The Customer Value Chain, Explained

Ready to see what radically personal customer service looks like? Sign up for a free demo with Gladly today.

The big question on every ecommerce company’s mind is, “How can I get my brand to stand out with all this competition?” Unfortunately, there’s no single magic bullet for success. But what is possible is taking a holistic approach to improving products and services to provide the most value to customers, showing a commitment to being a high-quality brand.

The key to doing so comes from unlocking the customer value chain.

What Is a Customer Value Chain?

The customer value chain is a concept modeling the entirety of a company’s activities that go into delivering value to a customer.

Every part of this chain can be improved in some fashion, but one of the most opportune areas in this retention-obsessed era is customer service. With more shoppers demonstrating their loyalty based on positive experiences, brands need to optimize their customer support to retain their repeat business.

REPORT

2022 Customer Expectations Report

Download now

Let’s dive into the customer value chain in depth and the tools needed to make the most of it.

Customer Value Chain Example: Amazon

Depending on the type of consumer-facing business, a customer value chain can have different critical touchpoints that add value for a shopper. For those on the consumer packaged goods and retail side, this will likely include some form of inbound and outbound logistics, branding, and customer support.

Here’s a breakdown of Amazon’s customer value chain:

• Marketing and advertising
• Inbound operations supporting a robust storefront and product catalog
• Outbound and fulfillment logistics like warehousing, shipping, and third-party partnerships that ensure products get where they need to go
• Customer experience and service provided through Amazon Prime, which builds on top of the overall value to develop a lasting relationship with the shopper

Support and Your Customer Value Chain

Customer support plays an invaluable role in the value chain, representing a large portion of logistical elements that contribute to long-term customer value and loyalty. Ensuring support teams are properly equipped, funded, and functioning helps produce more recurring revenue for brands to reinvest across the rest of the chain.

Support can also be considered its own customer service value chain, including the staff that makes up and runs a contact center, the service platform that the team uses to manage their workforce and serve customers, the storage and use of customer data for support purposes, and the channels on which they operate and communicate.

Trying to achieve all aspects of the customer service value chain with disparate tools is tricky and ill-advised. Instead, the right solution would be to find a platform that helps manage and achieve all of these tasks at once.

RESOURCES

Customer Experience Resources to Build Long-Term Brand Loyalty

Get them

Optimizing Value Chain Management

Modern technology and organizational management are key to getting the most out of your customer value chain. Gladly is the kind of platform that can go a long way for brands looking to drive loyalty in their shoppers.

Gladly incorporates a number of out-of-the-box tools that help during crucial moments along the customer service value chain. The platform’s scalable, intelligent customer details database houses information and makes it easily actionable in any support context while an internal knowledge base does the same for brand information. On the staffing side, workforce management tools track interactions across your service teams to interpret your support center’s performance in real time.

Managing the customer value chain is imperative for ecommerce brands, particularly as they scale up and increase revenue. The key to upgrading is using the right platforms to integrate as many elements of the chain as possible, streamlining the management and optimization of the value chain overall.