Companies are people too

Editor's note: Based in London, Claire Sporton is senior vice president, customer experience innovation, at research firm Confirmit.

As we hit 2019, you can hardly move for people stating that the customer experience is the last true battleground for consumer markets. Expectations are sky-high, fueled by companies like Amazon that deliver levels of personalization, self-service and ease-of-use that sometimes seem to border on witchcraft. Get it wrong and you’re in trouble, it’s as simple as that.

But that’s consumer markets. Surely it’s not the same for business-to-business companies?

Actually, it is. Or at least, it’s not far off.

For organizations operating in a B2B environment, the customer experience is a critical consideration too, a fact that’s become clearer and clearer over the past five years or so. As in the business-to-consumer world, it is often the last true battleground for competitive differentiation and client retention. But with fewer customers and dramatically larger deal sizes, the stakes are higher. There is also a much more complex relationship to consider. Rather than one individual making a purchase from another individual, there are most likely teams of several stakeholders on each side, each of whom has different expectations, different organizational levels and segmented experiences at varying touchpoints.

That said, is building a customer experience program in a B2B environment fundamentally different from that task within a B2C organization? The short answer is no. The longer answer is: no, but there are some areas where you will need a different approach.

Precious clients

It can be tempting to launch into a new program and start capturing customer feedback without thinking clearly about key issues such as how you’ll use data, how you’ll share data and what the actual experience of being approached for feedback will be like for your clients. This is unwise in any situation but especially so in a B2B world where you are dealing with fewer, more precious clients with long-term relationships with your organization. Your client base may be “semi-captive,” in fact, if your market segment is fairly specialized. How do you keep that relationship growing?

It’s important to take a step back and take a measured approach to building a program that will put you in good stead in the long run, not just for a few months until the novelty wears off with your executives!

There are several key stages to building a B2B CX strategy. Of course, within each of these stages, there’s a lot to think about, but here’s what I think provides a good starting to point to help guide plans:

Define your program’s direction: First take stock of your current state of CX maturity. Do you have customer journey maps that are segmented by customer and end-user types to accurately pinpoint moments that matter most to the business? Then, how have you used these maps to anchor your VoC or customer insights program? Have you designed the program to contribute critical data points linked to your company’s business outcomes?

Deliver an action-oriented insights program: Has your insights program been designed for maximum impact? Are your listening posts delivering the quantitative or qualitative information you need on customer behaviors and emotions? What about other operational data – are you pulling that into the system and integrating it? Most of all, are you providing information that those outside the CX or insights teams can understand and act upon?

Drive results: You may not own the actions that are needed to change your customers’ actual experiences with your brand but are you driving the organization toward the answers? Are you the catalyst, the champion and the leader of your company’s CX maturity? Do you fully understand the connection between the insights you deliver and the results your organization is striving for?

B2B customer experience can be challenging for many reasons. There are few universal metrics that apply to B2B’s specific market segments, thus benchmarking tends to be most effective against your own internal measures vs. categories too broad for comparison. It’s also difficult to gain CX alignment across multiple segments with very different client bases, yet we see progress being made here with our client base.

As a CX practitioner in B2B and B2C, I know the challenges are real. But the answer lies in driving action in the most effective ways you can, often earning the right to more budget once you have proven ROI models. So, know your weak spots to improve and leverage your strengths – jump in strategically and make it your goal to sponsor and deliver actions that are meaningful to both the company and your customers.

Multiple contacts

People buy from people. What does this mean for the people “on the ground” – the account managers who need the right insight about these multifaceted client relationships in order to succeed? For a start, there is no such thing as a straightforward client relationship. Not only are there multiple contacts within a client account to consider – users, influencers, decision-makers and more – but the story is much the same on the vendor’s side too. The main point of contact may be an account manager but there are also operational teams, support and service representatives, supporting sales personnel and more. For those of us who work with global clients, the situation gets even more complex, with multiple account managers looking after the relationship in different countries. This “many-to-many” relationship means that a clear view of the overall health of an account is not easily grasped.

