#58 - Titanic surveys, Ideal Customer Profiles, Pre-mortems, and lots more

Welcome to my 58th Customer Analytics Newsletter here on LinkedIn. Regular readers will already know that I have recently been writing about this special time of year. (No, I am not talking about Diwali.) This is the time when overall 2024 budgets have been locked down in most companies, but the detailed plans for the year have not. I urge all readers who have not yet done so to read my last three articles on LinkedIn and to pay attention. Customer Experience and Customer Success professionals must be viewed as critical to customer retention and growth, rather than as just another overhead cost that can easily be reduced. I do have an additional point on the general subject to make today, and more may occur to me. That said, here are the subjects covered in this newsletter:

• Renegotiating survey budgets . . . (cue music from Titanic)
• Structural mismatch between marketing and sales team objectives?
• Webcast - Customer AI for CX and VOC teams
• CX Iconoclast podcast with Joe Wheeler - Digital first, people second?
• Pre-Mortems - Essential step in project management
• American Customer Satisfaction Institute Retail Holiday Preview

Let's get on with the show!

Renegotiating survey budgets . . . (cue music from Titanic)

A casual discussion revealed a surprise earlier this week. A CX leader I know said they are renegotiating their Qualtrics contract, comparing with Medallia and others, essentially to try to save some money. I asked my usual boring questions: what is your response rate, how do you find out what each of the non-responding customers wants, and so on. Nothing. No response. I was just speaking some sort of incomprehensible language, apparently.

I suppose I should have tried to take a completely different approach to this question as what I tried certainly did not accomplish anything. The phrase, or analogy that works for me here is a phrase that I have only heard in English, and never in other languages, at least so far: Renegotiating survey software contracts is like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic!

My point is that it is pointless. The whole survey world has hit an iceberg and is sinking. The survey Titanic has been leaking due to response rates. Machine Learning is the iceberg. Why bother spending lots of money getting information on 10% of your customers when for about the same amount, quite often less, you can get detailed information, NPS and retention predictions, and action suggestions for 100% of your customers. Please, please, leave the sinking survey vessel and move to 2023. (Now you can cue Céline Dion... yes, that's it... your heart will indeed go on...)

Structural mismatch between marketing and sales team objectives?

The responsibilities we give the various teams in our companies are not nearly as aligned with the way customers buy things from us as we would like to think. Let's take sales responsibilities and marketing responsibilities in B2B as examples. Two major marketing responsibiities are to generate as much awareness and as much demand as possible, casting the net far and wide. Sales teams want to focus their efforts on categories and profiles of customers that are likely to require the least effort to sell to, are least likely to force prices downwards, and who will continue to purchase from your company for a as long a time as possible.

Essentially, your sales teams have a strong notions of what is called the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Their views on the ICP are mainly based on personal experience, rather than science. They view the wide net-casting by the marketing teams as largely irrelevant and sometimes painful. But since their views are experience-based, rather than data-based, they have no way to push back.

Enter Customer AI. Modern machine learning techniques remove ambiguity and personal opinion from your decisions about ICPs. The customer-touching operational data from your various IT systems let you identify ICPs with great certainty. For example, Salesforce data will help you to identify industries, geographies and other critera common to customers that require the least selling effort. ICP data will help marketing teams do a far better job in targeting demand generation campaigns. I could go on to provide further examples but I think you get the picture. You should get started with Customer AI ASAP. It usually takes less than three months from project initiation to the first positive results.

Webcast - Customer AI for CX and VOC teams

Our CEO, Richard Owen, is leading a great series of four webinars on the benefits of Customer AI for various teams in your company. At 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time on November 14th, Richard will consider it from the perspective of CX and VOC teams. Once core concept that will be covered in detail is the improvement in account coverage from the average we see of 6% with surveys to an almost-incredible and absolutely realistic 100%, all through fast implementation of Customer AI. It should be really interesting. Please click on the image below to register.

CX Iconoclast podcast with Joe Wheeler - Digital first, people second?

I listened to this great podcast while driving this morning. I got so engaged that I almost ran a red light! Joe Wheeler is a best-selling author, among many other accomplishments. His discussion with Richard Owen centered around concepts he describes in his excellent book The Digital-First Customer Experience. I felt that he was successfully standing a lot of traditional management practices on their heads, suggesting that we would organize and act quite differently if our starting point were purely digital, rather than the methodologies we have been using for many years. You can find The CX Iconoclast podcast on your favorite platform, or simply click on the image below to watch or listen.

Pre-Mortems - Essential step in project management

In my highly-biased opinion, one of the world's best project managers is my former colleague Paul Maguire . Paul was the first person to introduce me to the non-intuitive concept of project ‘pre-mortems’. The person who is credited with original idea is Gary Klein, who invented it in the 1980s. He was frustrated with project failure post-mortems, during which fairly obvious obstacles to success were pointed out; obstacles that should have been easy to avoid. I would rather not tell the story here as Gary explains it himself in a recent Freakonomics Radio podcast, and his explanation is really entertaining. The podcast is the fourth in a series on ‘How to succeed at failing’ and Gary's section is close to the start. You can find the podcast and a transcript here .

American Customer Satisfaction Institute Retail Holiday Preview

This may not be happening where you live but the end-of-year holiday decorations have started to appear in stores around here. The people at the American Customer Satisfaction Institute have chosen this moment to release a preview of their annual research on American retailers, both physical stores and online brands. The ACSI press release has graphs that provide the top-level rankings in each major sector and you can access it by clicking on the image below.

Notes

OCX Cognition predicts customer futures. Our breakthrough Customer AI solution lets enterprises transform what’s possible in customer experience. Reduce your customer risk, break down silos, and drive speedy action – when you can see what’s coming, you can change the outcome. Building on more than 100 years of CX-focused expertise in our small team and thousands in teams we have led, we’ve harnessed today’s advances in AI, elastic computing, and data science to deliver on the promise of customer-driven financial results. Learn more at www.ocxcognition.com .

Maurice FitzGerald is Editor-in-Chief, Content at OCX Cognition. He retired from HP where he was VP of Customer Experience for their $4 billion software business and was previously VP of Strategy and Customer Experience as well as Chief of Staff for HP in EMEA. He and his brother Peter, an Oxford D.Phil in Cognitive Psychology, have written three books on customer experience strategy and NPS, all available from Amazon.