Four Customer Experience Competencies

 

A single bad experience can cost company money?

In the case of United Airlines, one bad experience became a YouTube viral video that damaged its reputation for months and resulted in a drop in their share price.

The fact is that managing customer experiences isn’t something to leave to chance. Great companies design customer experiences.

Some reports indicate that as much as 53% of consumers report stop spending at fast-food restaurants or rental car agencies as a result of a bad experience.

The Customer Choice

Customers today have more choice than ever. If you onto Amazon and type in any product you will find a plethora of alternatives.

The point is that customers don’t have to remain loyal, don’t have to choose your company.

Customers can easily see reviews of good and bad experiences and they trust these more than they do your marketing.

The Customer Journey

Today’s customer buying journey spans buying, owning and advocating. It is progressive so that if brands do the right thing in the buy and own stage, they earn customer advocacy. This is important because when marketers improve the entire customer experience across all three phases, their marketing results amplify and improve.

The connected economy continues its path of creative destruction and as a result, changing the nature of competition itself. Customer experience is in now the battleground for customers. Why? Well, hyper-competition has reduced traditional product and service advantages. Now customers have more choice than ever before. Customers also have easy access to those choices through the internet. This means that there is ubiquitous access to pricing and product information, and so consumers have little reason to remain loyal to a particular brand.

And for your customers to like you, you should know them very well to create and deliver personalised experiences that will entice their loyalty. But gaining this in-depth knowledge about customers isn’t something that just happens. It’s about collecting a lot of customers’ data and bring out valuable insights from that data with speed and precision.

The Four Customer Experience Competencies Infographic

What does it actually look like to take your customer experience capabilities to the next level?  Many organisations say they focus on their customer “experience” but the reality is that defining the stages of customer experiences from the customer’s point of view is hard. One reason is that many organisations do not coordinate and collaborate across the customer experience journey. As a result, the operating areas do their own thing, driven by their internal tasks and agenda and scorecard. A lot of work is resources are committed within each area of the company. However, these don’t add up from the customers’ experience to deliver a unified experience.

Organisations need to have a framework and teams that have a clearly defined customer experience vision and integrate culture, employees, marketing and operations to deliver it. The four customer experience competencies infographic nicely illustrates the competencies that an organisation needs to develop to succeed.

https://tinyurl.com/285xxp38

How to create a customer experience strategy across the full lifecycle

 

Discover how a customer experience strategy that enhances digital experiences across all touchpoints can help build brand loyalty and improve ROI

In today’s fast-paced digital world, providing a seamless customer experience strategy is no longer a luxury but a necessity. As consumers have more options than ever on where, when, and how to interact with brands, ensuring a consistent and positive digital experience can significantly impact your business's growth and competitiveness. 

It’s easy to forget just how many touchpoints your business may have. The Smart Insights customer lifecycle visual highlights just some of the many paid, owned, and earned media omnichannel options available today to communicate with prospects and customers. There’s a lot! 

The diverse array of channels highlights the amount of avenues we need to effectively manage to create effective customer experience, no matter where or how a customer interacts with us. 

However, due to the speed at which our industry moves and the amount of changes we have to regularly adapt to, it can be easy to neglect implementing a customer experience strategy. In doing so, you may be losing potential customers to competitors at various stages of the lifecycle, without even knowing.

What do we mean by customer experience?

Customer experience refers to the cumulative impact of all interactions a customer has with a brand throughout their entire journey. This includes every touchpoint, from initial awareness and engagement to post-purchase support and advocacy. A positive customer experience is characterized by ease of use, personalized interactions, and consistent satisfaction across all channels.

Integrating customer experience into your marketing strategy is essential because it not only influences customer retention and loyalty but also enhances brand reputation and drives revenue growth. By prioritizing customer experience strategy, businesses can differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace and create lasting relationships with their customers.

Why does customer experience matter?

