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November 2000
7 Customer Experience Guidelines
- May 3rd, 2020
- B2Community
- 0 Comments
Every company wants to be more customer aligned. Happier customers buy more and more frequently. They also tend to share positive word of mouth with their peers and colleagues. When things get bumpy in the relationship, they’ll cut you more slack than new or disgruntled customers. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a team of consultants to figure out that profit margins and customer lifetime value (CLV) are higher with satisfied customers. Who wouldn’t want that? What holds many companies back from going all-in on customer experience is – how to get started. The volume of advice from technology vendors, practitioners, bloggers, and consultants can be overwhelming and confusing. The approaches touted as best practices often conflict and demonstrable, measurable success is circumstantial and hard to measure. Unable to determine how to get started and who can help them – a culture coach, six sigma process expert, qualitative researcher, a strategist, industry analyst, or a customer success consultant – companies often opt instead for a DIY (Do It Yourself) to control the pace of the change and learn along the way. They’ve decided to figure out customer alignment for themselves even if it means some trial and error and dead-ends. Why? Companies are looking for common sense in how they approach customer alignment. C-suite and leaders understand that becoming customer-aligned is a transformation that touches every corner and employee of the company. Lots of dust is going to get kicked up, just make sure it doesn’t choke the company to death in the process. Based on our nine years of client engagements, here are seven guidelines to help companies figure out how to get started with their customer experience initiatives:
1. Executive champion.
If not the CEO, that person should be in the C-Suite so they can help other leaders connect the dots between the effort and the ROI as well as run interference when change threatens a sacred cow or when the initiative runs into the inevitable bumps in the road or budget cuts.2. Solve a handful of key use cases.
Instead of trying to achieve the optimal customer experience out of the box, zero in on a handful of use cases that will move the needle for key customer segments. Let what matters to customers guide your focus, not how grandiose the initiative sounds or could be. Making incremental improvements that are important to customers goes a long way to improve customer loyalty and retention.3. Do the right thing for the customer.
Lots of customer experience approaches quickly become complicated and confusing with steps that don’t seem to relate to the use cases being solved. Determine what approach is right for you based on what customers said they want to experience. In other words, ask customers first, then act.4. Review your policies and procedures.
The root causes of customer dissatisfaction are usually internal policies and procedures designed to support hierarchical structures and perks with rank cultures. That doesn’t mean toss out sound governance, instead look at the correlation between policies, procedures, and customer feedback. Does your billing, contract negotiations, accounts receivables, return, etc. drive the bulk of complaints? Ask yourself the question, “Would my customer feel good about experiencing this policy or procedures?” If the answer is “no,” revisit how to maintain appropriate internal controls while making it easier to do business with you.5. Let the use case define what data to collect.
Companies have become obsessed with the amount of data they collect. Unfortunately, just because every piece of data can be analyzed doesn’t mean it should or that it will reveal meaningful information. Don’t let data become a novelty item. Instead, develop a hypothesis for each use case and analyze only the data needed to prove or disprove the theory. Have your domain experts review any analytics to make sure you’re interpreting the data correctly.6. Measure what you manage.
It’s tempting to report on an array of metrics, but that will take you down a rabbit hole. Pick a handful of KPIs that are relevant to the use cases you’re solving – is it churn, conversion, sentiment analysis? Make sure the KPIs are something the entire company understands and keep it simple. You can always evolve the KPIs as the company adjusts to new ways of engaging customers.7. Crawl, walk, then run.
Start small. As the company builds its understanding of customers and how they define experience, values, and engagement, then expand the scope of customer alignment initiative. The best measures of success are customer effort level and customer satisfaction. Share progress with employees; it’ll motivate them to stick with new behaviors. Focus on fixing the needle mover use cases to build internal and external credibility for the initiative. As employees see the results and that their jobs are more fun, and more rewarding, it’ll motivate them to be more open-minded about change and willing to tackle more complex customer experience use cases. Employees are crucial to taking customer experience to the next level. First published in B2CommunityDriving Faster B2B Purchases through Sales and Customer Alignment
- December 31st, 2017
- MarTech Advisor
- 0 Comments
The new customer
The way B2B buyers make purchasing decisions have transformed, but many sales staff continue to exhibit learned behaviors from a prior era. Sales once thrived from closing big deals, but now buyers make purchases incrementally. They chaperoned buyers through their purchase, but, according to Forrester, now 75 percent of the buy cycle is completed before sales is contacted. Sales feels their role is to persuade buyers to make a purchase, but the majority of buyers obtain evaluative information from nine or more independent sources before engaging with sales. These disconnects between buyer expectations and seller behaviors that are hard-coded into sales culture have crippled efficacy and efficiency. Only 50 percent of sales staff are hitting their quotas. Forrester has found that buyers don’t see value in their interactions with sales 97 percent of the time. To close deals faster and meet quotas more often, sales needs to be re-wired to meet the expectations of the modern buyer. They, and Marketing, need to systematically understand buyer expectations and use that information to align sales with those behaviors that buyers will see value in, which will help buyers make purchasing decisions faster, and increase close rates. Bridging the gaps

Customer Experience Is A Culture Problem
- May 10th, 2016
- Forbes Blog
- 0 Comments
Customer experience has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past four years. Beginning as a new software category promising to help companies delight, convert and retain customers to where it is today, a business discipline, focused on aligning culture, strategy and processes to audiences’ lifecycle expectations. The road has been a bumpy one. The software category matured, fragmented and is consolidating as vendors and users, alike, tried to achieve the promised ROI – revenue growth from customer loyalty. Companies ran into multiple roadblocks mostly from employee fear, resistance to change, lack of internal competences and mistaken belief that software could bypass change management. Vendors, on the other hand, introduced a steady stream of features at a cadence that outpaced the capabilities and understanding of the most sophisticated users. An impasse has been reached. Frustrated users are taking a step back to evaluate why delivering the experience customers valued was so hard. Robert Tas, chief marketing officer of Pegasystems, a strategic applications vendor for marketing, sales, service, and operations, summed up five key barriers as:
- Companies structured around products instead of customers,
- Treating digital experience as a ‘check the box’ and not understanding what it means,
- Line of business-centric funding model that doesn’t benefit anyone else,
- Disconnect between employee expectations with them being treated as consumers and how they ultimately treat customers , and
- Not closing customer feedback loops and being transparent.
