How do B2B organizations create exceptional customer experiences? Linda speaks with Jim Tincher, author of “Do B2B Better” about best practices in B2B customer experience design.
Thanks for listening to the B2B BRAND180 Strategy podcast with Linda Fanaras, CEO/Strategist at Millennium Agency.
Linda Fanaras:
Welcome to the B2B Brand 180 Strategy Podcast. Hi, I’m Linda Fanaras, CEO of Millennium Agency, and if you want to transform your B2B marketing into a powerhouse brand, then you may want to listen in. Here you will gain the latest insights on how to position your brand different from the competition and uncover “white space” in the market so you can craft a B2B marketing strategy that drives new opportunities. Today I’m excited to have our guest, Jim Tincher, customer experience expert and best-selling author of “Do B2B Better,” he is a nationally recognized customer experience expert and keynote speaker. So let’s get started. Hi Jim. Welcome to the B2B Brand 180 podcast. Thanks for joining me today.
Jim Tincher:
Thanks Linda. Glad to be here.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah, it’s great to have you. So why don’t we get started. You can tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Jim Tincher:
You betcha. So, always been customer-focused, often working in business-to-business brands, whether that is corporate training, manufacturing, and always had that customer focus. And how the organization can actually make more money through a better customer experience has always been my focus. Back to my first job out of college. I worked for a printer manufacturer and was going on my first vacation. I asked if I could visit a customer while I was there. That conversation confused my boss, but that’s always been my approach is how do you get the customers, how do you understand more so that you can give them better products, better solutions, and create a healthier company? And that’s just always been my focus. I started the company nine years ago. It was nine years ago two weeks ago, and where we really help organizations, especially in the business-to-business space, understand more about their customer needs, what are the moments of truth in the relationship, those critical moments, and how do you do better against them? So you create an outcome where customers want to spend more with you, stay longer, and also interact in ways that are less expensive for both you and for them.
Linda Fanaras:
That’s fantastic. You know what I really liked about what you spoke about is the fact that you interviewed quite a few companies, and I’m wondering if you could speak to that a little bit. So you didn’t exactly sit behind, you didn’t sit in a coffee shop and write your book, you know, just based on what came to mind. You actually did your research, which I think is fantastic. So maybe you could speak about that and how that process was and how valuable it was for the book.
Jim Tincher:
You bet. So we actually started out first, there was some research that showed that most programs are not very good at customer experience. And let me define that, first. Customer experience is a deliberate process of managing your customers experiences with you, but creating that- a better experience for them, making it easier to work with you, more pleasurable so that they will return and come back to you with buying more, by staying longer. And we started out in a conference room, my leadership team, we read some research saying that most programs are not good at it and B2B is even worse than most. And so, we did actually put together our ideas, you know, kind of in the conference room what we thought it was. But we knew that probably wasn’t right. And so, we wanted to go through a deliberate process. And we interviewed over, spent over 200 hours interviewing business-to-business leaders to understand how they do this work, whether they were really effective or ineffective, surveyed hundreds more. I also got a chance to shadow three programs. UKG, they are a software firm. They do HR and other payroll software. Dow, the advanced manufacturer and Wolters Kluwer financial services, they have- if you ever get a mortgage, you look at the bottom of that mortgage, odds are Wolters Kluwer’s name is there because they help banks stay compliant.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah. That’s great. That’s fantastic. You know, it’s interesting, I was talking to a marketing expert, and they said to me, “You know, you guys do brand B2B marketing strategy?” And I said yes. And they’re like, “That’s actually really hard compared to B2C.” Like B2C is easy, B2B is really tricky, and you have to really understand what you’re doing. So it’s great that you came out with this book. Can you talk about what customer experience is? I think it’s a word that people throw around a lot. They don’t know if it’s part of the cadence nurturing process. They don’t know if it’s actually the engagement process of how companies work with their customers. Maybe you can just speak to that a little bit and give us some examples of like a B2B versus a B2C type scenario.
Jim Tincher:
Sure. Beause you’re right, it’s much more complex. So first of all, customer experience at its most basic is the perceptions your customers have of all of their interactions with you. So how they feel about interacting with your sales team, your account management, your customer service team, your ability to deliver products on time, or to have software that works well. All of that rolls up into their perceptions of you. The practice of customer experience is to improve those perceptions through working across the organization to create a more pleasurable experience, an easier experience for your customers, more pleasurable sounds really soft, and most B2B programs are not soft, but there’s quite a bit of research out there that it’s actually the emotional connection with a client that matters the most. They’ll forgive you a lot if they feel you have their back. And so, it’s how do you create that perception? How do you work across the organization to create that consistent belief that your company is there for them?
