The ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Best Practices Study has been conducted for three years now. It was established in 2010 with an emphasis on understanding which functional areas were driving customer experience management and the scope of deployment within each company. In 2011, we continued the core set of questions along with an in-depth exploration of B2B voice of the customer practices, and we explored customer experience management success factors seem to be driving business results. And in 2012, we continued with that core set of questions and emphasized success stories of companies’ progress in their customer experience management, as well as showing three-year trends.

CEM Practices in Top-Performing Businesses
First of all, we wanted to identify which companies had the strongest business results. For example, some companies attributed customer experience management to their financial progress, such as 200 percent increase in market share over the past four years or 20 percent improvement in revenue over the past year. Some companies mentioned figures such as 15 percent reduction in churn and so forth.

Secondly, among the companies with strong business results, we identified which ones also had strong performance of at least 20 percentage points advantage in most of the other best practices in the study. It turned out that there were six of those practices that had such strong correlations, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

To illustrate, when managers of various customer experience activities coordinate their work by reporting to a single department or to a committee or executive, or meeting quarterly or more often for coordination purposes, their companies are at least 20 percentage points more likely to collect voice of the customer from all influencers in the purchase decision, to capture front line employees’ observations, and to capture customer complaints. There were also many other best practices that correlated with this coordination of communication among managers of customer experience activities. This gives you the idea of what we mean by having a more holistic customer experience management effort on these six success factors.

Success Factor 1: Coordination Among Managers of CEM Methods
For the first success factor, coordination among managers of customer experience methods, an interesting example is TW Telecom. When the economic downturn occurred, TW Telecom was in the midst of acquiring about 20,000 small and medium business accounts and yet, they were able to reduce churn by 27 percent and outperform their competition by 20 percent in most of their customer management processes.

They did this by setting up a customer operations team comprised of people from strategy, operations, marketing and service, and it’s positioned as the company’s customer conscience. They have very vocal roles in the business units and help the company to evolve their customer experience management to a more organized, cross-functional mode that even adapts the company, itself, to the customers’ needs. Other companies are doing work like this with customer champions in every business unit: Symantec and JD Uniphase are examples that come to mind. Others are coordinating managers of surveys, advisory boards, customer references, contact centers, loyalty, and so forth.

Success Factor 2: CEM is a Determinant of Corporate Strategy
The second success factor is viewing customer experience management (CEM) as a determinant of corporate strategy. When companies have this view, rather than viewing CEM as a sub-set of corporate strategy or irrelevant to it, these companies tend to have stronger business results and more comprehensive customer experience management.

During the economic downturn, SunTrust realized it needed to go back to the drawing board and make sure that they could earn their clients’ trust. They reworked their enterprise guiding principles to focus on the client first and everything that they do in their business. They set out to change the way they include voice of the customer in their decision-making process. They migrated from a product focus to a client focus through a massive cultural change that included people asking in meetings, “Do we believe X because we’ve been bankers for so many years or because the clients told us?”

This changed the way they sought customer input and how every employee, regardless of their role, viewed their job. Essentially, they saw voice of the customer as a part of their larger business transformation and how they’re leading, using insights, prescribing action, holding people accountable, and communicating the value of keeping clients first. Despite the fact that only about one in five companies is using customer experience to determine corporate strategy, those who are, are reaping greater benefits.

Success Factor 3: Presentation of Survey Results to All Employees
The third success factor is presentation of survey results to all employees.

At Applied Materials, their decentralized culture and matrix organization structure caused them to create more than 50 reports of their customer surveys so that each business unit and every sales office and functional area across the company could see their own impact on customer experience. They also conducted “train the trainer” sessions through a video conference with the champions in each location, who then presented the results locally to ensure common interpretations, answer questions and discuss the implications. These presentations included an action-planning workshop to digest customer comments and make a difference for customers.

Success Factor 3: Calculation of Customer Lifetime Value
The fourth success factor is calculating customer lifetime value. There are many ways to do that — very thorough methods and other approaches to just create a number that is helpful. When companies do such calculations, they tend to have stronger business results and broader deployment of their customer experience management.

Citrix is a great example where they’ve mapped their customer contract values to the ratings for likelihood to recommend the brand. By setting up listening posts from brand awareness to brand advocacy, they’ve been able to gain valuable insights about the functionality that could have increased positive word of mouth and specific revenue lost or gained as a result. After product trials and contract periods, they asked, “What could we have done differently that could have led you to buy?”

A customer insights team created a business case model that uses this data to help managers prioritize product changes, based on their impact on keeping customers, as well as acquiring new customers. Because this is a quantified approach that helps all of the internal stakeholders to make decisions, it has been embraced as a methodology that they use on a regular basis. While few companies actually perform some type of customer lifetime value — generally about one in four or one in five companies — they see more success in establishing a single view of the customer across the company, using customer feedback to guide their annual operating plan, and many other customer experience management practices that go hand-in-hand with this one.

Success Factor 5: Action on Survey Results by Owners of Key CX Drivers
The fifth area of customer success is action on survey results by owners of key drivers of customer experience. The companies that do this have not only better business results, but also a more holistic approach to their customer experience management.

One example I’d like to share is from LexisNexis. They have done a variety of voice of the customer efforts, including a spontaneous customer feedback opportunity where customers could e-mail their concerns right away, and a customer experience manager routed those messages internally and thanked the customer, whether it was positive or negative. People who were receiving these were expected to make improvements, as well as provide feedback that could be shared with the customers.

