% of consumers are more likely to make a repeat purchase after a positive experience. (Salesforce)
    • 78% of customers say they are loyal to brands that understand them and what they want to achieve. (Acquia)
    • B2B and B2C companies that implement innovative CX strategies are 3 times more likely to substantially outperform their business goals. (Adobe)

TrustRadius’ data on customer-focused efforts

We ran a report of buyer traffic to all 789 software categories on the TrustRadius website, and the data bears out this huge shift to customer-focused efforts. Customer experience, along with customer analytics and ecommerce personalization, are all taking center stage. And as we’ve seen, these surging software categories are a sign of the times.

The following customer experience software categories saw the biggest growth, both in terms of TrustRadius’ site traffic and Google Trends data, year-over-year. The same is true for surging products.

Surging Customer Experience Software Categories

Methodology: We compared TrustRadius site traffic with Google Trends Data to determine surging categories in the market. We then applied this same process to surging products within each category. TrustRadius site traffic reflects a % of traffic growth based on a 60-day, year-over-year reporting period, to rule out seasonality discrepancies.

Professional services automation – 56.1% increase in traffic

Professional Services Automation (PSA) Software creates a centralized platform to manage client-project engagements through the entire lifecycle, from sales opportunity creation to final invoice collection.

Customer journey analytics – 55.5% increase in traffic

Customer journey analytics software, also known as customer experience analytics software, offers a complete picture of a customer’s online behavior. It tracks a customer’s digital path from their initial engagement, through such actions as subscribing to a newsletter or signing up for a trial to completing a purchase.

Customer experience management – 36.2% increase in traffic   

Customer Experience Management is an approach to managing and improving an organization’s interactions with its customers across all channels and touchpoints in the customer journey.

Ecommerce Personalization – 48.7% increase in traffic

Ecommerce personalization software allows online retailers to serve up relevant product recommendations, offers, experiences, and ads to shoppers browsing their site.

Headless CMS – 34.01% increase in traffic

Headless content management systems (CMS) is content infrastructure software that make content available as data via APIs instead of traditional, or monolithic, content management systems.

In addition to the above products, TrustRadius, the most trusted research and review platform, can boost your customer experience efforts by giving your users a platform where they can give unbiased feedback on your products. Our review platform serves as an active listening tool, perfect for customer-centric organizations who are seeking to tailor the customer experience, make product improvements, and identify and prevent churn. Learn more about how TrustRadius helps B2B tech vendors transform the voice of the customer into deal intelligence.

About the Author

Vinay Bhagat
Vinay Bhagat, founder and CEO of TrustRadius, is an entrepreneur passionate about tackling big problems. Vinay conceived TrustRadius after experiencing challenges when buying enterprise solutions at his last company. In 1999, Vinay founded Convio, the leading Software as a Services platform for nonprofits. In April 2010, Convio became a public company, and was acquired in May 2012 for $325 million. Prior to Convio, Vinay was at Trilogy Software and Bain & Company. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he graduated as a Baker Scholar, an MS Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford University, and a MA Engineering Information Sciences from Cambridge University with First Class Honors. When he’s not working, Vinay loves spending time with his family, playing squash and racing cars.