B2B Customer Experience: Do This, Not That

Lynn Hunsaker

 

Is business-to-business customer experience management (B2B CXM) a watered-down or a souped-up version of consumer experience management? Does the answer differ when the business you’re selling to is a manufacturer versus a professional services company? Or when your company provides specialized industrial goods, ingredients or components for customers’ products, enterprise software versus desktop software, or business services? All these questions are worth exploring. They’re important questions because customer scenarios differ in each case. Ideally, how you manage customer experience custom-fits your customers’ needs, preferences, and circumstances.

This series of monthly B2B CX articles explores the nuances of business customer experience. The questions above will be addressed in future installments.

Universal to most B2B CXM scenarios is the existence of a “village” of people who influence B2B buying decisions. This single fact means a lot. If the purpose of customer surveys is to accurately monitor customers’ likelihood of rebuying, then you must gain an understanding of each influencer’s expectations and sentiment.

A logical follow-up to this is the need to integrate the viewpoints of the “village” to paint a realistic picture. In consumer situations, there are usually only a couple of viewpoints to integrate for any purchase: husband and wife, parent and child. But for B2B situations, you may be grappling with integrating the views of the user, purchasing agent, plant manager, and gatekeepers for IT, safety, facilities, and quality, among others.

And another commonality among many B2B relationships is extensive post-purchase interaction. This may be related to a complicated deployment such as enterprise software, or peer-to-peer, such as engineers from the supplier and customer companies meeting to work out usage details, or a customer appointee who interfaces with multiple locations of the supplier company in a single morning.

Here are 3 keys to getting B2B customer experience management right: capture the whole buying decision equation, integrate influencers’ inputs to paint an accurate picture, and ensure post-purchase customer experience consistency.

1) Capture the Whole Buying Decision Equation: Why try to tie CX to financials without fully understanding who’s driving what?

DO THIS: Identify all parties within a customer account with the power to kill a buying decision. Characterize each party’s expectations and design your customer-listening portfolio to keep a radar on their sentiment. Quantify the consequences of meeting or missing each party’s expectations.

From the ClearActionBusiness-to-Business Customer Experience Management Benchmarking Study

NOT THAT: Assuming that whoever signs the contract or transacts with your service organization is a spokesperson for their company, or that a series of transactions represents the customer experience that can be reasonably tied to bookings.

2) Integrate Influencers’ Inputs to Paint an Accurate Picture: Simplification of the complex picture is essential for tackling the issues and formulating better strategies to capitalize on opportunities.

DO THIS: Weight and nest the parties’ inputs for more realistic linkages to bookings. Make your customer intelligence reporting compelling: consider show the parties’ interests through flow-charting, cause-and-effect diagramming, activity network diagramming, or interrelationship diagraphs. Make sure action plans reflect inputs from all influencers.

From the ClearActionBusiness-to-Business Customer Experience Management Benchmarking Study

NOT THAT: Assuming that averages and bar charts convey what’s needed to be actionable and effective. Don’t ignore the opportunity to get valuable insights from your dedicated sales team. And don’t let the account teams obscure insights that can help the rest of the company help them.

3) Ensure Post-purchase Customer Experience Consistency: Why work so hard to manage perceptions but ignore these vital touchpoints?

DO THIS: Make it easy to capture informal comments. Then stream informal feedback to relevant groups throughout your company. Establish cadence & methodology for originators to prevent issue recurrence. Motivate actions and follow-through on informal inputs. Set the stage for streamlined re-purchase decisions: share actions and progress to proactively influence rebuying.

From the ClearActionBusiness-to-Business Customer Experience Management BenchmarkingStudy

NOT THAT: Assuming that inconsistencies will naturally work themselves out, or aren’t important to building trust and relationship strength. Waiting to send a survey when you’re already getting a goldmine of insights that you can work on right away to be more proactive in influencing repurchase decisions.