But this can also be an advantage: people buy from people and the front line of your business is bigger. You have more people who have access to the nuanced interactions with your clients and, more importantly, those people have insight and opinions about the prospects for that account. While account directors may have the ultimate responsibility of retaining and growing clients, it’s important to remember that the rest of the team will have great insights into the quality of the relationship.

This means that business must incorporate the voice of the employee alongside the voice of the customer by deploying health-check surveys. These should be made available to all frontline employees who have something to say.

An important element to remember here is that the feedback they provide does not have to be based in metrics or hard facts. Often, a hunch or a gut feel is a vital first sign that all is not well in an account, so allow employees to share that sense through your survey. One person feeling that things are not quite right may be nothing to worry about but if your discover that several people have a similar feeling you have the ability to create an early warning system that the account manager can use to take action.

Drive action

Listening is only the first step, whether you’re listening to clients or to team members. The purpose of all that listening is to drive action. To make the right decisions, prioritize effectively and minimize risk.

For the CX practitioner, the focus must be on enabling that action, putting the right tools in the hands of the account managers and helping to build an environment where customer and employee feedback are at the heart of decision-making processes.

Actions come in two forms: tactical and strategic. Tactical actions can be set in motion as an immediate response to a contact’s feedback or a changing situation and enable account managers to manage the short-term health of an account to keep things ticking over. Strategic actions are driven by a longer-term view and will probably impact multiple accounts. This makes them critical but often not entirely within the control of individual account managers and so may require wider support.

Great opportunity

When looking at the short-term steps that companies can take, remember this it isn’t all firefighting and troubleshooting. When clients are happy, this is a great opportunity to cross-sell, secure recommendations into other areas of their business or even recruit them into an advocate program. It’s also a good opportunity to engage and recognize the wider teams who are responsible for keeping clients happy, helping to embed a client-centric ethos into the business.

In most cases, account managers will be accountable for coordinating specific actions in response to their clients’ feedback but they will have to engage with the different functions to resolve the challenges raised. Ultimately, it’s about making many small changes within an account as a result of listening to the right people at the right time. This sounds simple enough but when an account manager has a dozen or so accounts, each of which have five or more contacts, then keeping on top of what needs to be done is a challenge. E-mail alerts that flag low scores or negative comments are great but there’s a danger of getting buried and either not focusing on the right thing or failing to act at all.

Live dashboards that provide insight into the overall health of an account manager’s portfolio can be set up to show all the cases requiring action in a single environment. It may be the same number of cases as with individual e-mails but it’s a lot more manageable. Equally important is the ability to track what action was actually taken – something that can be easily be forgotten in a flurry of activity but which is critical to understanding which actions are effective and which are not.

Clear understanding

For account managers, long-term success means a clear understanding of their entire portfolio and its performance now. This requires a holistic view that takes into account all their clients, as well as a clear indication of the health of individual relationships.

This is where bringing together data from multiple sources around the business is vital. Metrics such as Net Promoter Score or customer effort are great but this needs to be viewed through the lens of revenue. More specifically, at-risk revenue. Bringing in financial data to a portfolio-reporting dashboard enables account managers to identify the most critical issues effectively and reduces the chance of a squeaky wheel receiving more focus than business value would justify.

A high-level view like this also makes it easier to identify what the underlying causes of problems are and can help tie a revenue figure to the risk of not dealing with a particular problem. This is vital in situations where implementing a resolution to that problem is above the pay grade of an account manager and will need involvement from people at a more senior level.

Fundamentally, people buy from people and it is the role of a good CX team to give account managers in B2B enterprises the tools they need to work effectively to meet the needs of their clients in the short and long term. Simply firing out alert e-mails to say a particular contact at a client is unhappy is not enough. Context is vital and can make a huge difference in achieving buy-in from potentially cynical sales teams who feel they have enough to handle already.