DR: Each year, B2B Marketing runs something called the Trend Tracker. Basically, this is a survey that seeks to understand what specific areas B2B marketers will be focused on in the year ahead. In the 2021 iteration of this report, customer success – which was a completely new entry – finished in second place, just behind growth marketing. As the Propolis Expert for our CX Hive, why do you think customer success will be so important in 2021 and beyond? Is it just about reducing churn, or is there more to it than that?
BS: Unfortunately there is no easy quick, silver bullet that will enable B2B organisations to deliver a CX that will deliver. Instead companies must deliver a total B2B customer experience. Doing so means that companies must address all aspects of the relationship in terms of both what they deliver to customers and how they deliver.
They have to create and deliver two customer experiences; one that caters to the needs and priorities of buyers and another that caters to the needs and priorities of users. It is only by taking a two pronged approach, organisations will attain the tangible, measurable benefits they seek. For me, the customer success team are vital to enable this approach to be a reality. They are responsible for the on-going partnership and ensuring the organisation is delivering against the golden promises made at moment of sale and managing buyers expectations. As well as supporting the users to have the optimum on-going service and able to use the portfolio of products and services to the best of their capabilities.
DR: On that note, what do you think a great customer success process looks like? What people or processes do you think B2B marketers need to have in place in order to deliver customer success?
BS: For me, it’s challenging for marketing to do this alone, to establish a customer success process you need a whole organization to create it not a department. Marketing should lead it but they cant do it alone.
Regarding a process:
- Have a clear & living Customer Experience Vision, that has been shared to all of the company
- Really understand who your customers are, what their needs are and what their expectations are
- Work to create a single view of the customers (unifying data across your internal systems, capturing each customers activities and using this information to seamlessly engage with each customer across touchpoints)
- Articulate your CX strategies internally
- Build a corporate culture that knows how to listen
- Train and develop your team
- Act upon regular employee feedback
- Ensure that customers feel understood
- Measure the ROI from delivering great customer experience
Don’t make assumptions or think about what makes life easy for you. It is all about your customers
DR: More specifically, for the listeners that perhaps don’t have a customer success function in place, what steps can they take today to get things on the right track?
BS: Some simple ways to leverage customer success solutions:
- Ensure your content is customer focused: Review your content and anywhere you focus on features rewrite them to be customer benefit driven.
- Listen to your customers, especially the very upset ones. And the act to resolve the cause not just the symptom. Constructive feedback is a gold mine for any business. It is a form of valuable, direct, instructional feedback from the people who matter most. Your customers.
- Track your communication at both customer and contact level
- Leverage Service Level Agreement tracking so your always delivering on the customer expectations
- Tailor self-service content for specific business needs of your customers and users.
- Deploy a live chat system focused on administrative business interactions, freeing up team members to have the valuable interactions with potential customers and existing customers.
- Check in with your existing customers, ask them how you can improve and let them know the actions from their feedback
DR: Of course, customer success comes under the much broader umbrella of customer experience. So, what do you think great CX looks like? Not just in terms of the end result – i.e. did the customer sign on the dotted line again – but what are buyers really looking for, and how can marketers help deliver this?
BS: Whether B2B or B2C, when it comes to CX, every function, every employee, every representative on every channel and platform, has a role to play in delivering a good experience. Hence, the (slightly modified) saying – ‘It takes a whole village to deliver good CX’
While you can have one team to manage and report on your CX effort, the real delivery comes from each and every moving part in the organisation, that need to work together to create and deliver great customer experiences. In other words, you need to build a customer centric culture to deliver on your CX strategy, and its got to start at the top.
- Plan each stage of your customer’s journey. Do you have a customer journey map? It’s critical to improving the customer experience.
- Reduce the effort customers must take to be successful. Reducing the effort it takes customers to get a solution makes your customers more satisfied
- Remove friction from your process. Removing friction from the sales cycle is absolutely vital for B2B companies (and it’s the first stop on a potential customer’s journey with you), but that process will look different for each company.
- Recognise that customer experience initiatives don’t always have a one to one ROI. This isn’t to say you won’t ever see ROI, or that you should disregard ROI altogether. Of course, you need to see profit and a return on investment from your customer experience initiatives. But the key is that it might not be a clear cut, one-to-one return.
- Humanise the customer experience. Is there an opportunity for you to make customer interactions more human? Since SaaS companies’ in-person interactions are often limited, you should consider how to make the most of them when they arise. Maybe it’s by giving your customer support and success managers a budget to make a customer’s day better. Or maybe it’s a change you make at a broader scale by creating an online community to multiply personal interactions among customers and staff. Whatever it is, think outside the box to how you can focus on connecting with customers as people.
DR: Customer success and customer experience more generally are clearly very important to any organisation, so why do you think so many organisations don’t have these functions in place? From the outside, it seems to me that marketers are in the best place to take ownership of CX and customer success, but not at all marketers are doing so. Would you say that’s accurate?