B2B CXM has parallels with consumer experience management, but there are definite realities in B2B CXM that should be addressed in order to make the most of your efforts and investments. Experiment with these 3 B2B “musts”, or better yet, design them into your B2B customer experience management from the beginning. As the graphics above show, you’re likely to stand out from the crowd in your industry in doing so, and these methods may be an important customer experience differentiator for your company.

Note: The concept of "Do This, Not That" is borrowed from the popular book "Eat This, Not That", where the weaknesses of common practices and myths are brought to light and sensible replacements are recommended.

Other articles in this series:

• Business-to-Business Customer Experience: What’s It Like?
• Understanding Business-to-Business Purchase Decisions
• B2B Voice of the Customer: Integrating Decision Influencers’ Views
• Customer Experience ROI Opportunities in B2B Touchpoints
• State of Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management

Voice of the Customer: Do This, Not That

Voice-of-the-customer (VoC) is often the start and focus of customer experience management, as well it should be in several respects. It’s about paying attention to “the hand that feeds you”. But stop to think about the customer experience return on investment (CX ROI) implications of this emphasis:

1. 1. By starting your customer experience management (CXM) with VoC, you’re probably side-stepping the all-important foundation of CX strategy and customer-centered culture. Ask any VoC manager what their biggest concern is after a few years of conducting surveys and most will tell you that gaps in strategy and culture plague their progress.
   2. By focusing CXM on VoC you’re likely to be so busy updating/selecting samples, driving response rates, poring over data, and packaging graphs and presentations that most of the other internal engagement efforts needed to fix broken things get short shrift. Ask any customer who’s participated in surveys what their biggest concern is, and most will tell you they feel like not much changes for the good after they generously share feedback.

These weaknesses in VoC are evidenced in Temkin Group’s 2013 State of VoC Programs study:

1. 1. • 7% of companies are VoC novices, in the very early stages of VoC development.
      • 37% are VoC collectors, focusing on listening post selection, which questions to ask, and which metrics to use.
      • 37% are VoC analyzers, spending the majority of their time finding insights from VoC data.
      • 16% are VoC collaborators, tailoring customer feedback to stakeholders who are engaged in continuous improvement.
      • 4% are VoC transformers, linking customer insights to operational data and processes, as well as strategic planning throughout the company.

With statistics like that, it’s no wonder that executives are frustrated about CX ROI. How many other business efforts are allowed to stay in the non-transformation phase year-in and year-out? VoC is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end.

Here are 3 keys to getting it right: respect existing customer feedback, understand the whole customer experience, and align VoC to customers’ preferences.

1) Respect Existing Customer Feedback: Remember the purpose of CXM is to build strong relationships that yield better results for the company and for customers.

DO THIS: Collect customer comments from your front-line employees, CRM, service call and sales call reports, complaint logs, social and other sources. Historically, comments were unwieldy, but now we have technologies that help consolidate, sort, prioritize, and deliver relevancy. Like any human-to-human relationship, let’s respect what customers have already told us before asking them to say it again.

NOT THAT: Surveys are often “jumped into” because “everybody’s doing it”. If you want to stand out from your competitors, think carefully about what’s best for your customers and for your unique culture. Scores and indexes are typically over-emphasized to the exclusion of reading, studying, and acting on customers’ comments. Is that what you’d do in any other type of relationship in your life or business?

2) Understand the Whole Customer Experience: The whole experience is whatever the customer defines it as — and typically has an earlier starting point, a later ending point, and more behind-the-scenes efforts by customers than managers tend to define it.

DO THIS: Allow customers to give you feedback about their experience, and their world. Make sure you’re understanding their challenges and journey before any touch-point occurs, as well as post-purchase, and behind-the-scenes among their decision-makers. What does your product/service get combined with in the customers’ use, and what implications does that have for customers? These are essential sources for performance improvement and innovation ideas, if you’re aiming to differentiate customer experience and improve business results.