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah. I love that. That is so true. I talked to my staff about that a lot. It’s, it is about perception. It’s about making them feel as though they’re the only ones that you’re talking to, like they’re your only customer or your only client. And how do you do that through a great customer experience? And I think that’s what you’re speaking about here is building out programs to actually accomplish just that. What would you, what would you envision as like a really amazing customer experience program? It has to be multifaceted, sort of this omni channel strategy? I mean, what do you see putting some of those pieces together? If we were to take a technology company as an example, or a manufacturing company as an example.
Jim Tincher:
You bet I, I can talk about each of those, two of the case studies – there are four case studies I use throughout the book as well as a lot of other ones I bring in – but these four companies do things really well consistently. And so, I’ll speak to two of them, which is Dow, the advanced manufacturer and UKG, the HR and payroll software provider. They have very good programs and they’re what we call change makers. We found that maybe one out of five programs in B2B is a change maker. The vast majority are what we call hopefuls. They’re doing good work. Maybe your organization uses a net promoter score or does other survey work and they hope it matters, but they can’t prove they’re creating that environment where customers want to work with you more. But Dow and EKG are great examples of programs that can show that, “Yes, our work is creating more profit for the company because customers want to come to us first.” Two interesting things about B2B. First of all, depending on your sector, retention may not be your biggest issue. You know, for example, Dow rarely loses clients. It’s not about retention as it is often in B2C, it’s more about shared wallet, and reducing cost. How do we get our customers to order more from us? Dow has certain products that are unique that customers can’t get anywhere else, so they’ll always use them for that. But how do they win in those extra products? Similar UKG, ripping out your payroll provider, that’s a big deal. And that’s probably multiple millions of dollars. Yes, they have retention that they want to focus on. They clearly do. But it’s more about how do we help our clients understand we can solve more of the problems through additional products? And how do we make it easy on our customers so that both of us are spending less money in this relationship on operational issues. And what they do is they understand overall both organizations have a ton of data. Most B2B programs do, and often what happens, you have the data people over at some other silo way over there. You have your customer experience people over here looking at surveys and let’s not ever have them talk to each other, you know, Heaven forbid that, and it’s all done in isolation. But Dow, for example, we had a conference couple weeks ago and Riccardo Porta leads the customer experience program, and he talked about a question he was given: “What is the role of inventory in my business and what does customer experience have to say about that?” That’s a really good question with something we always work on in, in manufacturing is, what is that right level of inventory? Clearly, if you can reduce inventory, there’s a tradeoff, you get much better working capital, but you’re at risk of not having the product when your customers want it. He spent 25 minutes just walking through how he answered that question, looking at the availability to promise, ATP, when somebody orders in following that through to say that when you reduce inventory past a certain threshold (he listed what that was, I can’t share that), that what you actually do is you decrease confidence – they measure confidence – in your customers, which means they order less from you in future quarters. It was a marvelous way of bringing together the organization’s data and then working to make decisions on choosing the right level of inventory to create customers who feel more confident ordering from you in the future, and therefore do so. Very advanced level. Most programs don’t even think about that.
Linda Fanaras:
Right. Very interesting.
Jim Tincher:
And he’s able to do the math. Yeah. UKG is another example. Roxie Strohmenger was, was there, and she talks a lot about confidence. They measure that, it’s what we call an emotional north star, and she shows that when a customer is confident, they’ll still call you the first time an issue happens, but a non-confident customer calls you every time that issue happens. A confident customer will flip over to self-serve, solve the problem on their own, saving both you and them time and money. And so, she’s able to track that actual, how many times are they calling you, as well as link confidence to future orders, and be able to really create this structure where you know that if you increase survey scores, which is what most customers programs look at, they’re able to prove that actually creates higher EBIT for the organization as a result.
Linda Fanaras:
So are these companies instituting different marketing tactics and people tactics as part of this customer experience? How are they actually going about creating a program that actually works? So I know, you know, we spoke about some different things here, but what are the actual tactics around that?
