The complexity of communicating with customers in the B2B environment is nothing new. However, the decision to focus on customer experience (CX) to drive better business decisions is rightly gaining momentum. Many B2B organisations are increasingly aware of the value of CX programmes in the B2C world and are keen to harness their potential to reduce risk, improve profitability and drive business growth. However, the challenge for many B2B companies continues to be securing long-term investment in CX from the executive team.
The reason for this is that, like every other aspect of running a business, the impact of CX on the bottom line needs to be proved to acquire the necessary buy-in. To do this, CX teams must place far greater focus on measuring and communicating CX success in the format and language that the c-suite understand. They must use the terms that the c-suite regularly use to monitor and analyse financial and operational performance. In other words, CX metrics don’t matter, business outcomes do. Whether that is profitability, revenue growth, lifetime value, retention, utilisation or whatever keeps your c-suite awake at night. But we know that underpinning these business outcomes – our early warning system – is our customer and employee engagement metrics. They are key to understanding and driving CX efficiencies across the B2B ecosystem.
The connection between CX and business performance
First, it’s important to understand you can only track and prove the link between CX and broader business performance if you have identified business success metrics for a CX programme at the outset. These need to be anchored in corporate goals, business models and the corporate lifecycle of the company.
You might, for example, set your CX success metric as net sales and volume growth because this is the corporate goal in a maturing market (i.e. it’s a lifecycle issue). Or you might set it as an increase in renewal rates because you operate a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model and retention is key. Alternatively, your metric may be to reduce calls to the support team because this is a business line goal in a time of transition (i.e. moving to self-service) and cost avoidance is key. Importantly, if you have a long sales cycle, you will have to be particularly creative and resist the urge to simply measure CX success based on year-on-year revenue growth.
Mapping your metrics
The importance of identifying, profiling and building a stakeholder map for all customers and influencers has been outlined previously but having done so, it is imperative that you use the right metrics to measure the moments that matter across the customer lifecycle.
This is the only way to establish the link between what happens when customers research the market and subsequently make their initial contact with you; how they feel about early engagement with your company and the procurement process (whether this is a first, second or frequent purchase), and what the outcome is. In other words, if they decide to buy and how they behave post-delivery, during implementation and throughout the contract period.
Feedback gathered at multiple touchpoints such as these can combine to enable the c-suite to understand the value and financial gain of streamlined processes, problem resolution, contract renewal, and so on. More importantly, proactively seeking feedback at ‘key moments of truth’ for the customer will reveal more timely, relevant and actionable insight than that gathered in an annual survey. This customer data can help organisations to take a more responsive and agile approach to decision making and action management which ultimately will enable them to proactively support partner engagement with customers, when it matters most, not when it’s too late to make a difference.
The metrics of motivation
According to Forrester, there are three types of metrics that can help you to understand what motivates or impacts customer engagement with your brand, products and services, either direct or through a third party:
- Interaction metrics: First call resolution, logins/features used, event/webinar attendance, etc – objective measures of errors/wait time, implementation/onboarding efficiency, engagement with vendor
- Perception metrics: Customer surveys/interviews, customer maturity assessments, quarterly reviews, etc – subjective measures of customer satisfaction, sophistication and ease of use
- Outcome metrics: Net Promoter Score (NPS), purchase dollars, number of web visits – to measure the likelihood to recommend, outlay/spend, etc.
This mix of behavioural and attitudinal metrics has the potential to help you identify processes that require improvement but it’s important to create a metric hierarchy to operationalise CX measurement. Simply put, you need to identify and weight metrics that best suit your ultimate business objectives and potentially even more importantly are aligned to your corporate brand and values. If your brand is all about efficiency, then an ‘easy’ metric is going to work well.
You may focus on strategic drive metrics which enable you to monitor ease of doing business with your company and the importance of value over cost. You may put the emphasis on tactical drive metrics that track the ease of using your products and first call resolution. Or you may want to proactively track operational metrics that enable you to document product defects or the number of calls to the call centre.
Once you’ve identified your top CX ‘beacon’ metric (at brand level, many organisations plump for NPS because of its ability to identify which customers, or promoters, will yield the greatest return from investment), you need to test it with multiple stakeholders to confirm its effectiveness as a predictor of success. You need to verify whether the experience of certain customer roles (e.g. users or sales) affect success metrics more than others. And you then need to analyse how the CX programme affects financial metrics at the account level over time.
The aim, of course, is to be able to combine all customer contact, operational and financial data with customer feedback on one platform so that you can construct a ‘customer health assessment’ that can be shared not only with the board but across the whole organisation. It’s about combining this insight with contextual knowledge about the status of the vendor champion within the client account (good or bad), the client’s business performance, market share and competitive landscape to understand early on if a customer relationship is going south or if an urgent intervention can protect existing investment in the account.
In B2B, identifying ‘business-at-risk’ versus ‘business-at-growth’ customer accounts is a major challenge but this is where a real-time dashboard can make the greatest impact. Given the number of direct and indirect customer relationships that need to be managed, involving multiple stakeholders and influencers, the ability to build a holistic profile of each customer, and use CX metrics to calculate the revenue opportunity of each customer experience initiative in relation to outcome (propensity to purchase etc), offers real potential.
Look up from the CX dashboard
The ability to monitor metrics that drive positive outcomes and drill down into the data – either by account, line of business, country or global position – improves the ability to link CX initiatives to outcomes and success criteria for the business overall. It can not only help the c-suite to make decisions about where budget should be invested to reduce customer-centric cost units (such as lead generation, complaint handling, returns). It can help individual account managers to take pre-emptive action to secure a high-value but dissatisfied key influencer client-side. Perhaps more importantly, measuring CX metrics raises awareness of the contribution that positive and consistent customer experience – at all levels, and by all employees – can have on overall profitability.
For any CX practitioner in a B2B enterprise looking to secure the future of their work, metrics do indeed matter. But the trick is to look up from the CX dashboard and make sure you’re taking in the big picture. Connect your CX metrics to those that matter to the rest of the business. A recent survey conducted by Confirmit showed the number one driver of success in CX programmes, was the ability to define goals and business outcomes. Put simply, this means ‘show me the money’ Make sure you’re not showing yet another NPS score instead.