NOT THAT: Resist the temptation to copy someone else’s survey questions, design surveys as a means to determine departments’ bonuses, or enable your survey to support your planned public relations and marketing claims. What a waste of everyone’s time and investment. Don’t confuse your world with the customer’s world. When you ask customers to rate you, that’s not necessarily indicative of how well their needs were met. And when they answer in terms of their world, you not only gain context that illuminates their expectations, you also increase the likelihood of higher response rates. Everyone likes to talk about themselves. Let them.

3) Align VoC to Customers’ Preferences: Allow customers to provide you feedback when, where, how, and on what they prefer. After all, VoC is intended to improve — not detract from — customer experience.

DO THIS: Find out what feels most comfortable for customers, and what draws them out to gladly share their world with you. Build-in some flexibility to adapt your methodology over time. Or be willing to abandon non-customer-friendly methods when you discover what works best for customers’ experience. Only ask for more feedback as quickly as you can act on what you already have, or when things may have changed. Enable customers to volunteer feedback anytime, any place, and put processes in place to capture it and channel it to departments in your company (or your external partners) with emphasis on acting on it.

NOT THAT: Resist the inclination to stick with a methodology purely for internal reasons. While ratings continuity is desirable, what’s the point when the very thing you’re aiming to improve is hindered in the VoC process? New technologies make it easier now to customize questions, allow substantial comments, and translate customers’ world context to actionable information in your world. Get out of the old-school rut of stock-piling or vaporizing customer feedback in your CRM, contact center, and other sources; the originators of those problems, wherever they may be, need to receive that customer feedback and be held accountable to prevent recurrence.

A sensible approach to voice-of-the-customer is what’s needed for sustained customer experience business results. Make VoC the central focus for CXM — and for everything the company does! To do this, make sure your CXM resourcing enables facilitation of strategy, culture, employee engagement in continuous improvement, and everything else that’s needed to respond to and build upon inputs from “the hand that feeds you”. For long-lasting customer experience ROI, respect existing customer feedback, understand the whole customer experience, and align VoC with customers’ preferences.

Notes:

1. “VoC, Customer Insight & Understanding” is one of the six domains in the body of knowledgeadvocated by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA).
2. The concept of “Do This, Not That” is borrowed from the popular book “Eat This, Not That“, where the weaknesses of common practices and myths are brought to light and sensible replacements are recommended.
3. Other articles in this series:
   • Customer Experience Strategy: Do This, Not That
   • Customer-Centered Culture: Do This, Not That
   • Customer Journey Maps: Do This, Not That

Effective Listening to Voice of Customer (VoC)

Once you have established that customer service is paramount to successfully running your service business, the obvious next step is to devise systems and procedures that can help you effectively learn, combat and manage customer grievances and any shortfalls in service levels from customer expectations.

This is a complex process, though not overly so, and can be succinctly summarised in the following points:

Being concerned

The very first step is to view each customer as a potential detractor, and thus being concerned about any untoward reviews from them. Studies have shown that a single negative review can offset 12 positive reviews. This puts an ever greater pressure on management and support staff to be actively involved with each and every customer, so that no customer leaves disgruntled. The caveat here is that being concerned alone won’t solve the problem, unless supplemented with the following actions.

Installing effective feedback tools

An effective listening to voice of customers would work only when effective tools to collect feedback are in place. While the definition of ‘efficiency’ in the context of feedback collection tools may be subjective, there are three things that any feedback collection mechanism must provide for it to be deemed worthy of consideration:

• Ability to capture vast amount of data – Only an innovative and unconventional feedback collection method will excite customers to leave their feedback.
• Ability to manage all collected data – A massive amount of data is meaningless if not stored in a format conducive to drawing business insights and trends of customer behaviour.

Ability to allow immediate addressal of customer grievances

As important as it is to store and record trends of customer behaviour, it is equally essential to solve service-related issues that customers may have, while they are still on-premises as this can eliminate the possibility of a customer venting their dissatisfaction online. A study has gone so far as to report that 82% of customers say that the most important factor leading to a great customer experience is having their issues resolved quickly.