Additionally, when the regular survey is being done on an ongoing basis at a division in LexisNexis, they have a closed-loop process where managers in the company have to contact the customers directly. Initially, many of the back office employees did not feel very comfortable with that, but as they began to do it, they started realizing that this whole process not only brings the voice of the customer to life, but it actually inspires their own action to make improvements. And, therefore, they’re seeing better business results because of this approach.

Success Factor 6: Funding of Cross-Organizational CEM Collaboration
Finally, the sixth success factor is funding of cross-organizational collaboration for customer experience management.

One of the examples I really like is from Maersk, a freight company that realized that businesses made of people and, therefore, they need to be people-oriented in the way that they pursue customer experience management. And they knew that in order to earn the trust of their customers, they needed to earn the trust of their employees. And so, they involved human resources and many other functions to work together in helping everybody become aware that they all have a role to play — not just the customer-facing people, as front-line staff are only as good as the rest of the company internally enables them to be, by resolving and preventing issues. Otherwise, nobody wins.

Maersk set out to help their employees understand customer experience by reflecting on how they, as consumers, feel about their experiences. They held a three-day session with managers across the company where they presented a playbook of 24 solutions ranging from very simple things such as how to talk to customers without using jargon, and putting customers’ pictures on the wall so that they could connect to customers more personally, to other more sophisticated things. They kept a score card, which emphasized that the countries with the best success were the ones that were embracing cross-functional collaboration. Other parts of the company jumped on board and now they’re seeing upward trends globally.

In summary, the success factors for customer experience management include:

1. Coordinating customer experience management across the people who are in charge of the various activities for customer experience in the company.
2. Making customer experience a strong input to your corporate strategy and not an adjunct to it.
3. Presenting the results of your customer surveys to all employees.
4. Using customer lifetime value.
5. Expecting actions to be taken on the customer surveys by all employees, especially all the ones who are owners of the key drivers of customer experience.
6. Collaborating cross-functionally to improve customer experience.

You can view the complete CX Forum webinar recording and download resources on Customer Experience Success Factors.

Our Credo — Johnson & Johnson:
"We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. In meeting their needs everything we do must be of high quality. We must constantly strive to reduce our costs in order to maintain reasonable prices. Customers' orders must be serviced promptly and accurately. Our suppliers and distributors must have an opportunity to make a fair profit.

We are responsible to our employees, the men and women who work with us throughout the world. Everyone must be considered as an individual. We must respect their dignity and recognize their merit. They must have a sense of security in their jobs. Compensation must be fair and adequate, and working conditions clean, orderly and safe. We must be mindful of ways to help our employees fulfill their family responsibilities. Employees must feel free to make suggestions and complaints. There must be equal opportunity for employment, development and advancement for those qualified. We must provide competent management, and their actions must be just and ethical.

We are responsible to the communities in which we live and work and to the world community as well. We must be good citizens — support good works and charities and bear our fair share of taxes. We must encourage civic improvements and better health and education. We must maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use, protecting the environment and natural resources.

Our final responsibility is to our stockholders. Business must make a sound profit. We must experiment with new ideas. Research must be carried on, innovative programs developed and mistakes paid for. New equipment must be purchased, new facilities provided and new products launched. Reserves must be created to provide for adverse times. When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realize a fair return." (source: http://www.jnj.com/connect/about-jnj/jnj-credo/)

Beyond customer surveys and rhetoric, an organization has to do things uniquely to lead its industry peers in superior customer experience. Here are some examples of companies that "put their money where their mouth is".

At IBM, the executive leadership model includes customer-centricity guidance: within their "focus to win" core value are 3 components — customer insight, breakthrough thinking, and drive to achieve. Customer insight is defined by IBM as putting oneself in the mind of the customer, to see the customer's business from their point of view.

At Toyota, the concept of "Next Process is the Customer" plays a significant role in defining the company culture. Next Process is the Customer means that everyone treats all downstream processes as if they were the final customer, all the while emphasizing that the final customer deserves and demands perfection.

At JetBlue, founder David Neeleman said he had three rules for employees: show up on time, take care of your co-workers, and take care of customers. He explains: "When customers fly JetBlue they feel special. You feel like the people serving you are actually pleased to have you on board. It’s okay to use the flight attendant call button. We relish the opportunity to serve." JetBlue has been the top airline in JD Power's customer service survey for the past 5 years, and it has 1.1 million followers on Twitter, more than any company except Whole Foods and Zappos. In 2009 JetBlue is profitable, expanding to 8 new cities and hiring 2300 people.

At Enterprise Rent-a-Car, response rates from customers to the company's phone surveys run as high as 95%. Enterprise uses customer input as a front-line operating tool by measuring customer loyalty at the individual rental office level. This has enabled regional managers to hold branches accountable for improving customer relationships, and encourage employees to be more responsive to customer feedback. All Enterprise offices are ranked by their monthly Enterprise Service Quality Index score, but only employees in those offices that score at or above the average index score for the company overall are eligible for promotion, raises or bonuses.

As these examples have shown, there are infinite approaches and styles for building a customer-centric culture, and the rewards can be fantastic. An attitude of anticipation allows greater flexibility and prevention of hassles for customers and for employees, and subsequently less wasted time, effort and money for all parties.

Customer-focused priorities organically produce desired results for employees, communities and stockholders. Try it and see how much easier it is to achieve the results you seek for all your stakeholders.

Customer Relationship Management

As a customer you hope you don't have to repeat your story every time you interact with a company. Just like in personal relationships, you expect to be valuable enough to the other party that they remember what you did together before, so that they might anticipate what would be appropriate going forward.