Customers form opinions about your brand through various digital touchpoints, whether it’s via social media, your website, or email campaigns. We need to go beyond customer actions here and really consider their emotions and feelings to truly understand sentiment. As TechTarget summarizes:

“Managing customer experience isn't just about how people perceive their experience with a brand or the actions a company takes, but how customers feel when engaging with a brand.”

If these interactions are not optimized, you risk losing customers to competitors who offer a more engaging and satisfying experience. A well-structured customer experience strategy can be the decisive factor between thriving in your market or lagging behind competitors. 

Top Tip: Think ‘consistency’. You want your customers to feel comfortable that they know what to expect when interacting with you at any stage of their journey, at any touchpoint. This is why brand messaging and experience needs to be consistent across all channels, to help build brand trust and reliability.

What does good customer experience look like?

This will vary depending on your business, industry and product/service. However, there are some key fundamentals that apply to any business, which Hojar has succinctly summarized.

"In short, good customer experience can be achieved when you:

• Make listening to customers a top priority across the business
• Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers
• Implement a system to help you regularly collect, analyze, and act on feedback
• Reduce friction and solve your customers' specific problems and unique challenges"

Benchmarking your customer experience

When diving into any marketing optimization, we first need to consider - where are we now? And what are we basing that on? 

Customer experience of all brand interactions is often based on Voice of Customer (VoC) tools, like customer ratings and surveys of satisfaction that are benchmarked, but often these don’t drill down into satisfaction with online channels which account for a high proportion of interactions. There are also behavioural measures of satisfaction with experience that with digital you can assess directly and aim to improve. 

Top Tip: A great way to better understand your customers’ pyschographic motivators, is to work on your personas and customer journey maps. For more advice on this, read our How to create an actionable customer journey map using RACE blog.

Our Digital Customer Experience review (shown below) enables you to review your capabilities for managing digital experiences too. Where does your business currently sit?

Looking at the benchmarking visual, it’s likely that you can already see areas you can improve to take you to the ‘Optimized’ stage consistently across channels. Now you have identified where you need to improve, it’s important to build these key activities into your customer experience strategy.

Key elements of a robust customer experience strategy using RACE

To effectively manage and improve customer experience, we can split up areas to optimize effectively using Smart Insights RACE Planning Framework. Our newly launched customer experience playbook is built using RACE, providing a detailed roadmap to enhance your digital customer interactions. RACE can support you in delivering an exceptional customer experience strategy by splitting out activities across the full customer lifecycle:

1. Plan: Set clear objectives and measurement criteria. Define the scope of customer experience, focusing on online interactions which often form a high proportion of customer engagements.
2. Reach: Increase your brand's visibility and demand through effective use of digital media. This involves improving your SEO, integrating social media strategies, and ensuring your content reaches the right audience.
3. Act: Encourage digital interactions that lead to increased subscribers and leads. By enhancing your website’s customer journeys and providing relevant, engaging content, you can significantly boost user engagement.
4. Convert: Turn your prospects into customers by optimizing conversion rates through an omnichannel approach. This includes both online and offline tactics to ensure a smooth transition from lead to customer.
5. Engage: Build long-term customer loyalty and advocacy by maintaining consistent communication through email marketing, social media, and other digital channels. Engaging your customers beyond the initial purchase is key to fostering lasting relationships.

Benefits of focusing on customer experience

Although it may never feel ‘top of the list’, optimizing your digital customer experience can really help support your overall business goals by creating:

• Increased Customer Loyalty: Satisfied customers are more likely to return and recommend your brand to others.
• Improved Brand Reputation: Positive experiences lead to positive reviews and word-of-mouth marketing
• Higher Conversion Rates: Optimized customer journeys reduce friction and increase the likelihood of conversions.
• Enhanced Customer Insights: Understanding customer behaviour helps refine marketing strategies and product offerings.

https://tinyurl.com/msespkms

The One Customer Experience Management Tool That Every CX Leader Must Use

 Denise Lee Yohn

Customer experience (CX) doesn’t just happen. CX is a multi-disciplinary business venture that requires the systematic and deliberate development, alignment, and integration of capabilities throughout the organization. To unleash its value creation power, CX leaders must reach for and achieve increasing and evolving levels of CX maturity. That’s why the one customer experience management (CEM) tool that every CX leader must use is a CX Maturity Model.