Given that a manager’s focus is on effectively listening to his customers, a logical conclusion would be the installation of a strong and reliable feedback collection procedure.

Understanding your customers and their complaints

This is basically a continuation of the definition of an effective feedback collection system, but merits a separate mention. Immediate addressal of customer complaints becomes feasible only with a thorough knowledge of what the exact issue is and where the grievance has arisen from. Gaps in service quality can be plugged in only with an in-depth understanding of why and how the lapse in service occurred in the first place. Complete data capturing of customers can help in a more robust loyalty module allowing personalized service to regular patrons.

This points to the development of a process that naturally tends towards a “systematic listening” and address of customer grievances.

Empowering customer-concerned employees

With the installation of a sound feedback collection system, comes the added responsibility of delegating responsibilities appropriately to the front-line, customer facing staff members. Doing so will ensure that all customer grievances are handled in a timely and accurate fashion.

An effective feedback collection tool, should, therefore, provide a means for assigning tasks to staff members, particularly the customer-centric staff. It would be even better if this mechanism could work in real-time, thereby resolving customer complaints quickly and ensuring cent per cent customer satisfaction.

Overall monitoring of customer’s behaviour

With on-premise resolution of customer grievances taken care of, the real value of a customer feedback system can be extracted from its ability to track trends in customer satisfaction and behaviour over time.

Customers rate a business over several parameters – pricing, service quality, attitude of staff while interacting with customers to name a few. Their overall satisfaction of interacting with the business will then, not be limited to just the quality of service provided but will depend on a delicate balance of these parameters, based on what weight they assign to each of them. An important thing to note is that these preferences may change over time and vary across customer segments. In an effort to keep all customers equally satisfied over time, these changes must be carefully measured and appropriate actions taken.

An effective feedback system will allow business managers to understand their customers changing preferences and make business decisions in accordance with those changes. This will truly include the customer’s voice in implementing business strategies.

Getting involved personally

Last but certainly not the least, nothing makes a customer’s day more than the pleasure of having his issue resolved instantly, and that too with the knowledge that their servers took a “personal” interest in their service. Establishing a personal connection with customers is becoming a vitally important aspect of service-oriented businesses.

Therefore, merely assigning customer complaints to staff members may no longer help the business acquire and retain customers, but taking a “personal” interest in the resolution of their customer’s issues will. Since this personal connection will help the customers achieve a sense of belongingness with the business and there will then be a higher likelihood of them returning again and again.

An effective methodology to listen to customer’s voice, then, remains incomplete without a mechanism to getting involved personally with the customers.

Managing a business that does not sell tangible goods but intangible service can be tricky, but a task that can be accomplished if the basics are done right – listen to what the customers are saying, respond effectively and analyse their feedback to make sure things don’t go wrong again.

https://goo.gl/MyMyje

3 Ways Customer Listening Powers Marketing Effectiveness

Ernan Roman

Today customers can make sure that their voice is heard like never before. And, if marketers don’t have measures in place to listen, they are turning a deaf ear to potentially significant problems and missing out on essential insights for improving their customer experience.

Following are 3 ways to leverage customer listening and examples of how companies are putting these strategies into action.

1. Realize that Customer Listening (and Responding) is a 360-Degree Commitment.

Engagement with customers includes business partners who are also the face of your brand. So, how every aspect of your brand listens to the voice of your customer and responds is key.

For example, NASCAR made the decision to revamp its marketing and listening in five key areas. But that’s not where it ended. NASCAR also encouraged its business partners and drivers to do the same.

“We developed an industry action plan,” stated Steve Phelps NASCAR CMO, “… A plan for digital and social, a plan for driver star power–and within each plan, [we came up with] a number of different action items … [In an] effort to be thought leaders who provide the best available experience to our fans. We strongly encourage those across the entire landscape of the sport to embrace digital and social media — from drivers and teams to tracks and corporate partners.”