CEM Lessons:

• CRM as a technology is a tool to nurture relationships that anticipate what a customer would appreciate, in the right way, at the right time. (Not a self-serving tool to push unwanted stuff with contrived urgency, essentially eroding rather than nurturing the customer relationship.)
• Use Marketing Automation and Sales Intelligence tools to prompt proactive outreach to customers in ways they'll view as valuable to them at the right time in the right way.
• Use a Customer Data Warehouse to integrate all the sources of information about a customer and to create a real-time single view of the customer that's accessible to back-office as well as front-line professionals who play a role in managing the customer relationship.
• Use all these tools to involve other functional areas across the company in gaining an accurate picture of customers' needs, so that they can make sure their processes, policies, and handoffs help strengthen customer relationships.

Customer Loyalty

As a customer you often like to keep things simple by making purchases with a familiar company, once you decide you like what they've got and how they do things. You like to feel like you're appreciated by the company, and you enjoy getting a good deal as often as you can. You also like variety if another company's product or service seems appropriate at any given moment for your life/business. While you see the value of consistency, you resent situations where you're not free to decide for yourself which brand you can use.

CEM Lesson:

• Anything that that forces customers to stick with you or lose it all — non-industry-standard technologies, expensive add-ons or consumables, exclusivity service plans/policies — may look like a good thing for your growing revenue, but this approach ultimately erodes your brand value (even if the whole industry is doing it) rather than maximizing customer equity.

Customer/Enterprise Feedback Management

As a customer you like to speak your mind about what's really helping you, and you often hope others won't suffer like you did when something has gone wrong. You prefer to express these sentiments right away in the context of what you were trying to do in your life/business, since that reflects what's important to you. You expect your feedback to make a difference.

CEM Lessons:

• Surveys that deviate from the customer's context or timing are a bit of a hassle and can be seen as irrelevant.
• In the interest of satisfying customers, don't dissatisfy them with a self-serving process that comes across as the customer doing you a favor.
• Use Data Mining to digest all the qualitative feedback customers give you and put it to good use.
• And make sure you fully honor your customers' investment of time by making a difference in the way you do business, in exact alignment with what customers said.
• Involve everyone across the company — as well as alliance partners and suppliers — in making a difference because of customer feedback.

Automated Customer Interactions

As a customer you want to move forward with your life/business as quickly as possible, so the ability to access information anywhere, anytime is a big plus. You want self-service opportunities to be really straightforward, and if you happen to be navigating an issue that's too unique for self-service, you hope you don't have to repeat everything once you talk to a live person.

CEM Lessons:

• First contact resolution (FCR; "one-and-done") applies to any type of contact, in customers' minds.
• Extensive testing with different types of customers may help meet FCR goals.
• Bridging the customer's self-service and customer-service trails, as well as acknowledging the hard work a customer has done through self-service prior to calling the company, are often a big part of healing a strained customer experience.

Knowledge Management

As a customer you expect front-line professionals to know everything about everything, and fast. You roll your eyes when someone tells you things like: "A different department handles that." But even more importantly, you get fed-up when the same type of issue recurs with a company, and when things happen that seem like they never should have happened at all.

CEM Lessons:

• Up-to-date, comprehensive information that's quickly accessible by front-line professionals, as well as self-service touch-points, is essential.
• But don't forget knowledge management across the entire company: make sure back-office functional areas throughout the company learn from customer service.
• Make sure "lessons-learned" are shared not only from customer service to the issue originators, but also cross-functionally well ahead of any field issues arising, in the spirit of prevention.
• Knowledge management in its broader context means your company is "a learning organization", repeating successes and preventing mistakes company-wide.

Customer Communities & Social Media

As customer you participate as part of a broader social role in your life, a need to express your opinions, see what others are saying, keep on top of issues/news/trends, be entertained, and/or solve something quickly. You don’t mind including those you buy from in this endeavor as long as it’s relevant — AND easy or fun, or helps you look good or get ahead — within the context of its broader social role in your life or to move ahead with your life/business.

CEM Lessons:

• Beware of the tail wagging the dog.
• Blend in with your audience’s routines, timing, processes and social environment … both in technology as well as overall approach.
• Transparency is key, as nobody wants to feel manipulated.
• Social media is an excellent opportunity for your entire company to learn how trust is defined and assessed by your target audience, and to provide value and build trust for stronger customer relationships and brand advocacy.

Conclusion

Take the mystery out of the true meaning of customer experience management by thinking about your own experiences, expectations, and preferences as a customer. As a customer, you know that all of the above (and more) are components of your customer experience. So it's certainly a misnomer for a company to call any one of these "customer experience management". Let's get beyond a technology-centered definition of customer experience management to view things the way customers do, and to manage our businesses in ways that customers will be eager to say great things and increase their share of wallet/budget with our brand.

"Showing the path and where we are on that path — kind of like the map at the mall: 'you are here' — gives everyone an idea of how far we've come and how far we yet need to go," explained Milista Anderson, Chief Customer Officer at risk management software firm Sungard's Energy and Commodities division. "I'm part change agent and also part customer advocate. I think there's a need for a healthy balance of both. If there's an issue in day-to-day operations, I'm interested in the process that got us there to begin with. And as a change agent, I'm trying to broker the best interests for customers along with the best efforts from our employees."

Voice of the Customer as a Pivot Point
As a guest on the Customer Experience Optimization online talk show that I host, Milista said she uses survey data as a conversation starter, to get people's attention. "One way we use voice-of-the-customer data is to kind of shock ourselves into reality as to where we are. Our employees want to do their best, but sometimes situations get out of their control for a variety of reasons. And some real clear things have emerged through customer comments which have caused us to launch some very specific improvement initiatives around the product, around our communication, and around how we develop our own people. So everything that our customers have been telling us in one form or another boils down to about seven or eight things. And that has helped us, not only in where we're going to put our strategic efforts, but also in forming some specific work groups for improving the customer experience."