A CX Maturity Model is a framework that identifies the different areas of development that CX requires, along with key milestones in each area. CX leaders can use a CX Maturity Model to assess the current state of CX in their organization, diagnose where improvements should be focused, and guide the evolution and optimization of CX. 

From Emerging to Excelling

The following CX Maturity Model is an example. It incorporates learnings from CX approaches at a range of companies as well as the transformation and competency models developed by CX software company MaritzCX, CX research firm Temkin, and Altimeter, a digital transformation research and consulting firm. 

CX Maturity Model by Denise Lee Yohn

DENISE LEE YOHN, INC.

1.     Emerging – In this first stage of CX maturity, key players within an organization have discovered that its product-, operations-, or finance-led approach has diminished in effectiveness and they realize their company needs to become customer-centric. These CX drivers lead conversations about the necessary transformation, assess existing CX capabilities, and/or initiate early efforts to improve specific touchpoints or processes.    

2.     Learning – Next, experimentation with CX process and improvements grows as does customer research on needs and pain points and trial of basic CX tools such as journey mapping. CX leaders start reporting on CX and customer metrics at the touchpoint level. More people in the organization become engaged in CX projects, but most efforts remain isolated in functional groups.

3.     Committing – Support for CX is secured among several key executives in this stage, so the organization formalizes CX: It defines strategies, allocates resources, establishes teams, adopts new technologies, teaches new skills, engages CX programs, and sets specific targets for CX.  Cross-functional collaboration is cultivated as CX developments involve greater integration, and therefore, impact.

4.     Accelerating – Quantified ROI on CX is achieved and the need for integration of CX with business strategy is understood, so an ecosystem of CX touchpoints, teams, tools, processes, and partnerships is established. The organization increases its proficiency with the data and digital technology instrumental to identifying and implementing CX solutions. It also ensures employee experience (EX)/CX alignment and employee brand engagement. 

5.     Excelling – For organizations at the most mature CX stage, CX becomes a way of business as all executives embrace and empower the transformation. An organization-wide CX skill set and mindset is established and CX gets embedded into organizational structures and practices. The CX ecosystem continues to scale and evolve as the organization proactively identifies new customer opportunities and seeks to innovate breakthrough experiences.

Each organization is different and begins its journey at different points, so CX leaders may find the progression differs at their organization. These five stages indicate general milestones on the journey to CX maturity.

Three CX Development Tracks

As organizations progress through the five stages of CX maturity, leaders must develop three building blocks of CX:

A.    Vision and Strategy –- the desired future and the path to get there. 

This building block addresses the problem that if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.  As an organization matures in CX, it achieves greater levels of clarity about its intentions, alignment of CX with business and brand strategy, measurement methods and rigor, and implementation of the overarching vision and strategy.  

B.     Leadership and Alignment – engagement of organizational leaders. 

CX excellence depends on leadership from the top of the organization and alignment throughout it.  With increasing levels of CX maturity, companies place greater priority on CX, more top-level executives become CX drivers, and collaboration across departments/functions develops.  

C.   Organizational Readiness – the state of competencies and resources.

CX leaders must cultivate the preparedness of the organization to get to subsequent stages of maturity. Customer intimacy is the most important dimension of this building block, but employee engagement, skills, and systems and processes must also grow and evolve.

Development of all three building blocks is necessary and the descriptions of the building blocks at each stage in the CX maturity model indicate the typical ways in which they develop. These building blocks are interdependent and, when developed effectively, can be mutually reinforcing.   