Jim Tincher:
Sure. Well, we identified four of them. The first one is to actually link the work you’re doing to financial outcomes. That sounds really basic yet it’s hard to do and both Dow and UKG are examples of organizations that do it. Most can’t. But they show that that when customers report better survey scores, which is how most customer experience track the experience, that it also relates to all these outcomes, such as increased order velocity or upsells. So they start with actually creating a linkage between customer experience and the health of the business. It feels a little funny to say the way to start creating a better experience for your customers is to show how you’re making more money. But we all know that’s what executive responds to, is how do we make more money? That’s what executives are responsible for, and they start with creating that link. Now, the one that’s going to drive a lot of your listeners crazy is the one about an emotional north star, to actually measure emotions. And most of our B2B clients have a hard time with that because they see the, the decision-making experience as being rational, that it’s all based on price, value, but it’s not true. And so, when I met Dan Futter, Dan is the Chief Commercial Officer at Dow, and we were helping them work through their complaints experience. If you’ve ever had a complaint with your vendor and they don’t resolve it quickly, I think we all know that’s not a good outcome. And they wanted to understand more about their customers and how they could build a better complaints journey. Okay. All makes sense. And I met with Dan. He said, “Jim, my goal is to create a complaints experience that’s enjoyable.” I said, “I’m sorry, Dan. You meant effective or easy, right?” “No, I want it to be enjoyable.” Now, Dan has the data. They don’t measure likelihood to recommend or net promoter score as many do. They measure customer experience on three questions: How effective is it to work with Dow, how easy is it to work with Dow, and how enjoyable is it to work? And their data shows that if it’s effective or easy, yeah customers act a little bit differently, but when a customer says it’s enjoyable to work with Dow, then their behavior changes. Their order velocity goes up, they order more products, and what’s a home run to Dow is they’re way more likely to work with Dow to create new to the world innovations. That emotions lead to this future behavior, very few programs track that, but both Dow and UKG does. UKG measures confidence and they can show when customers are more confident, cost to serve drops quite a bit. And likely to order more goes up. They also then bring in that data so they can look at, for example, ATP, availability to promise, is a Dow measurement, they look at actual calls to the contact center, open complaints, they bring all that and they have a comprehensive view of the experience. And then the one that’s missing most often is they have a deliberate approach to change management to show how everybody matters. When I was talking with Riccardo, he talked about one of their biggest challenges was to help the teams that are in manufacturing actually at the plants understand how they impact the customer experience because they’re so far removed. Another person I interviewed for the book, Sam Wegman, is with Univar. They’re a distributor for Dow and other chemical manufacturers. And she started her career in accounts payable and she thought there was no relationship whatsoever to the customer in accounts payable. You might think the same thing. Your listeners probably, “Well, yeah. There is no relationship.” Then she got promoted to customer service and she realized that she was getting complaints because they didn’t have inventory because accounts payable was trying to delay payments to save on cash flow. So her decision with accounts payable to delay payments actually ended up hurting their customers because they didn’t have inventory. And so, she’s now made it her mission to help the entire organization understand how their role specifically impacts customers.
Linda Fanaras:
You know, the one thing that I find very um, interesting is you take this sort of B2B, you know, how to do B2B better, what this customer experience is, and you talk about the emotional connect, which is extremely important. In fact, that’s how you devise your actual brand and you devise your brand messaging. So you take examples like Amazon as a potential, although they’re not necessarily B2B, but you know them for their variety of products, their low prices, their overnight delivery, and there’s a feeling, there’s an emotional feeling that you get with that brand, and you get that emotional feeling with every single brand that you work. And the idea here is I think, what you’re speaking about, is whatever that is needs to just penetrate through the entire company, through every experience that they have with their B2B customer. Because if they can make all that unite and match up and marry up, then they are really ahead of the game and so much beyond a lot of their competition. So it’s taking all those pieces, wrapping it up and executing on it and doing it successfully. So I, I do like what you, you’re saying there on the emotional component. I think that’s a very huge piece that people maybe underestimate.
Jim Tincher:
Guaranteed. In fact, most people think of Amazon as about being easy and they are no question about it, but they actually measure trust. And the, when Jeff Bezos was in front of Congress, he reported that Amazon was the second most trusted brand in the US after Apple. And so, they measure trust as their emotional outcome. Another example, we work with a software company that for them it’s confidence. And when we look at- we actually measure six emotions. Confidence being one of the positive ones. Frustration, the negative, and for all those in software out there, exhaustion. If you’ve ever implemented software, you know, that can be exhausting. It doesn’t speak well to the implementation. Somebody says they’re exhausted, when we see people say they’re exhausted, so many bad downstream behaviors happen. They’re never going to buy you again. If they have any say in it, they’re going to advocate against you. They’re going to cost you more money as well as you try to recover from that. And so, when we measure, we see somebody that says, “Yes, I’m exhausted,” all the alarm bells go off because this is a relationship that’s highly at-risk.