Milista has found a great way to bring the voice-of-the-customer to life, by conducting a monthly internal talk show with customers that becomes a workshop for employees. "One day it just dawned on me that it would be more powerful if our employees heard it straight from the customer's mouth. I have good relationships with many of our customers and they were happy to do it. I ask them three questions:

• The first is: What is the purpose of your company, your group and your role? So they can explain what their business is, who their customers are, what their business pressures are, etc.
• The second question is: How do you use our software to meet your business needs? And often, we hear about the volume of natural gas and power that's transacted through our systems or just how many dollars are actually managed throughout our systems.
• And then our last question is: What is a good customer experience for you? And they'll come up with three to five things that they can describe as a good customer experience."

"There have been some 'aha' moments. For our product developers, who may otherwise see the product as a set of codes and screens they're working on, when they hear the customer talk about how they actually use it and how it impacts their business, it's highly satisfying. And it's very motivating to hear customers talk about the use of a product that they helped to build. Sometimes employees are surprised to hear just how many users are in a particular department or the pressures that go on from day to day in order to meet their business objectives. Employees hear the voice of an accounting supervisor, or the head of natural gas scheduling, or even the trader on the other end talking specifically about 'this is how my group uses your product, this is how our daily jobs are impacted when something goes wrong causing us to be unable to go home to our families'. It really helps to bring in that personal aspect of something that we think of as a packaged product."

"This is a process. You don't do one of these things and then find that all of a sudden your customer-centricity is better overnight. It's about continuous exposure to that type of direct feedback over time, unfiltered, and uninterpreted by me or anyone else. I think that's the key to continue that progress."

A Change Agent's Tools
"We've given my role the title of Chief Customer Officer, and we allow ourselves to have a journey instead of these big initiatives that we just can't achieve. This allows us to make little changes along the way and celebrate the little wins, as opposed to beating ourselves up for big failures. There are a few fundamentals that any change agent uses, starting with good communication. I write a blog which is sent to all our employees, and every time I mention someone's name that a customer has brought up, those postings always get the most comments from employees. People always like to hear their name mentioned, especially attached to a good outcome. Good communication includes repetition and consistency about what our objectives are, the journey, and where we're going."

My note: Milista has a strong background in customer service, process improvement, stakeholder management and other organizational development skills. My recommendation to Chief Customer Officers with a more singular career path is to ensure that these skills and backgrounds are well represented in strong players on your team.

A Change Agent's Roles
"I sit on the executive committee for our division. I report directly to the president and that certainly helps. Our corporate CEO has named 'Customer First' as one of our pillars for growth. And as a business unit, we want it to be an early adopter of that. My part in participating in the weekly management meetings is about: "Here's where we are with our improvements, and here is some key feedback that our customers provided to us — and now what are we going to do about it? It's very informal, and it may not work for everybody, where it may need more structure and more lines of authority, but that's the way our environment and culture work."

Busting Silos
A change agent model for your company's Chief Customer Officer may be just what the doctor ordered. Silos in your business are likely the biggest obstacle to achieving superior customer experience, as explained in these related articles:

• Advice to the CCO: Beware of the Silos, by Jeanne Bliss, author of the book Chief Customer Officer.
• The Ideal Multi-channel Org Chart, by retail marketing expert Francey Smith.
• Systems Thinking is Vital to Customer Experience Business Results.
• Improve Customer Experience by Eliminating Customer-Focus Boundaries.

You may listen to the 28-minute interview on the Customer Experience Optimization online talk show: http://tinyurl.com/cem-show.

The perennial dilemma for survey designers is finding the balance between asking too much or too little, affecting respondent fatigue and response rate levels. But take a look at your call center logs and other customer-initiated feedback. When customers talk about things they're passionate about, there's essentially no such thing as respondent fatigue or asking too much. The real dilemma at-hand is not so much finding the right survey length, but rather, finding the right customer-focus that opens up customers' passions related to what your products, services, and experiences do for them.

How to Discover Your Customers' Passion Buttons for Your Brand
Contrary to popular belief, doing what everyone else is doing might be the exact wrong thing to do, as described in my article: 8 Paths to Value via Benchmarking Studies. Often, the route to differentiation is to take the high road and leapfrog the masses. A smaller yet smarter segment of organizations is discovering their customer' passion buttons by analyzing unstructured data (survey comments, call center logs, social media comments, etc., often with the help of text mining and voice mining tools) and/or visiting customers to observe their experiences. These analyses and visits can be quite eye-opening by revealing the larger context of how your product, service and touch-points play into value-add or hassle factors (i.e. customer value quotient) in your customers' ongoing quest to succeed in their life/business.

Here are some examples shared in the 3rd Annual ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Best Practices Study:

Customer Personas: To better understand customers, what their day looks like, and how they use their purchased solutions, teams from LexisNexis (professional software provider) visited clients in various roles and observed them using their products. Then they aggregated findings from dozens of these "job shadowing" visits to create composite customers for each major role. Called user personas, the output was a series of profiles that included the fictitious customers' pictures, interests, demands, and goals. Personas were posted physically in offices and sent electronically to team members to help everyone understand the big picture and be more sensitive to customer perspectives. "The information was also used to make products more relevant and successful," said Jennifer Maldonado, former Customer Experience Program Manager for one of LexisNexis' U.S. divisions. "Product management and development teams learned to improve and create features tailored to the needs of specific user personas. One example of this was combining two separate screens in an application into one to simplify the user experience for the paralegal role, an idea born from observing actual users in their offices toggle back and forth between two different pages repeatedly throughout the day."