Destination: CX Excellence

Whether CX leaders use this particular CX Maturity Model or if they choose any others that exist is less important than simply using one. Without a model, CX efforts can become a bunch of difficult-to-manage, direction-less, disparate initiatives with no definitive outcome. And if companies approach CX in a disjointed way, their customers will experience CX in a disjointed way. But with a CX Maturity Model, CX leaders have the compass, map, and engine needed to get the destination – CX excellence.

https://www.forbes.com/

What Makes Customer Service Experiences Great or Terrible?

 Which factors contribute most to great and terrible experiences when customers contact businesses?

To find out, Oracle and Ascend2 surveyed 5,053 people around the world between the ages of 18 and 80 with an annual household income of $40,000 or more.

Respondents say the factors that contribute most to a positive customer service experience are helpful service agents (65% cite), having the ability to easily find the information needed (62%), and receiving proactive service to address potential issues (42%).

Respondents say the factors that contribute most to a negative customer service experience are having to repeat themselves to multiple agents (56% cite), having to contact customer service multiple times (52%), and being unable to reach a live agent (47%).

Respondents say the things that matter most to them when trying to contact a business for customer service are the speed of getting connected to an agent (64% cite) and having to expend limited effort to achieve a resolution (46%).

The researchers found the customer service method of contact that has seen the greatest increase in usage over the past two years is webchat with a live agent (35% of respondents report using more).

About the research: The report was based on data from a survey of 5,053 people around the world between the ages of 18 and 80 with an annual household income of $40,000 or more.

https://www.marketingprofs.com/

Experience Matrix™

 

Experience Design is widely recognized to be critical to the customer development process. Not just in our digital age, but even long before bits-and-bytes driven firms grabbed control of the helm from their brick-and-mortar predecessors.

Global research by Avaya (2014/2015) indicated that “Eighty-one percent of those who have seen a significant increase in profits have a CEM (Customer Experience Management) program in place, compared to those who have seen profits remain static (46%) or suffered a decrease in profits (35%).” and “Companies see the biggest improvements in customer satisfaction, loyalty, retention and repeat purchasing, which the survey finds is largely attributed to the fact that 88% of customers would rather spend their money with companies that make it easy for them to buy.”

In contrast “a staggering, 81%/82% (2014/2015) of organizations have seen their CEM initiatives fail in the last three years.” According to business decision-makers, “the top reason for CEM failure is project-misalignment with customer preferences, indicating communication barriers within organizations themselves.”

If anything, the ROUNDMAP™ is designed to increase the effectiveness of cross-silo collaboration. However, it is also important to mention that the scope of the third sector, Delivery, is much wider than offering customer support and customer service.

As indicated by the Avaya-research, “companies do not typically associate functions like finance, R&D, IT and operations as dealing with customers. This could be a blind spot in the way they approach and plan CEM initiatives given that people across all departments within the company have direct or indirect contact with customers and prospects and not just the roles typically seen as customer-facing.”

This made us create the ROUNDMAP’s Experience Matrix™:

The Experience Matrix™ contains four elementary experiences:

1. Brand Experience or BX (product-driven)
2. Customer Experience or CX (lifetime-driven)
3. User Experience or UX (service-driven)
4. Shared Experience or SX (meaning-driven)

Similar to how we’ve mapped four value disciplines to four elementary business models in the Business Model Matrix™, we have also mapped experience design to the business model.

For instance, a product-centric business model should focus on BX-design, while a resource-centric business model profits most from UX-design. Coca-Cola is a product-centric business, with a product-leadership value position, driven by brand experiences. Greenwheels, on the other hand, is a resource-centric business, driven by user experiences.

In fact, the choices regarding business model, strategic advantage, value position, and experience design together are what sets the firm’s value proposition apart: from similar offerings or experiences.

Similar to how value disciplines are to be perceived, experience designers should keep a threshold, indicating that while experience design requires a certain priority in line with the business model and value position, it should not neglect the basics of the other experience design functions.

