Fantastic customer experiences can stimulate the right emotions in customers, while alleviating them of negative ones. From this approach both parties profit, but how?

With the cost of new customer acquisition totalling as much as seven times that of retaining an existing customer, it is unsurprising that the smart marketers are dedicating increasing resources to retention rather than focusing on acquisition alone.

Loyalty is only one by-product of great customer experiences.  Companies that strive to deliver consistently excellent customer experience experiences will reap greater rewards in the long run.

The application of customer experience in B2B has traditionally been very product-focused, seeking to measure sales and returns rather than customer satisfaction – in other words, the focus has been on products and service transactions rather than customer needs and the customer journey as a whole.

It should come as no surprise to learn that B2C companies are more likely to have someone driving customer experience than their B2B counterparts.  However, customer experience is just as important here as in the consumer world.  B2B customers are everyday consumers once away from the desk, so why shouldn’t we expect our business banking facilities to be just as sophisticated and straightforward as our First Direct current account?  Why shouldn’t computer peripheral ordering be as easy and reliable as buying books from Amazon?  In short, B2B customers’ expectations have been raised by their experiences as consumers and now it is up to B2B players to raise their game.

The embodiment of the brand

A customer experience is the embodiment of the company brand, occurring at each point of interaction between an organisation and its customer.  Essentially, every time your brand comes into contact with customers, its performance will be measured against their expectations – both in terms of the actual performance of your company and the emotions that the interaction evokes – all of which will impact either positively or negatively on customers’ perceptions of your company.

The first step in building an effective customer experience is to identify what your customers feel is most important to them during the customer journey.  This is not as simple as it used to be; low prices are not the sole deciding factor.  Instead their experiences as consumers are impacting on their work purchases, driven as they are to seek out the best-value product with flexible delivery times to suit their schedule and pre- and after-sales support that treats them as an intelligent individual.  In other words, value – not cost – is key.

An example of a generic customer journey can be seen in the diagram below:

Figure 1. A generic Customer Journey – kae: marketing intelligence

B2B companies have traditionally tended towards thinking from the ‘inside-out’.  In the effort to create efficient supply chains, companies tend to reduce the number of steps deemed to have no tangible benefits without fully understanding that these steps can be used to reinforce intangible benefits, such as brand awareness and repetition of the core brand principles.  In order to promote an effective customer experience, B2B companies need to change the way that they think and view the process from the customers’ perspective.

Thinking from the ‘outside-in’

Once you know what it is that your customers value most, an effective customer experience programme identifies how the organisation and its employees will behave in order to evoke these reactions at every point of contact and deliver on the company’s brand promise.  This exemplifies the ‘outside-in’ approach that is crucial in delivering an effective customer experience. 

By viewing the customer experience from the ‘outside-in’, companies are placing themselves in their customers’ shoes rather than focusing merely on sales and returns.  By mapping the customer journey from start to finish, B2B companies can follow their customers, from the setting of expectations – via brand image and word of mouth – to point of sale interaction and finally post-experience review.

Taking each of these stages into account, companies then need to match customers’ desired feelings with specific targets and initiatives capable of generating these.  Only by implementing these measures at both strategic and actionable levels can companies build an effective customer experience programme.

Putting it into practice

The end goal of customer experience is to become the guiding principle by which the whole organisation is directed, structured, populated, targeted and measured.

The Customer Experience Ecosystem is a visual representation of all the possible inputs that need to be co-ordinated in order to deliver a great customer experience.  It allows us to map the relationships and inter-dependencies of the full range of inputs and strived-for results.  On the input side, this includes top-line considerations such as Customer, Channel, Environment, Company, Brand and Competitor.  Drilling further down, and as illustrated below, “Customer” can then be sub-divided into ‘Touch Points, Segmentation & Prioritisation, Customer Needs, Customer Journey and CRM’, each of which sub-divides further to a point of tactical consideration.

Figure 2. The Customer Experience Ecosystem – kae: marketing intelligence

Given the degree of integration required, rolling out a cohesive customer experience programme demands top-level adoption by a C-level executive within the company to drive the process forward and ensure that the ecosystem evolves over time.  Customer experience is not an install-and-forget programme but a change of mindset.  It is a dynamic ecosystem, not just a means of driving loyalty alone.  Feedback loops, demonstrable ROI and other measures ensure that the value is recognised and advertised, proof of principle ensuring self-perpetuation.

Evolving experiences

The firm that consistently exceeds its customers’ expectations worries least about retention.  By doing this well, your retention rates will increase while your cost per customer falls: the proverbial ‘win-win’ situation. Companies that deliver excellent customer experiences reap the rewards in the long run as they not only retain a higher number of customers, but also watch as their satisfied customer base act as vocal advocates: the “must-have” unpaid sales force.

By Huw Watkins,
Account Director,
Kae: Marketing Intelligence

Email: huw.watkins@kae.com
Tel: +44 (0)20 7960 3377

About the author

Huw Watkins is account director at kae: marketing intelligence. He has over 15 years of marketing experience as both a client and a consultant operating at senior levels in the UK and overseas. Working across multiple B2C and B2B sectors, his focus has been upon identifying new market opportunities and generating and delivering innovative and sustainable solutions to drive revenue growth.