2. Customers are More Than Numbers, They are People, Talk to Them … (And listen.) 
Data gives you a good view of what customers are doing. However, it is not going to tell you why or give you theemotional factors like a conversation. Personal interactions can be more valuable than all the big data you will ever collect. 

Starting in October, Flow and Columbus Business Solutions, a telecommunications company serving the Caribbean, asked customers to tell them how they felt. Michele English, Columbus’ executive vice president and chief customer officer noted, “Our plan is to significantly enhance our customer ‘listening’ systems and ensure that feedback is integrated into our daily decisions and connected to our customers’ experiences across the organization… we have to design and implement [operational processes] to ensure that every customer touch point in the organization can support our customers’ needs efficiently and effectively… We now look forward to more customer feedback. “ 

The Company designed an easy to use online customer survey and sent communications to customers to encourage them to complete the survey and tell the company what matters. 

3. Make Conversation (and Listening) Easy with Social Communities 
Online communities enable the exchange of ideas in discussion forums, polls and social media. They provide brand information, mitigate problems and provide opportunities for a collaborative two-way conversation.

Southwest Airlines launched a Listening Center to monitor its online communities using a keyword-based listening tool that pulls in mentions from social platforms. The Listening Center monitors insights in real time to quickly identify issues and immediate engagement opportunities. Customers can connect their Twitter handles to their Rapid Rewards frequent flier numbers to get personalized services. Southwest Airlines also leverages the Listening Centers to send apology letters for delays, find new opportunities for engagement and implement company-wide customer care. 

Alice Wilson, social business advisor for Southwest’s marketing organization notes that sharing the information collected is the key to listening success. “The customer feedback means something different to each [department] and can inform each group in a different way…From a social care standpoint, [employees] want to help assist and resolve. But somebody from the marketing team may be looking at that [data and ask], how do we alter communications to help these future situations?…The point is not to keep it as a silo.”

Keys to Effectively Listening to the Voice of Your Customer:

• Listening should be at the heart of your marketing strategy.
  Listening lets you understand the “why” of what your customers are doing and experiencing so that operational issues, communication, and experience can be overhauled for a more positive overall brand impression.
• Learnings from Listening Needs to be Shared with Every Part of your Business.
  Having data without acting on the implications does nothing for your business. Set standards for how the insights from your listening programs are regularly integrated and shared with all departments so that changes and actions are put in motion to respond to customer needs and comments.
• Meaningful Dialogue Based on Listening.
  Develop authentic, honest and direct conversations based on listening, which lead to meaningful connections and two-way dialogue.
• Use Listening to Develop Strategies.
  Once you launch programs to listen, develop means for incorporating these learnings into new strategies that address the issues identified in customer conversations. Put in motion ongoing review of the data collected through listening programs so that you have a clear roadmap that delineates what customers are expecting, their pain points and their current/future demands.
• Listening Objectives Must be Established.
  If you don’t know how you are going to listen, you will not be able to hear what your customers are trying to tell you. Whether you have the means to set up a full scale listening center, a social monitoring program, a survey, or a call center monitoring program, know what you are implementing and how you will regularly harvest and utilize the insights.

In summary, customers have a lot to say and they want you to listen. The good news is that customers generally have valid concerns and smart advice to offer. Marketers and customers will both benefit if the marketer creates multichannel ways of listening to customers and processes for acting quickly on their input.

3 Ways Customer Listening Powers Marketing Effectiveness

Today customers can make sure that their voice is heard like never before. And, if marketers don’t have measures in place to listen, they are turning a deaf ear to potentially significant problems and missing out on essential insights for improving their customer experience.

Following are 3 ways to leverage customer listening and examples of how companies are putting these strategies into action.

1. Realize that Customer Listening (and Responding) is a 360-Degree Commitment.

Engagement with customers includes business partners who are also the face of your brand. So, how every aspect of your brand listens to the voice of your customer and responds is key.