ROUNDMAP™ Full Stack

The Experience Matrix™ and the Value Position Matrix™ are both part of the ROUNDMAP™ Full Stack:

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Cover Image by Daria Nepriakhina from Pixabay

https://cutt.ly/x7G1qT7

Why Customer Complaints Are a Gift

 

by Nick Hague

In a crisis, delivering exceptional customer experience is exceptionally hard. Chaos can lead to slip-ups, creating unhappy customers.

But the truth is, even amidst uncertainty, customer complaints are a gift.

Why? A customer has taken the trouble to tell you their story!

Customer experience is a round-the-clock endeavour. When mistakes happen, it’s more crucial than ever to jump on it; acknowledge it and look to rectify.

After all, a bad customer experience left ignored could become a scathing review.

But let’s look at the opportunity.

Receiving a thoughtful complaint gives you a second chance to make things right.

Our response should be three things: swift, precise and professional. Addressing situations quickly can turn frustrated customers into happy advocates.

The next step is turning that feedback into improvements. A complaint that becomes a better product or process leaves customers feeling recognized, appreciated, and connected to your brand.

Building a loyal customer base comes with bumps along the way. Yet even during this uncertain period, consistently handling issues with quality and grace is what separates a good business from a thriving one.

https://bit.ly/3A9TkaH

Six Steps To B2B Customer Experience Excellence

 The last few years have seen an appreciable increase in the attention paid to the discipline of customer experience – However, much of this focus has been in b2c markets. Unfortunately, the same cannot yet be claimed consistently for business-to-business firms: B2B customer experience performance still lags other markets and can often struggle for attention against myriad other corporate priorities. In this white paper, we examine the drivers of b2b customer experience success, based on our analysis and research of hundreds of top b2b brands.

The business value of taking b2b customer experience seriously

High satisfaction scores do not equate to high loyalty. A customer could be highly satisfied with a company’s products and services, but that doesn’t mean they are also loyal. A competitor could lure them away with a more attractive customer value proposition. Conversely, a customer may not be satisfied with a company’s offering but could display loyalty simply due to the barriers of inertia or the difficulties in switching brands.

Integral to both satisfaction and loyalty is the customer experience. We have entered the age of the experience economy where customers expect more than ever before. Brands are at battle to outperform on experience such as making the customer journey easier and delivering faster. The more powerful brands connect more on an emotional level with their customers by invoking feelings such as pride and accomplishment, thus challenging the value paradigm in that customers are often seeking more than functional and rational benefits.

A positive customer experience encourages customers to spend more. By way of example, Amazon – a leader in experience innovation with the likes of Amazon Prime and Amazon Dash – enjoys an industry-leading position on its Net Promoter Score (NPS), and attributes more than one third of its revenue to cross-selling.

However, many companies fail in delivering an excellent customer experience as customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal than loyal. Poor customer experience drives brand switching and the majority of customers who suffer a bad customer experience spread negative word of mouth. Research by McKinsey showed that improving a customer experience from average to exceptional (where the customer is “wowed” in some way) can lead to a 30 to 50 percent increase in KPIs such as likelihood to renew or to purchase another product.

How customer-centric are b2b brands?

According to research by B2B International, only 14% of large b2b companies are truly customer centric: That is to say, where the customer experience is deeply ingrained in the company culture. This indicates that b2b organizations have significant work to do to become more customer-focused, but it also highlights an opportunity for b2b firms to differentiate their brands and improve profitability by delivering a superior customer experience.

More positively, 31% of b2b firms are engaged with customer centricity in that the customer experience is a core component of their organization’s strategy. This suggests that almost a third of b2b brands have a structured vision for the execution of strong customer experience, although it is not yet ingrained in the company culture.

What are the secrets of b2b customer experience excellence?