BS: If navigating the minefield of B2B is not challenging enough, the manner in which many organisations approach CX accidentally undermines their own efforts. Many organisations, once they have decided to embark on the journey to improve CX, spend the majority of their time undertaking strategic exercises such as journey mapping and design thinking, which usually result in creating massive strategic documents such as PowerPoint decks. While these activities are exceptionally vital, by themselves they are not sufficient to impact business performance.
Driving improvements and producing results through delivering a B2B CX is difficult and requires hard work. Results are only achieved by truly taking action.
This requires organisations going beyond ‘blue sky’ strategic thinking, rolling up their sleeves ‘getting dirty’ and ‘getting into the detail’.
This is achieved by:
- Prioritising and determining exactly what initiatives will be undertaken
- Detailing action plans that specify by whom, how and when
- Mobilising and managing the resources required
It’s painful, it’s tough, but that is where the focus needs to be to create and deliver the B2B CX which will drive a company’s performance.
DR: All organisations and industries have different peculiarities, and customers may want or expect slightly different things as a result. Am I right in guessing that marketers will need to do some research on what their customers actually want, and therefore how they can deliver great CX? How can marketers carry out this research and then turn that into a great CX plan?
BS: To be customer centric means to listen to your customers and incorporate their needs into your product and service offering. This means finding and tapping into rich sources of real-time intel that goes beyond predictive insights or NPS surveys. There is a very real strategic value in finding customer insights, utilising them, track satisfaction and eliminating friction from your CX.
From a practical perspective:
- Develop personas: Using behavioural data to including challenges, goals, motivations, point of view statements
- Conduct Job to be done interviews to understand your customer needs
- Carry out co-creation customer journeys. In B2B customer journey mapping can be challenging to map complex networks. Creating the journeys with your customers can help.
- Review your customer feedback. Don’t look for the positive feedback, listen and look for the hesitations, the negatives, the disappointments. Deep dive the issue and get to the root causes. Then work to rectify
- Talk with your customer, I mean pick up the phone and chat. By asking questions and processing the answers you get to know what things your should enhance to increase customer loyalty and drive revenue.
DR: To be blunt, what do you think marketers – or whoever is responsible for CX for that matter – get wrong when it comes to CX? Are there any classic mistakes you see time and time again?
BS: I actually just posted a blog in the Propolis Hive about 3 days ago about the common CX mistakes and how to avoid them. The biggest mistake is that people and /or organisations treat CX functionally. It is not a business priority but treated as a marketing tactic. To be successful CX needs to be a business strategy and a priority in all departments.
Some of the common mistakes include:
- Attempting to deliver CX without a vision
- Ignoring the role of Employee Experience in the process
- Improving analytics isn’t treated as a top priority
- Focusing on too many things at once
- Mistaking process automation as CX
- Taking the human out of the equation
- Being reactive about churn
DR: And on the flip-side of that, are there any instances where you’ve seen the introduction or optimisation of a CX function really take an organisation’s success up a level?
BS: I am really excited and really enjoying how the Pharma/Healthcare industry is taking on CX and PX (Patient Experience). The companies I am working with, are focused on 3-5 year transformation programmes, combining CX & EX lead by global and region visions. They know the journey is long and hard but they are being pragmatic and focused on making small changes rather tackling everything at once. They are revolutionising the way they go to market and genuinely putting the customers at the heart of their organisations.
Why I most admire this sector is, they have some big challenges from compliance to extremely complex ecosystems and go to market models, to out-dated legacy infrastructure but yet they are so passionate and willing to make mistakes, trial new approaches and taking on the challenge whilst also doing their business as usual.
DR: This next question could arguably require a full report to answer, but what do you think CX looks like in ABM compared to traditional marketing strategies? Does it look completely different? Or are they largely the same thing?
CX and ABM are interlinked. ABM sits within CX.
BS: Traditional marketing demand generation tactics often involve casting a wide net in the hopes of catching the right fish, i.e., standard inbound marketing.
Attract people to your site and get them to fill out forms. Nurture them with automated emails. Identify target companies.
To reduce the time, resources, and cost of lead-to-deal conversions, marketers need a better way to deliver quality leads to sales. The solution, take the inbound marketing funnel and flip it on its head.
ABM: identify target companies. Engage them with personalised campaigns. Build lasting relationships that lead to new opportunities.
Account-based marketing is an approach that is based more on conversation, research, adaptability, and listening than any clever combination of programmatic software or artificial intelligence. It represents a pivot away from managing individual leads to looking at accounts holistically, understanding their needs and motivated by building relationships and partnerships.
Being account-focus helps you understand where to concentrate and prioritise efforts when it comes to customers. This includes which accounts to follow up with based on satisfaction and revenue, as well as stakeholder management. The emergence of roles such as relationship managers (for e.g., CSMs), have become necessary in proper relationship management and for the growth and stability of accounts.
DR: Finally, if you had to really narrow it down, what’s your one piece of advice for anyone looking to really up their CX efforts this year?
BS: Knowing more and more about customers—is now overwhelming businesses. What you really need to focus on is the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish. Knowing this and focusing on it sets you up for success.
Your starting point should be “How does this create value for the customer?” What actually works is meeting the needs of your customers, better than everyone else.
