Customer Experience Tips for Indexing Relationship Metrics to Find, Keep and Grow More Customers – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #168
My Granddad used to say, when times are tough hang on to those that love you. Is the same true for tough economic times and B2B relationship marketing?
Your market is fundamentally made up of three types of targets. Customers you have, those you’ve lost, and potential accounts who – so far – have decided to do business elsewhere.
This is the first of a serial discussion (please join in) about measuring and connecting some specific customer experience management dots for minimizing customer churn, growing key accounts and identifying new revenue opportunities with companies that share common profiles with those with whom you do well.
Over the decades I’ve devised and managed dozens of customer retention programs. As a deliberate marketing proponent I was an enthusiastic Net Promoter adopter because of its implied relationship with corporate growth and its sheer simplicity – something very appealing when trying to achieve internal buy-in for major (sometimes costly) customer experience initiatives.
But in times like these where the outcome of a company’s customer experience strategy can make or break quarterly revenue plans, a one dimensional measurement such as NPS may help to know how many loyal customers there are, but isn’t very good for knowing about problems or –more importantly– how to fix them.
So while I love the idea of NPS as a simple advocacy index (as well as the role it’s had on increasing the importance business owners now place on these types of marketing metrics) I’ve found it to be just one of the many dots that need connecting to drive revenue growth. The most common mistake in the B2B world today is confusing loyal customers with satisfied customers.
The difference between satisfied customers and loyal customers is distinctly a matter of emotion. And while metrics dealing with both are very different and have unique implications – they are interdependent as two halves – quantifiable (satisfied) – and subjective (loyal) of the complete customer relationship picture.
This means customer feedback must be secured, structured, analyzed and acted upon in both concrete and abstract formats. To this end I have developed an arsenal of best practices that can be used for the following:
- Optimize the flow of information and feedback that captures both quantifiable and emotional responses to “customer experience” surveys.
- Analytical methodology for connecting and measuring quantifiable and emotional feedback to determine a “CEI,” or Customer Experience Index for each customer on your list.
- Templates and guides for using CEI scores to craft short, mid and long term account plans for retention, up-selling and cross-selling.
- Templates and guides for using highest CEI scores to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting.
- Templates and guides for using lowest CEI scores to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions
Over the next few weeks my blog posts will address these subjects one-by-one. Again, I’d really appreciate your feedback as we go.
6 Responses to “Customer Experience Tips for Indexing Relationship Metrics to Find, Keep and Grow More Customers – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #168”
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November 4th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Hi Cody,
Your post caught my eye and it is loaded with excellent information!
As owner of a market research firm in the Chicago area, I just have to ask you one question. Have you ever considered mystery shopping as an option for measuring the customer experience? I can tell you first hand that our firm is seeing more and more B2B companies coming to us for help in this area. Traditionally mystery shopping was used in the hospitality industries, however we have seen a strong trend this year in B2B clients. This has made for some interesting studies. It is also used as a form of competitive intelligence in the B2B marketplace as well.
I look forward to reading more!
November 5th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Kathy,
I agree mystery shopping might have an interesting part to play in measuring customer experience. I’d love to find out more about how it works in a B2B environment.
For example if I owned a B2B-SaaS company and hired a mystery shopper to analyze how loyal + satisfied my customer’s are, what are the steps involved?
My only experience with mystery shopping is with competitive intelligence applications.
November 6th, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Conducting mystery shopping for your B2B-SaaS company would allow you to see the process through the eye of your customer. Just as in retail, we set up a typical customer situation with a mystery shopper to evaluate service levels. It offers a different view from traditional survey systems.
Our biggest asset in doing this type of research for companies is due to our diverse shopper data base. With over 100,000 shoppers available throughout North America, we have many shoppers who are self employed and/or have a general knowledge or background with a particular industry.
We are advocates of customer feedback too, but feel mystery shopping is a very important part of insuring customer service levels are in place.
Hope that helps!
November 11th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I am a customer focus consultant and the theme of my work is Sharper Customer Focus – Sharper Competive Edge. When I tell people about this and what I do, the reaction invariably is that ‘business must be good, because service is more important now’. This is the (logical) line of thinking, also espoused by your grandfather.
It is amazing to me how such logical and strategic thinking appears to turn into knee jerk budget cutting all across the board. When the CFOs take over and put the brake pedal to the floor, the notion of strategically (although frugally) investing in those customer segments that really pay the rent and keep the doors open is totally overwhelmed by ‘budgeteering’. I would say: More power to those few that hold the longer term and more strategic view, Let’s honor the wisdom of your grandfather!
December 3rd, 2008 at 5:37 pm
Cody,
I am interested in your thoughts on this topic and most specifically would be curious to understand how you might link CEI metrics to web experiences and specific tactics that customers can use to enhance CEI via their online channels.
I believe that the cross channel interaction is crucial, but that in times of tight budgets, more companies will be driving interactions via lower cost online channels … optimizing these for CEI would be of high value.
Cheers,
Kirsten
December 5th, 2008 at 5:19 am
Kirsten,
Agreed. The use of online channels is crucial to CEI. And from a cost cutting, “do more with less” perspective almost everything I mention in part 3 of my series here about “pushing” and “pulling” for quantitive an qualitative customer feedback can be accomplished using social computing.
Think of it:
> Online surveys
> Blogs and other Social media interaction
> Shared online workspaces
> Account level knowledge distribution (sharing) and work flow between customers, employees and partners
> Capturing, analyzing and routing customer generated content at account or functional levels
> Enable Voice of Customer re: product reviews, content discovery, product development etc.
Furthermore, having those modes integrated, or at least packaged within a nice, tidy customer community is all the better, especially when it comes to slicing, dicing and scoring data points that comprise CEI.
Thanks for being a part of this discussion.