With this in mind, how can b2b brands become more customer-centric to the point that the customer experience is embedded into the company culture? In examining the customer experience of over 500 b2b brands, we identified a step-by-step process to achieving b2b customer experience excellence that applies to virtually all b2b brands, as shown in the graphic below. We then tested how well large b2b brands perform on each of these factors of customer experience excellence, on a 10 point scale where 1 means poor and 10 means excellent. The far right column of the table indicates the top 3 box score, i.e. those rating their organization an 8, 9 or 10 out of 10.

At least a quarter of b2b firms perform well on each step of the process towards customer experience excellence. The highest performance is on the first step, commitment, yet only around a half of b2b firms are committed, i.e. enthusiastic about satisfying customers and making them feel valued. This is alarming given that commitment is the foundation to success. In other words, without being committed to delighting customers, it is very difficult to deliver an excellent customer experience.

Knowledge-based companies (such as those in IT, financial and professional services, healthcare and education) rate their customer experience performance higher than companies in trade and services (such as wholesale, telecoms and utilities) and companies in manufacturing and construction. Knowledge-based companies typically entail more customer interaction with people and so there is arguably more opportunity to build strong customer relationships.

How can b2b brands improve the customer experience?

1. Commitment: Being enthusiastic about satisfying customers and making them feel valued

The first step in customer experience excellence is to be committed to satisfying – and where feasible, delighting – customers. Employees have to share a common goal of customer centricity for 100% commitment to the customer experience across the organization. Cintas, the facilities management company, refers to its employees as “Partners” as a means of engaging their cooperation towards the shared purpose. Southwest Airlines takes this a step further by capitalizing all those who engage with its brand in some way. Southwest’s purpose includes “Connecting People” and its mission includes “dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service”.

Companies committed to customer experience excellence should be passionate about their customers to the point that customers recognize the brand’s efforts in going the extra mile. These extras drive differentiation yet are usually small actions and have a low cost to implement. The founder of the Ritz-Carlton hotel said recession isn’t an excuse to eliminate distinguishing features such as bouquets of fresh flowers, as this would bleach the customer experience clean of what makes the hotel distinct. Ritz-Carlton guests are not after a bed and four walls for the night; they are seeking an exceptional experience where every touchpoint with the brand makes the customer feel special.

The more sophisticated companies boast customer experience-dedicated teams. These typically comprise a head of customer experience who is supported by someone in a research role (to collect and analyze the voice of the customer), someone in a process implementation role (to ensure the customer experience is ingrained across all processes), and someone in a culture role (typically part of the HR function). The most successful companies are those with cross-functional teams, i.e. various integrated functions across the organization focused not only on improving the customer experience but on reinventing it. McKinsey claims that less than 30% of companies have a highly collaborative culture, indicating that most have work to do in achieving a shared commitment to customer centricity.

According to the Service Profit chain, customer service improvements are linked to employee satisfaction. The more successful companies at delivering an excellent customer experience are those who also understand what satisfies and motivates employees. And they are companies that typically reward employees for exceptional contributions to customer experiences.

Case study: Safelite AutoGlass has a “Wall of Fame” displaying employees. Up to 75 employees (typically spanning numerous roles across the company) are recognized annually at Safelite, all of whom were nominated by their leader or peers. Such displays of employee accomplishments towards the shared goal of delivering exceptional customer experiences ensure that customer centricity is always a focus across the whole company.

2. Fulfilment: Understanding and delivering on customer needs

Understanding and delivering on customer needs is vital to customer loyalty, but is easier said than done. Customer demands are frequently diverse and increasingly demanding – more customized, cost effective, quicker, etc. In spite of this, up to half of b2b suppliers believe that quality and price are all that matter. This oversimplification is perpetuated by sales teams driven by short-term sales targets and obsessed with selling on price (as opposed to on value). Sales teams are often poor listeners fixated on selling products and services they have to sell, which can be very different from what the customer really wants and values.

The requirements of customers transcend functional needs like quality and value for money. Customers are individuals and have emotions and attitudes. It is therefore important that companies not only understand their customers’ needs and behaviors, but display empathy, especially when customers report issues. This is where segmentation can help.

