Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Customer Experience But Were Afraid To Ask...

The phrase "customer experience" is on everyone's lips these days, so we thought it was high time we ran a series of blogs to deal with how this issue is being dealt with in the B2B world. So, over the next few months, that is precisely what we aim to do.

But before you can answer the question of how to improve customer experience, I think it is useful to ask why it should suddenly be so important. After all, isn't all a bit obvious? We've known for some time that making customers happy is a better idea than pissing them off.  But as with so much business thinking, there are some critical subtleties of meaning here. Look a little closer and you'll see why customer experience is actually a more complex issue than it first seems, and deserving of further analysis by B2B organisations.

Here are, I believe, the three main reasons that the concept of customer experience has risen up the business agenda.



1. The temples have fallen
The first reason can be seen in the tough economic times we live in. For years, we have built up trust in brands based on pure reputation, rather than capability. But brand heritage counts for less in a world recovering from a crisis where the big solid performers were shown to be paper-thin. The current customer experience is more important than a reputation based on what they did a generation ago.

IBM, for example, should be considered as a solid brand because of what they are doing now, and not because they were the pioneers of business computing. Why should the company that invented the mainframe be trusted with the multi-million dollar contract to plan and implement an IT strategy in 2010? The answer is that they prove consistently, by virtue of a well-managed customer experience, that they have the qualities to do the job.

Yet reputations based on heritage rather than present capability have a habit of persisting - until recently that is. As some of the world's leading financial institutions crumbled under the pressures of an economic crisis of their own making, business decision makers realised that reputations weren't what they used to be. A big name should count for nothing. What you need is a big experience.

2. The principle of secondary experience
The second reason that B2B marketers should be thinking about customer experience is that the way we seek information about potential suppliers has changed beyond recognition.

The influence of the Buyersphere - that is the self-contained world where buyers seek recommendations from each other, with the result that they have diminishing reliance on the promises of suppliers - is well documented. A recent survey of 500 business buyers in the Buyersphere Report showed that the four most influential 'channels' of information used when considering purchases at all stages of the buying cycle were word of mouth, Twitter, blogs and Facebook.

But then this should come as no surprise since social media tools can be viewed as little more than the enablers of electronic word of mouth. In the interest of fairness, I should add that these were not necessarily the most frequently used of the various information channels in the research, but their use was increasing. Studies of usage amongst different age groups showed that the use of social media to inform business purchases has been growing fast, and will continue to grow with the gradual arrival of the Facebook generation in decision-making positions.

The point is that a good customer experience is no longer just relevant to the person who receives it first-hand. It is now so easy to tell others of the experience you have received - and there is a huge global audience waiting to hear about it - that customer experience is no longer just a one-to-one, personal issue. We are vicariously experiencing brands through social media every day, whether by reading blogs or noting user ratings. The reported brand experience is here to stay.

3. The connected world
Another related factor that has added to the wave of interest in customer experience is that the term often refers to the 'service wrap-around' rather than to the product itself. The reason for this, in turn, is that as brands seek to differentiate themselves in near-commoditised markets, they seek refuge in service-oriented positioning statements. "We're the people behind the brand". "We care because you matter". "Understanding customer needs", etc.

And as mobile communications and social media channels mature there are more and more opportunities to interact with brands [or more importantly perhaps to interact with the 'people behind the brand'], which means there are many more opportunities every day to really make an impact on customers by offering unbelievable customer service.

But for every Rackspace [a hosting company that lives and breathes this philosophy, and owes its astonishing success to the fact that they really do offer unbelievable service, rather than just talking about it], there will also be a customer service disaster story somewhere about a company that conspicuously fails to walk the customer dedication walk. As always, there is a bell-curve distribution here and the customer service high-achievers are neatly balanced by the laggards. And as customers become more demanding, the bell curve moves slowly to the right, making it harder and harder to excel.

So customer experience really does matter, and the reason for its current popularity as an issue for B2B marketers to think about is a little more complex than many would think.

Presenting the Customer Experience blog series
But what can you do about it? This blog will host a series of six posts over the next three months focusing on what B2B brands should be doing to optimise the customer experience.

We will cover practical tips that go beyond answering the phone within ten rings and investigate the activities that are helping some B2B brands to provide a customer experience that is really setting them apart from the chasing pack. With references to real examples, the blog series will examine the issue of customer experience at the different stages of the B2B buying cycle, starting with the needs identification stage and moving on all the way through the sales funnel to the critical post-sales phase.

If you would like to learn more about how B2B marketers should be approaching customer service, come back here every couple of weeks. Better still use the RSS bookmark, or click here to request reminders by email. We'll even publish the whole series as a free whitepaper at the end.

In fact, we'll do all we can to keep you happy. But, dear prospective customer, isn't that the point?