For example, NASCAR made the decision to revamp its marketing and listening in five key areas. But that’s not where it ended. NASCAR also encouraged its business partners and drivers to do the same.

“We developed an industry action plan,” stated Steve Phelps NASCAR CMO, “… A plan for digital and social, a plan for driver star power–and within each plan, [we came up with] a number of different action items … [In an] effort to be thought leaders who provide the best available experience to our fans. We strongly encourage those across the entire landscape of the sport to embrace digital and social media — from drivers and teams to tracks and corporate partners.”

With new technologies NASCAR is boasting 6,000 tweets a minute, 565,000 posts per day and one million posts per event.

2. Customers are More Than Numbers, They are People, Talk to Them … (And listen.) 
Data gives you a good view of what customers are doing. However, it is not going to tell you why or give you the emotional factors like a conversation. Personal interactions can be more valuable than all the big data you will ever collect. 

Starting in October, Flow and Columbus Business Solutions, a telecommunications company serving the Caribbean, asked customers to tell them how they felt. Michele English, Columbus’ executive vice president and chief customer officer noted, “Our plan is to significantly enhance our customer ‘listening’ systems and ensure that feedback is integrated into our daily decisions and connected to our customers’ experiences across the organization… we have to design and implement [operational processes] to ensure that every customer touch point in the organization can support our customers’ needs efficiently and effectively… We now look forward to more customer feedback. “

The Company designed an easy to use online customer survey and sent communications to customers to encourage them to complete the survey and tell the company what matters. 

3. Make Conversation (and Listening) Easy with Social Communities Online communities enable the exchange of ideas in discussion forums, polls and social media. They provide brand information, mitigate problems and provide opportunities for a collaborative two-way conversation.

Southwest Airlines launched a Listening Center to monitor its online communities using a keyword-based listening tool that pulls in mentions from social platforms. The Listening Center monitors insights in real time to quickly identify issues and immediate engagement opportunities. Customers can connect their Twitter handles to their Rapid Rewards frequent flier numbers to get personalized services. Southwest Airlines also leverages the Listening Centers to send apology letters for delays, find new opportunities for engagement and implement company-wide customer care.

Alice Wilson, social business advisor for Southwest’s marketing organization notes that sharing the information collected is the key to listening success. “The customer feedback means something different to each [department] and can inform each group in a different way…From a social care standpoint, [employees] want to help assist and resolve. But somebody from the marketing team may be looking at that [data and ask], how do we alter communications to help these future situations?…The point is not to keep it as a silo.”

Keys to Effectively Listening to the Voice of Your Customer:

• Listening should be at the heart of your marketing strategy.
  Listening lets you understand the “why” of what your customers are doing and experiencing so that operational issues, communication, and experience can be overhauled for a more positive overall brand impression.
• Learnings from Listening Needs to be Shared with Every Part of your Business.
  Having data without acting on the implications does nothing for your business. Set standards for how the insights from your listening programs are regularly integrated and shared with all departments so that changes and actions are put in motion to respond to customer needs and comments.
• Meaningful Dialogue Based on Listening.
  Develop authentic, honest and direct conversations based on listening, which lead to meaningful connections and two-way dialogue.
• Use Listening to Develop Strategies.
  Once you launch programs to listen, develop means for incorporating these learnings into new strategies that address the issues identified in customer conversations. Put in motion ongoing review of the data collected through listening programs so that you have a clear roadmap that delineates what customers are expecting, their pain points and their current/future demands.
• Listening Objectives Must be Established.
  If you don’t know how you are going to listen, you will not be able to hear what your customers are trying to tell you. Whether you have the means to set up a full scale listening center, a social monitoring program, a survey, or a call center monitoring program, know what you are implementing and how you will regularly harvest and utilize the insights.

In summary, customers have a lot to say and they want you to listen. The good news is that customers generally have valid concerns and smart advice to offer. Marketers and customers will both benefit if the marketer creates multichannel ways of listening to customers and processes for acting quickly on their input.\

Ernan Roman