Case study: A UK mortgage company trains its representatives to identify and allocate a customer into one of its personality segments. This enables the rep to quickly determine whether they are interacting with a “controller,” a “thinker,” a “feeler,” or an “entertainer,” and to tailor their responses accordingly. The segmentation strategy improved the customer experience and decreased costs by reducing repeat calls by an impressive 40%.

Successful fulfilment also requires an understanding of unmet needs and what keeps customers awake at night. This enables suppliers to differentiate their offering and in some cases, exceed customer expectations. For example, an insurer serving livestock farmers challenged by climate change developed a digital solution specifically tailored to farmers’ needs. This offering provides time-stretched farmers with valuable information such as historical and predicted weather data, in addition to the ability to buy policies online at times when the farmers aren’t occupied by their job (such as late evenings).

B2b audiences increasingly value suppliers that help them differentiate and better serve their customers. Innovation and partnership are key to delivering against the needs of customers’ customers, but these requirements are often insufficiently met. Most b2b companies have a parochial view of the customer being the direct consumer of their product or service, and so the best-in-class b2b companies are those who understand the full value chain and positively impact their customers’ customers.

3. Seamlessness: Making life easier for the customer

Across virtually all b2b markets, a top driver of overall loyalty is ease of doing business with the supplier. Regardless of whom the customer is buying from – be it a manufacturing company, a reseller, a SaaS provider, a consultant – seamlessness is central to a smooth customer experience. In most cases, seamlessness is synonymous with simple, convenient and hassle-free.

Case study: HP identified a gap in the market for a more seamless ink replenishment solution and launched its Instant Ink offering. This consumables replacement service automatically delivers ink to the customer just before the ink cartridge runs out. It also provides attractive cost savings of up to 70% through the subscription program with its high yield cartridges. The subscription model makes the customer experience simple, the delivery to the door makes it convenient, and the proactive automatic replenishment makes it hassle-free.

Customer surveys often assess the amount of effort the customer has to put into the relationship with the provider through the Customer Effort Score. Feedback on poor performance on this metric indicates how improvements to seamlessness can be made. By way of example, customers resent providers that consume more time than they deem necessary as their time is precious and bears a cost. Complaints on this issue include time spent on hold on a phone call, wasted time repeating the same information, and lost time in having to deal with incompetent systems, people and processes. It is clear that reducing customer effort is pivotal to delivering a more seamless and therefore more superior customer experience.

4. Responsiveness: Timely response, delivery and resolution

As consumers in the digital era, we are accustomed to intelligence at our fingertips and receiving answers in a matter of seconds. Business professionals are also consumers and have the same expectations in the workplace. Timely response, speedy delivery and fast problem resolution have become the standard. Companies that excel on providing responsiveness that is quicker than competitors and in a timeframe that exceeds customer expectations are likely to deliver a superior and memorable customer experience. For example, financial-technology start-up Kabbage requires just 7 minutes to approve a small-business loan – nearly 5,000 times faster than the 20 days it takes a typical bank.

Responsiveness spans numerous touchpoints across the customer journey including communications, deliveries and issue resolution. Failing on this important requirement can increase customer defection.

B2b customer experience research programs can assist companies in becoming more responsive, not just in identifying where improvements need to be made, but also by providing a platform through which remedial actions can be taken shortly after a problem has occurred. For example, real time detractor alerts enable problem resolution to be taken quickly.

5. Proactivity: Resolving issues before the customer feels the pain

Proactive companies are those capable of anticipating customer needs and desires and that strive to resolve issues before the customer feels pain. It is easier for companies to be proactive if they are good at fulfilling customer needs and can foresee potential customer needs and pain points – such as in the case of Amazon Dash and HP Instant Ink which prevent the problem of “running out” before it happens, while making life easier for the customer.