Close to the Customer: To help employees relate to B2B customers' day-to-day realities, a division of Sungard (risk management firm) conducts a monthly interview webcast with a customer, asking 3 questions: "What is the purpose of your company, your group and your role? How do you use our software to meet your business needs? What is a good customer experience for you?" This unfiltered, direct exposure to customers is valuable in understanding how their products and services impact customers' personal quality of life and business objectives.

Customer Mirrors: Observation of customers at their work site is a program that Maersk Line (freight provider) calls "Customer Mirrors". While the company had mapped their own internal processes, they know they need to have a clear picture of the processes their customers go through. Employees visit the customer to see how they interact with the company, observing without a specific problem in mind. For the people dealing with the company on a daily basis, what do they actually do? How easy is it for them to find the appropriate person to deal with? What is it like for them to navigate the company’s website and fill in forms? While the focus is on observing, a bit of problem-solving is typical when customers request it. Findings are posted in the offices to provide a Customer Mirror for all employees to look into and learn from.

Findings from these valuable in-depth research tools should be used far and wide in your company to inject additional customer-focus into all of your customer feedback efforts as well as day-to-day attitudes, processes, and decision-making company-wide. That's how you’ll begin to reap exponential business results from customer experience management. Shift away from company-focused surveys and move toward customer-focused surveys by tailoring them according to your findings from these types of in-depth research. Response rates are likely to improve, but even more importantly, the validity and value of the information you collect is likely to increase exponentially.

Applying Customer-Focus from Voice of the Customer
One of the keys to success is attaining sufficient budget to manage CEM effectively. And to do that, executives want to see that great things are happening because of your CEM investments. Based on the Temkin Group's voice of the customer maturity stages published in Assessing the Maturity of Voice of the Customer Programs, the 2012 ClearAction CEM study asked B2B companies where they're at in the maturity journey: 1) collecting data, 2) analyzing data, 3) collaborating cross-functionally for continuous improvement, or 4) transforming business-as-usual to truly customer-centric operations.

Here's what the masses are doing: A third of participating B2B companies are asking owners of VoC key drivers to create action plans, and one in four firms is collecting anecdotal or formal VoC, but not analyzing or acting upon it.

Inject customer-focus in your VoC strategy by striving to manage things the way your customers view your brand: as one cohesive entity, not as a variety of silos, data collectors, and unilateral action plan achievers. A smaller, smarter segment of companies (based on the 2012 ClearAction study) is injecting customer-focus in their VoC strategy: one in eight B2B firms is using cross-functional collaboration to continuously improve VoC, and one in ten firms is striving to transform business-as-usual toward truly customer-centric operation of their company.

Recommendations:

• Leap-frog the masses and build a roadmap that will accelerate your company's progress on the VoC journey toward transforming business to truly customer-centric operations.
• Design VoC to be useful to as many functional areas and business processes as possible.
• Design VoC to maintain the customer's viewpoint, priorities, and phrasing.
• Nurture an insatiable curiosity about customers within your company-wide culture.

It's a joy to receive revenue from customers, but it's not always a joy to be a customer. Let's improve customer-focus in what we do and make our customers and our organizations alike more joyful and effective. Doing so will make it easier to link customer experience management to strong business results.

Hear interviews with executives from Sungard and CenturyLink about their approach to increasing customer-focus through customer visits/interviews in the recordings from the Customer Experience Optimization talk show.

Related articles:

• Focusing on People in Customer Experience Strategy
• Investment Patterns in B2B Customer Experience Management
• Business Customer Experience Management Stories Highlighted in 3rd Annual B2B CEM Study
• 6 Factors Identified for B2B Customer Experience Excellence
• Payoff for Coordinating Customer Experience Management Worldwide
• Big Gains by Presenting Voice of the Customer to All Employees
• ROI Opportunities for B2B Customer Experience Management
• 8 Paths to Value via Benchmarking Studies
• Fall in Love with Your Customers for Best Customer Experience

CX Strategy & Deployment
Customer Trust: With 50-some country organizations around the world, everyone on the front line at Maersk Line was working to please customers according to their own interpretation, but not really with a common goal of how to do it. A session was held with top management to determine the kind of emotions they want to invoke, tying into company values and history. They wanted customers to feel trust, cared for and pleased in every interaction. That became the mantra which provided a common aspiration for customer experience success.

Playbook: Showing people what a customer experience means makes them reflect on how they as consumers act on their own experiences. In 3-day sessions held by Maersk Line, managers received a playbook of 24 solutions that each country organization could pick and choose from. The playbook included simple suggestions such as how to talk to customers without using jargon, and posting customers' pictures on the Maersk office walls to emphasize people connecting personably. Despite the traditional tops-down culture, the playbook was rolled out with a train-the-trainer approach on a voluntary basis. Most country organizations did sign up for it, but some had other pressing priorities and didn't feel it was right for them. A clear divergence in customer satisfaction scores emerged, and the non-participating countries saw that and began closing the gap. Now the company is seeing upward trends globally.

CX Employee Engagement
Most B2B companies (85%) are engaging employees in customer experience management, and the number of companies reporting that they are well-established or perhaps world-class in these areas has increased since 2011. Nearly half of participating B2B firms are using customer metrics in performance reviews, presenting customer feedback to all employees and executives, and expecting action on survey results by owners of CX key drivers.

The 2011 B2B CEM study indicated superior business results for presenting customer feedback to all employees and all executives.