Linda Fanaras:
Right. Yeah. Fantastic. How do you measure, like, large companies that might be dealing with different target audiences in the B2B sector? Do you envision those being treated differently? How would a company tackle something like that? Because usually I would think that what you’re instituting as part of this experience has to be kind of across the company, across the board, but what happens when you’re dealing with different types of target audiences?
Jim Tincher:
Well, that’s, isn’t that the amazing thing about B2B, that you have that? I used to work at Best Buy, and it was big news to us that you had to worry about both the husband and the wife. That was news to us. Like, oh, we’ve got two people to worry about. Hey, I think every B2B relationship would, every B2B company would be happy if they only had to work with two stakeholders at a company, right? It’s more like 2000 or more, depending on the size of the organization. And that takes a deliberate approach to understand and to report on the behaviors and the sentiment of the different roles. Now, ideally in your CRM, you’ve identified different roles for each of the different people. They are the economic decision maker. Of course, economic decision maker makes the ultimate decision and then doesn’t pay you much attention after that, often, depending what your role is. You’ve got the user. Users matter, but maybe they matter a little bit less than the others. Then you have your influencers. And so, this is a fairly simplistic, you can get much more advanced, but let’s use that as example. Your influencers matter because they often have the ear of the economic decision maker, and if you aren’t measuring them and how they interact with you, then you’ll be in for a surprise because you think things are great with the economic decision maker, but he or she has a rebellion on their hands from all the influences that are frustrated. And so, what the great programs do is they deliberately measure each and they track. They also do it by role. I did some work with the, the Grand AV – they were one of our case studies in the book, Laurie Englert leads the customer experience program – and we did reporting based on role. And the installers, who was their direct customer, absolutely loved them. Who didn’t love them was finance, but they were okay with that because they were the most expensive provider. And so, they were not trying to optimize for finance to love them, but it was still great to be able to measure that. What was most important was that the installers, the ones who actually recommend their brands, were absolutely in love with the brand. They were able to track that and maintain that relationship and see how it compared with others.
Linda Fanaras:
Right. What you’re really saying here is if you’re looking at customer experience, it’s, it’s really connecting the customer, their experience to the financial aspect, and measuring that against their emotions and really getting a handle on the operational behavioral and all the financial stuff that goes with that to, like I said, package it up and make sure you have it right. What’s the best way for a company to go about something like that? It sounds like a big ask. It sounds like a big job to be able to do that successfully. Is there a way that companies can get started with some on a smaller scale to start to build a, a program internally that actually does track that?
Jim Tincher:
Yeah, It, I guarantee if we, if we got all of your listeners in a room, 90% of them are doing very little if any of this. Most programs simply put out a survey. They may look, okay, last year those who gave us a high score on the net promoter score survey, they stayed with us longer than those with low score, and that’s where it all ends. If we look at Dow, UKG, Haggerty’s another one we interviewed, all these programs it took them about two years to build this solid approach, and most of them, not all of them, started with one thing very specifically that most don’t. And by the way, when I share this next stat in customer experience circles, they hate this stat. And that is don’t hire somebody from the outside to run your customer experience. Hire somebody from the inside who cares about customers but has learned how to drive change in your organization. Most people take somebody, “Oh, they did customer experience for a competitor, let’s bring ’em over here.” And they’re not able to move the needle because you are different from your competitor. If we look at uh, Riccardo, he came from supply chain. Probably not what you would be thinking. But he has this wonderful ability to tie the data together. Now, Roxie did come from the outside, but she was a consultant, and so she knew how to work across organizations. She’s, I think, our only example of a change maker who came from the outside. We look at Nancy. She is, Nancy’s with Haggerty. She led their marketing organization and moved over to customer experience. Laurie Englert as well, came from marketing. It doesn’t matter where they came from as long as two things are true: they have a passion for customers, and they know how to drive change in your organization. It’s far easier to learn how to learn customer experience than is to learn how to get your executives to change their opinions. And so, take somebody with a proven track record for that and then start building the infrastructure so they can really understand the behaviors of your clients and how it’s impacted by your operations and vice versa. So they need to be comfortable with that data and bring all that data together so they can understand it. And then it comes down to some of the blocking and tackling of building surveys, and so on. But those are the big things, is somebody who understands your business and cares about customers. Start there/
Linda Fanaras:
That makes sense. I mean, it looks like you would have to integrate your dashboards, your, any sort of journey mapping software that you may have, any sort of analytics and start to really track that on a holistic level to make sure that you’re optimizing that B2B customer experience. So that’s great.