Proactivity needn’t require new product or service offerings. For example, the lighting company Osram Sylvania identified that a simple change in language could make a big difference to the customer. Words like “can’t,” “won’t,” and “don’t” naturally invoke feelings of disappointment and dissatisfaction as they imply an inability to deliver against customer needs. The company therefore trained its reps on alternative phrasing with a positive spin, such as indicating when an item would be in stock, as opposed to the disappointing alternative of stating that the item is currently unavailable. Examining root cause can provide insights on where proactive measures need taking:

Case study: Bell Canada recognized that a high percentage of customers were calling back requesting usage instructions relating to a particular feature. As a forward resolution to the issue, reps now provide a quick tutorial on the feature over the phone, resulting in fewer call-backs and a drop in customer churn by 6%. For more complex issues, the company sends follow-up e-mails which are easier than lengthy instructions via telephone. This proactive approach means less effort for the customer and a more seamless and hassle-free customer journey.

Fidelity uses a similar proactive support process on its website by providing “suggested next steps” to customers completing certain transactions. For instance, customers who change their address online are also asked about their interest in ordering new checks and taking out new insurance. Such proactive measures have resulted in a reduction of customer calls by 5%.

6. Evolution: Continually seeking to improve the b2b customer experience

Customer needs, behaviors and attitudes can change any time, as can competitive threats and influences such as technology and legislation. Thus companies that already perform well on delivering an excellent customer experience cannot be complacent. The totally customer centric firm acknowledges that improvements must be made on an ongoing basis.

The more receptive companies to evolution are those that are agile and open to applying design thinking to the customer experience. This entails reinventing how customers interact with the company to reengineer and transform the customer journey.

Case study: The Netherlands-based bank ING created a solution for its retail and corporate clients that enables them to access real-time account overviews and customized reporting, along with the ability to process various transactions from any location. This required the bank to conduct a major overhaul of its systems and processes involving omnichannel automatic integration of customer data. After just one year, ING had grown profits by 23% and increased its share price by 15%.

So what does this all mean?

Business-to-business audiences look for solutions to problems, or offerings that better meet their needs, such as more customized products, better integrated systems, increased responsiveness, lower cost-in-use, or higher productivity. Influenced by the consumer world, many b2b audiences are also seeking an improved experience in using a b2b product or service – a customer journey that is seamless, more convenient, and hassle-free. Savvy b2b suppliers sell an experience and outcomes, not products. We operate in an experience economy where brands embody more meaning through experience.

Customer surveys and loyalty research tends to assess company performance in silos. B2B customer experience research, however, assesses the whole customer journey in terms of interconnected touchpoints, and current and anticipated pain points. Even in value chains with numerous channel partners and routes to market, it is possible to identify opportunities for enhancing the customer experience, such as in the case of HP with its Instant Ink offering.

Customer journeys are more complex than ever before as the average b2b customer uses six different channels (such as in-person reps and ecommerce sites) over the course of their decision-making journey. This can make it challenging to deliver a seamless experience, yet b2b buyers who interact with multiple channels spend more than those who only purchase from a single channel. The more profitable customer experiences, therefore, are those that comprise omnichannel marketing and sales strategies. They are also typically delivered by companies that are more agile.

Customer experience excellence recognizes that the customer isn’t a mere transaction. In b2b markets, the customer often comprises numerous decision-makers and influencers within the same company, often with different needs. The more sophisticated suppliers know how to sell on value to these different audiences. They also understand the broader impact of their offering in terms of the benefit to their customers’ customers.

The foundation of b2b customer experience excellence is a commitment to putting the customer at the core of what the company does, how it does it, and ultimately why it does it. Less than a half of b2b firms are enthusiastic about satisfying customers and making them feel valued, and without a commitment to delighting customers, it is impossible to deliver an excellent customer experience. The starting point, therefore, is to obtain board-level buy-in on ingraining customer centricity into the fabric of the company. Although cultural alignment doesn’t happen overnight and customer experience management needs to continually evolve, the financial returns of customer experience excellence can be immediate and deliver a sustainable competitive advantage.

Written by Julia Doheny

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