Recommendations: Remember the adage: "What gets measured and rewarded gets done", and use metrics wisely to motivate customer-focus throughout your company. To maximize your customer surveys' return on investment, educate all employees and partners about their impact on front-line professionals and touch-points. And design your voice-of-the-customer tools so that their output can be used to help as many employees across your company as possible to focus their jobs on making things better for the people in your customer companies.

Bringing Customer Experience Management to Life
Customer Mirrors: Observation of customers at their work site is a program that Maersk Line calls "Customer Mirrors". While the company had mapped their own internal processes, they know they need to have a clear picture of the processes their customers go through. Employees visit the customer to see how they interact with the company, observing without a specific problem in mind. For the people dealing with the company on a daily basis, what do they actually do? How easy is it for them to find the appropriate person to deal with? What is it like for them to navigate the company's website and fill in forms? While the focus is on observing, a bit of problem-solving is typical when customers request it. Findings are posted in the offices to provide a Customer Mirror for all employees to look into and learn from.

Employee Trust: "If we want customers to trust us, then we first need to let our employees trust us," decided Maersk Line. To manage emotions of trust internally, Human Resources plays a big role in the customer experience program, stressing the cross-functional aspect of operations. A big part of it was making everybody aware that they actually had a role to play — not just the customer-facing people: they’re only as good as their ability to get through internally to get problems solved — otherwise nobody wins. The countries with the best success are the ones that really embrace cross-functional coordination.

Cultural Change: Close relationships with customers matter a lot. Daily transactions are important because that influences decision-makers. Maersk Line experienced a cultural change when they realized that the people who are recipients of daily transactions recommend upward within their organizations about who to buy from next. Since these decisions are impacted by so many other factors besides trying to deliver good services within Sales and Service, the company's operational execution is a huge priority as well.

Inspiring stories about the progress of business customer experience management can be found throughout the 2012 best practices study, featuring companies such as Ciena, Citrix, LexisNexis, Orange, SunTrust, Symantec, tw telecom, and others in business services, building materials, remarketing, and semiconductor industries.

Related articles:

• Investment Patterns in B2B Customer Experience Management
• Business Customer Experience Management Stories Highlighted in 3rd Annual B2B CEM Study
• 6 Factors Identified for B2B Customer Experience Excellence
• Payoff for Coordinating Customer Experience Management Worldwide
• Big Gains by Presenting Voice of the Customer to All Employees
• ROI Opportunities for B2B Customer Experience Management
• 8 Paths to Value via Benchmarking Studies

Customer Experience Management Investment
Uncertainty in the 2012 business climate may have been a factor in reduced investment levels of 35-60% as compared to 2011 and 2010. Interestingly, in 2010, shortly after the major global economic crisis, CEM investment increased for the majority of participating B2B firms. This appeared to be evidence of management's recognition of CEM as an essential building block toward revenue and profit goals.

Most "customer knowledge areas" have seen a decrease in investment since the previous year for 35% to 60% of companies. 2012 investment in both VoC and touch-points has increased since last year for one in four participating B2B companies — and has decreased in these areas for one in four companies as well.

Investment has decreased in co-innovation for 65% of companies, followed by lifetime value for 60%, customer communities and CX innovation for 57%, retention for 50%, and experiential marketing for 48%. A question for the next study: If you did not decrease investment, are your customer experience results stronger than your competitors who did decrease CEM investment?

Connecting Revenue to Customer Experience Management
Many business-to-business companies are making strides in customer experience management best practices, and the 2012 ClearAction study features numerous stories of companies' progress. Here is an example from Citrix:

After mapping customer contract values to their ratings for likelihood to recommend the brand, Citrix knew they could increase revenue by increasing customers' and prospects' propensity to say good things. Through listening posts across brand awareness to brand advocacy, valuable insights are gained about functionality that could have increased positive word-of-mouth, and specific revenue lost or increased is monitored along with customers' satisfaction level and likelihood to recommend. After product trials and contract periods, they ask the question: "What could we have done differently that would have led you to buy?" The Customer Insights team created a business case model that uses this data to help managers prioritize product changes based on their impact on keeping customers as well as acquiring new customers. This quantified approach has helped internal stakeholders embrace the methodology and the importance of customer experience management, and it brings the customer to the decision-making table on a regular basis.

If you're interested in linking financials to customer experience data, make sure your company is making operational and attitudinal changes in response to customer inputs (i.e. customer experience management). Finding linkages based on marketing and sales efforts alone may not be sufficient impetus for marked patterns.

"Knowing the spending levels of customers who provide overall satisfaction ratings at different levels across the scale is valuable for the enterprise line of business in helping managers envision revenue gains that can result from better customer experience,' said Emilie Smith, former Customer Experience Manager at telecom provider Orange. 'In B2B there's an even bigger argument for CEM linkage to revenue and profitability because often the products and services for businesses are a lot more sophisticated and cost a lot more for the company to provide them. For one account, millions may be at stake. So B2B really needs to make sure the profitability will be there."

For a summary of the 2012 study, see http://clearaction.biz/benchmarking.
To hear the Citrix online interview Customer-Driven Business Cases, see http://tinyurl.com/cem-show

Related articles:

• Business Customer Experience Management Stories Highlighted in 3rd Annual B2B CEM Study
• 6 Factors Identified for B2B Customer Experience Excellence
• Payoff for Coordinating Customer Experience Management Worldwide
• Big Gains by Presenting Voice of the Customer to All Employees
• ROI Opportunities for B2B Customer Experience Management
• 8 Paths to Value via Benchmarking Studies

Business CEM stories are rare relative to consumer-focused examples, despite the fact that business customer experience can be much more challenging, with high involvement of numerous influencers of the purchase decision, high stakes purchases with lengthy sales cycles, reciprocal buyer/supplier relationships, and complex touch‐points across functional areas, managerial levels, and products, among other factors unique to B2B environments.

