Bottom line
Launching a customer experience program doesn’t have to be a complex project. You can start with a small step and grow from there. Looking for the first touch point to kick off your customer experience efforts from? Ask yourself these three questions, find the common denominator in your answers, and start there.
1. What are your business goals?
2. What are your 3 most valuable customer journeys?
3. What does your customer perceive as a successful experience?
The full process
Accenture’s latest B2B customer experience survey shows that about 90% of B2B executives recognize that customer experience has a leading role in their strategy. However, only 23% of those who are actively focusing on their customer experience and journeys, see the desirable business outcomes.
The fact is, that while most of the B2C companies are talking and practicing CX, most of the B2B and Saas companies are still warming up their engines. If you are in the Saas and B2B world, you company is either:
1. A very innovative one that has adopted customer experience strategies, incorporated tools and analytics into the journeys, communications and workflows. Most probably, you have designed your initial product and sales funnel with the important customer journeys in mind. meaning you have automated data collection in every step and touch point, as well as a proper internal communication process and, accordingly, communication with your customers .
2. In case you are connected with the vast majority, you acknowledge the importance of customer experience throughout your journeys. However, while building your offering and customer flows, you haven’t taken the fully organized approach of laying these foundations. It’s like buying a home that’s been on the market versus planning and building it from scratch. You do what you can with the resources available to you, to get as close as possible to the experience you desire. And then, when the time comes, you will either address more journeys and flows, or, you will build it all from scratch.
As customer journey and customer experience jargon is a relatively new field in B2B, unsurprisingly most of the leading enterprises, and Saas companies as well, fall into the 2nd type.
Yet it’s not all grey. Even if you fall under that category, with some thought and planning you too can get your foot in the door and enjoy the fruits of success sooner rather than later.
Usually, to affect your customers’ experience and to impact customer success, we recommend to reverse engineer your perception of success. To do so, answer the questions below:
1. What are your business goals?
2. What are your 3 most valuable customer journeys?
3. What does your customer perceive as a successful experience?
Find the common denominator that lies within them. That will lead you to the first touch point and experience to focus on.
These questions above are pretty easy to answer. However, the trick is to connect the dots between them and to find your common denominator. For me this is the first and most important journey to tackle. Succeed here, and the rest will follow.
The secret of your success lies in the 3rd question. To answer it requires a different mindset than the two above. The 3rd question is like analysing a marketing persona. It takes into consideration more than just your product and user flows.
For example:
Let’s look at a big data analytics company. Their business objectives are increasing their customer base, average yearly revenue per customer and reducing churn. One of the successful journeys in addition to customer acquisition could be a user accessing their platform 3-5 times a week, extracting and sharing data and connecting new touch points for analytics.
However, the experience for this company’s customers is not just obtaining the right data. Not even if it’s quick and just requires one click. To them, a memorable experience is when they present a top notch presentation to their boss and get a pat on the back and a good word in return. That presentation consists of beautiful and coherent slides, using the company’s brand. The flow that leads from statistics and findings to actionable insights and is well organized. And, the key takeaways have a big WOW effect.
Why is this a memorable experience? Because it turns our user to more than just the guy or gal who collect data. Rather our user appears as smart and forward thinking enough to make some useful suggestions for the business.
In this case, the common denominator is an ongoing usage of the platform. The unique experience though is what will make that happen, and funny enough it’s more than just the data. It’s turning our user into a star. If we want to turn our user into an appreciated star we need to give him the ability to shine. Otherwise, as easy as getting the data he wants from the platform may be, soon there will be another solution in the market, as easy to use, cheaper and the sales rep is an old buddy of theirs.
The funny thing is that this memorable experience doesn’t just serve your goal for retention and satisfaction. It also serves your new revenue stream. Working with B2B and Saas companies on their customer success programs for the past years has shown us time and again – that the experience that keeps our customer on board and happy is also the one that initially sells. More on how we use customer success programs for lead generation in our next posts.