Jim Tincher:
I’m so glad you brought that up by the way, dashboards. Okay. That surprised me about the power of a dashboard. It was nowhere on my list of things to think about when I started doing these interviews, I started tracking following people around and because most customer experience dashboards are just survey scores and the executives look at it once a year, just before bonus time, and that’s all they ever look at it. But when I was out at Dow, Jen Zamora used to lead the customer experience program. She’s now in a global change management role at Dow, and she was sharing what is my favorite business problem ever. I tell all of my clients, “I want you to have this problem.” They created this dashboard that brought together the operational data, for example, on time delivery and to get it right, along with the sentiment to answer all the executives questions about customer experience in one spot. Jen shared to me that they had a thousand licenses for the dashboard, and they ran out of licenses because it created such a compelling dashboard that all the executives were logging into it. They had to start telling lower-level executives they couldn’t look at the dashboard. Now, I want all my clients to have that problem because it means you are creating compelling information and you’re getting everybody on board the customer experience. They ended up having to go back to Qualtrics, the survey vendor that they worked with, and negotiate for unlimited licenses for the dashboards. I talked to Riccardo a couple weeks ago and four years later, they actually, two and a half years later, they still have almost a thousand people per quarter logging into the dashboard because they’re creating that compelling information that answers the questions executives. The power of a dashboard, I didn’t expect to be one of the outcomes. That’s powerful.
Linda Fanaras:
That’s very, very powerful. So what would you say is the biggest takeaway for, our listeners here today? What do you think they should really take away regarding this customer experience? If you were to give them like a couple of key things to do or recommend, what would you say?
Jim Tincher:
Well, first I would say if you have a customer experience program, give it a hard eye. What we found was that most programs, what we call the hopefuls, they report on sentiment. Here’s what customers said. They said they’re likely to stay with us. They said they’re likely to recommend us. They said, they said, they said. That’s what hopefuls do, and they’re not adding value to your organization. A change maker analyzes and changes behaviors. So if you have an existing customer experience program, look at what they’re doing. Are they talking about sentiment, or are they showcasing behavior and are they changing it? That’s the first thing. Now, if you don’t have a customer experience program, or if you find out your program is not doing what’s needed, then I would look for that passionate person inside your organization, somebody who cares about customers and who has a proven track record of making change in the organization, and I would put them in charge of your customer experience. Strongly recommend. It’s at least at the vice presidential level. You can get some change to senior director, but that’s hard, but vice presidential level and say, “We’re gonna give you the data you need,” that’s the third thing, is give them the data. Help them bring that data together from your different systems so they can help understand where your operations are supporting your customers and leading them to want to buy more from you, and where maybe your operations are letting customers down, and so you can make a deliberate decision. Where do we make changes to our operations that will have the greatest return for our customers that will come back to give us the greatest return to the company. So number one, look at your existing program. Are they actually reporting on behavior? Second of all, if not, or if you don’t have one, put somebody who knows how to drive change, who loves customers in charge, and then third, make sure they’re looking at the actual data combined with the sentiment to see where you’re creating outcomes, where customers want to spend more with you and stay longer, and where you’re just creating more costs for you and your customers instead.
Linda Fanaras:
Yep. That’s great. What would be a process for a company that just wants to get started? So they have somebody, but what does that person do? They have to figure out ways to really measure this and build upon it in a very, effective way. And because it’s, I think it’s something that’s very niche., the question might be is “Where do I start? Yeah, I have somebody. Now what?”
Jim Tincher:
And it does, it’s a little bit of a, if you use a college example, a 201 class. Yeah. There are other sources. I like the Customer Experience Professionals Association to really help a new person get started and they’re a great resource overall. But my book will help you understand where to take it to the next level. So they may be- take them six months as well to get started. Now, my organization also worked with the CXPA, the Customer Experience Professional Association, to map the first-year experience of a leader to see what they need to be working on. So I would say if you have nothing, get my book, but then also talk to the CXPA. As you hire your person, that’s where they can really get some great resources and then the book will start to make sense and they can start implementing that change. It’s very much of a how to do this filled with case studies. I like to say that if I took out the case studies, it’d basically be the length of “Goodnight Moon.” It’s all about the stories and how real groups do it. So yeah, it’s CXPA and the book together.
Linda Fanaras:
Fantastic. Awesome. I just want to thank you Jim Tincher, author of, “Do B2B Better.” It’s a way to drive growth through game changing customer experience, definitely pick that up. And thank you for joining us today on B2B Brand 180 Podcast. And if you like what you heard today, press like, share, or subscribe. Thank you very much.