An enterprise customer experience manager at telecom provider Orange, Emilie Smith, said: “In B2B there’s an even bigger argument for CEM linkage to revenue and profitability because often the products and services for businesses are a lot more sophisticated and cost a lot more for the company to provide them. For one account, millions may be at stake.” The head of customer experience at freight provider Maersk Line, Rene Bomholt, said: “Businesses are made up of people, and people have emotions. Close relationships with customers matter a lot.”

As the sole global B2B CEM survey, this research provides inspiration to executives who want to maximize value, differentiation, and profit. Findings and recommendations are detailed in the report for these topics:
1) Top Motivations for B2B CEM

• Role of CEM in Corporate Strategy and Day-to-Day Business
• Investment Levels and Deployment Scope
• Coordination Among Managers of B2B CEM Methods
• Greatest Obstacles to B2B CEM Success

2) Journey to World-Class in How We …

• Listen to Customers
• View Customers
• Center Our Employees on Customers
• Center Our Business on Customers

The second annual study explored the linkages of CEM to corporate goals, strategy, culture, processes, and business results. Seven success factors were identified, including coordination among customer experience managers, presentation of survey results to all employees, action on survey results by owners of loyalty key drivers, and cross-organizational collaboration. The 2010 baseline study examined the functional owners of various customer experience programs, and the scope of organizational deployment.

Customer experience management (CEM) is an emerging discipline that is a composite of customer service, voice of the customer, co-innovation, experiential marketing, customer relationship management, customer references, internal branding, and similar efforts.

About ClearAction
ClearAction is a customer experience management consulting firm that helps organizations build enterprise-wide customer-focus and customer experience innovation. ClearAction’s skills and 20 years of pragmatic experience in customer satisfaction, quality, marketing, and organizational development catalyze value from customer feedback by applying it to daily decisions and processes company-wide. Lynn Hunsaker, head of ClearAction is author of three ebooks available on Amazon Kindle: Innovating Superior Customer Experience, Metrics You Can Manage for Success, and Customer Experience Improvement Momentum.

• "Easily" typically means without much cost as burdens in time, worry, effort and financial aspects
• "Access and use" typically means both finding the solution that helps me get something done and using to get something done (pre-purchase and post-purchase)
• "Helps me get something done" typically means that whatever I buy is a means to an end. I’m just trying to live my life and run my business.

Note that as a customer it’s all about me. Sure, I may like to provide feedback to my suppliers, but typically because I hope it will help me in the future — or at least help a fellow human being not experience the pain that I might have experienced. And this is the foundational fallacy of most CRM/CEM/NPS/C-Sat/etc. endeavors: companies tend to ask questions from their perspective, to map the customer journey from the company’s perspective, to incent employees from the company’s perspective, and on and on — NOT from the customer’s perspective.

To be customer-centric, companies need to simply see things the way customers see them, and center their daily decision-making accordingly, with all other aspirations being secondary to — or within the context of — seeing things the way customers see them.

Customer-Centricity ROI
Why would it behoove a company to be customer-centric? Because customers enable the monetary machine. Shareholders leave when customers leave, not the other way around. When companies align with customers, they abandon non-value-add and wasteful efforts, policies, processes, behaviors, time, and costs. And alignment helps customers sense that the company gets them, leading to organic customer evangelism: retention, share of wallet, positive word-of-mouth … company growth.

The book Firms of Endearment (by Sisodia, Sheth & Wolfe) explains how "endearing companies tend to be enduring companies". To identify the firms of endearment (FoE), the authors asked a broad sample of people which companies they love, and then worked backward to identify those companies’ collective, distinctive set of core values, policies, and operating attributes — and then their return on equity — amazing findings resulted. The FoE list includes the usual suspects, and then some: Amazon, BMW, Caterpillar, Google, Harley Davidson, IDEO, IKEA, JetBlue, Johnson & Johnson, LL Bean, REI, Trader Joe’s, UPS — to name a few. "They actively align the interests of all stakeholder groups, not just balance them … and can do seemingly contradictory things such as pay high wages, charge low prices, and get higher profitability." Indeed, the financials seal the deal: "the public FoEs returned 1,026 percent for investors over the 10 years ending June 30, 2006, compared to 122 percent for the S&P 500; that’s more than a 8-to-1 ratio! Over a 10-year horizon, FoEs outperformed the Good to Great companies by a 3.1-to-1 ratio." While the customer-centricity journey for these firms is still underway, they do stand out from their peers in seeing things the way customers see them, and centering their daily decision-making accordingly.

Don’t Bastardize Customer-Centricity
When the term "Customer-Centricity" is used it is frequently mis-used! It’s over-used in an attempt to varnish self-serving approaches. Claims of customer-centricity are too often stated from the faulty perspective of companies. Hence, many people view this as a buzz word, jargon, something fleeting, a misguided concept. Your company can become customer-centric, but not just by saying it. This term entails deep and broad substance. Please don’t say it if it’s not really in the fabric of your culture.

Customer-centricity is not a way of interacting; it’s a way of life that must transcend the front-line to incorporate the ripple effect of hand-offs across the entire internal value chain enterprise-wide. Mom-and-pop businesses typically find this to be a necessary way of doing business, but when a firm’s management expands, it tends to become self-focused. Marketers, engineers, accountants, and everyone else in the value chain will only be customer-centric when they view their roles as advocates for what’s important to customers — when they put other aspirations first, they’ll always be at odds with customers and create waste, distrust, and ill will. These negatives aren’t initiated by customers, they’re created by people within the company.