- People – empower front-line employees to do what is right to meet customer expectations. Fanous takes a different approach to hiring customer success managers. He hires seasoned practitioners, storage and system administrators, that have scored high on empathy skills. These employees have the maturity and experience to make the right decisions and serve as advisors to customers that add value to every interaction.
- Engineering – is required to ‘man’ the customer support center and answer support calls. Having the employees who design the product address customer complaints, questions and concerns results in better designed products that can be produced with fewer defects. In short, they take more care in doing their job because they are directly accountable to customers.
- Automation – to remove complexity from the user interface of products. Fanous found that the ease of product use directly correlates to repeat purchases and higher NPS scores. Ease of use, however, cannot come at the expense of missing product features, value add or differentiation.
Journey Mapping the Customer Experience
- August 6th, 2015
- CMSWire
- 0 Comments
“‘We’re going to solve the customer experience problem’ is a hard sell to the C-suite,” said Miguel Quiroga, executive director of customer experience at Verizon. He went on to advise the audience at the Clarabridge C3 Conference on how to overcome that resistance. His advice? Identify which experiences matter the most in balancing customer satisfaction with profitability. Fix those experiences that are at the “root of the strongest customer pain points and are linked to the most profit.” Sound advice since the language of the C-suite is profit, revenue and growth. Despite all the rhetoric, the truth is the religion of the customer has not been embraced by the C-Suite as fervently as we’d all like to believe – despite Gartner’s claim that “89 percent of companies surveyed plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016.” Quiroga’s advice is to pick your battles: Prioritize the experiences to fix; be clear on how to measure improvement; set expectations internally and externally; then scale across the customer lifecycle and the organization. Keep in mind that the last experience the customer has defines his or her expectations going forward.
Understanding Customer Experience
Before you can actually fix any experience, you need to understand it. That's where most companies get stuck – not because the work is hard, but rather because there is a multitude of approaches without a clear consensus, and companies lack the requisite skills. The challenge with most approaches is twofold: They must provide a complete picture of the journey and they must invoke the viewpoint of the customer. Most approaches advocate focusing on a few customer touchpoints, which are often defined from a company’s “inside-out” perspective, not by customers. This approach does not result in significant, profit-impacting improvement because it lacks context. It’s like looking at a handful of puzzle pieces and guessing what the whole picture looks like. The objective of journey mapping is to reduce complexity and make all the aspects of the customers’ experience understandable and accessible to everyone in the organization. The best way to do journey mapping is to interview your customers face-to-face — qualitative research — and document, in detail, their entire experience through their eyes. Start with the trigger event that causes your customers to realize they have a problem or opportunity. Then map their decisions, actions and emotions all the way through purchase and implementation to the point of renewal or retirement. Done correctly by someone experienced in conducting and interpreting the qualitative research, the results will enhance the company’s success far beyond simply highlighting key experiences that need to be addressed. In fact, there are 30 uses for journey maps.Creating the Map
Let’s talk about how to journey map, since that is where companies are getting stuck. One process, as defined in the Sellers’ Compass methodology, includes five steps, which can often be completed in 45 days:Step 1: Data Breadcrumbs
- Identify sample size (industry, region, product) and roles to be interviewed
- Analyze trends
- Conduct internal journey mapping session with cross-functional team
Step 2: Interview Customers
- Conduct 45- to 60-minute interviews with two roles per company
- Transcribe and anonymize interviews
- Complete 15 to 20 interviews per sample
Step 3: Journey Map
- Plot detailed patterns of behavior as well as outliers
- For each journey step define the 5 “W”s
- Define interaction channels, emotion evokers, content and other drivers
Step 4: Tollgating and Content
- List tollgates by step
- Define buyers’ process for passing tollgates
- Define content/channel/source for each tollgate
Step 5: Gap Analysis
- Conduct gap analysis on content, interactions, CTA, channels, etc.
- Define “needle move” action plan and timeline for fast results
Using the Map
According to Jeff Freund, CEO and co-founder of Akoonu, “Your journey maps need to capture four core dimensions at each buying stage for each of your buyer personas: The buyer’s participation level (driver, participant, gate-keeper), the buyer’s informational and internals needs, the buyer’s activities to fulfill those needs, and the buyer’s content preferences.” Koren Stucki, Vice President, CEM Consulting for Clarabridge, believes journey maps “should be a catalyst for change.” Stucki has observed the following common pitfalls of journey mapping:- No clear scope and objective
- Lack of qualitative research
- No executive sponsor
- Engaging the wrong stakeholder
- “Inside-out” design
- Activity treated as a one-and-done
- Failing to make journeys practicable
- Bring VOC (Voice of Consumer) into journey maps
- Bring any recordings (from call centers, etc.) and customer quotes into journeys
- The journey mapping team should be cross-functional
- The same team needs to be involved from journey mapping through building the new experience and measuring the result
- Identify listening posts at key points in the journey
- Obtain input from customers on their current and future states
- Measure journey success based on how customers measure performance
- Refresh journey maps annually
- Build a Center of Excellence (COE) around customer experience