Customer-centricity is a culture that prevents non-value to customers, and at the same time maximizes value to customers. In a customer-centric culture, well-being of employees and shareholders is pursued within the context of doing what’s right for customers. This holds true for both B2B and B2C. Very few companies have ever been truly customer-centric. But let’s get real: since YOU are a customer, you do know what it should really mean.

What Does Client First Mean?
“One of the biggest challenges of people who do this work is they think that client experience and client loyalty is something that front-line people do,” said VanDeVelde. “We’ve tried to help people understand Client 1st is really everybody’s job, whether you’re doing item processing or deciding where to put your ATMs, or anything else. It means you’re using client input to inform all your decisions, not just when the client is in front of you. We engage our non-client-facing teammates by having them ask “Is this what the client would want as I design this process, or make this effort?”

Customer-Focus in Place of Product-Focus
Migrating from product-focus to customer-focus is a massive cultural change. “Part of our DNA is to take care of the client,” he continued. “We knew that some client-facing personnel were doing a really good job of this, but we weren’t sure they were delivering on Client 1st the way the client defines it. So we asked them “What’s most important to clients?”, and then we asked clients “What’s most important to you?” Since the two answers didn’t always line up, we realized we need to make sure we use less of our own intuition and more voice-of-client to drive our decisions.”

In November 2008, SunTrust executives rated themselves on a set of 50 client-first dimensions, and they ranked in the bottom quartile of companies participating in this assessment. “18 months into our journey we re-assessed ourselves and found we moved into the top tier of companies that exhibit these 50 customer-centric behaviors and traits. We’re excited that our effort to be client-centric has yielded this benchmark leadership.”

This transformation was achieved not only by capturing client feedback effectively, but also changing the way the company coaches, trains and hires to make Clients 1st. It had to be looked at as performance management, not only as research. “People started asking in meetings: Do we believe X because we’ve been bankers for Y years, or because clients told us?” VanDeVelde continues: “As our chief marketing officer and our head of cross-channel strategy began doing that all the time, it became common practice throughout our company. Then you begin to seek it and call people on it when they don’t. So we have a culture where we’re trying to put the customer in the center of our decisions.”

Voice of the Client
“We see a triangulated approach to client feedback:
1) Surveys based on things most important to clients during interactions (tracking, over time)
2) Qualitative client listening program via social media monitoring daily (1 full-time exclusive staff)
3) Panels associated with some communities we’ve built — so if we see something we don’t understand we can ask the panel, which in turn informs our qualitative listening approach.

“We look at our open-ended comments on recommendations, compliments, and complaints. A lot of companies look at sources of dissatisfaction to reduce them. We look holistically at compliments showing what we’re doing well, and at suggestions and recommendations as ideas — we don’t throw out any voice of client. We’re using text mining to use open-ended comments for innovation.

“They’ve made us a Center of Excellence so we’ve tried to aggregate all the surveying going on in the company to facilitate that. Our relationship managers run these programs with the lines of business (LOBs), and they’re charged with really understanding what’s important to the lines of business, and to work closely across them to find where learnings can be aggregated and facilitated out. This is a goal of the Center of Excellence. We also designed an enterprise portal to search on different research pieces we’ve done, kind of like a research library, and we’ve made access available to anyone in the company.”

Spreading Successes
“Internally we have a Client Experience & Loyalty Forum, conducted monthly for two hours, to bring in champions from across the LOBs, talk about practices, techniques, and what’s working. For example, ‘This worked for Private Wealth, so how about using it for Middle Market?’ Forum participants brings good ideas back into the LOBs; we’re always trying to cross-pollinate.

“We spend a lot of time talking about cross-channel performance. Clients have a channel preference, but the average client uses 7 different channels. So we think about cross-channel strategy to really take care of the clients when they interact with us across all the channels. And proliferation of social media is something we’re looking at, too. Our director of cross-channel strategy reports to the chief marketing officer and serves the enterprise. The stakeholders are clients first and LOBs second, to understand channel needs of clients and make sure the LOBs have prioritized the needs and are fulfilling those needs through that channel. Channel strategy is a very strategic role here at SunTrust.

“For our 1,700 teammates serving our customers on the front-line, we established a consistent way to know how way to treat clients, called Service Excellence. When our Human Resources group re-focused their guiding principles, not only did they lead out on being Client 1st but also focused on teammate engagement. We believe that highly engaged teammates deliver great experiences which cause clients to be loyal, and creates profit growth. We worked with our HR partners quite a bit to understand how we can coach teammates to be more engaged, get leaders to encourage more engagement, know that they’re creating great experiences for clients, and measure that. HR was also highly involved in our training programs to create our model of Service Excellence. And we ask clients to give feedback on these things, to make sure they’re getting what is important and relevant to them, since our clients are the ones that helped us build our Service Excellence criteria.”

SunTrust’s CEO William Rogers says: “We remain focused on executing our strategies to drive better core performance and efficiency across the organization.” And VanDeVelde sums up their formula for success: “The business saw Voice of Client 1st as part of a larger business transformation. It’s about positioning investments in capturing client feedback and performance management and addressing it holistically, beyond market research: How you are leading, using insights, prescribing action, holding people accountable, and how you’re communicating the value of it.”

Hear the full 28-minute interview on the Customer Experience Optimization online talk show, along with recorded interviews with numerous other companies that are making impressive strides in strengthening their customer-centric culture.

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