CX – Which C Are We Talking About? – PART 2

CX normally translates as Customer Experience, but that can be misleading. Depending on the business you are in, you need to choose from the following list:

• Consumer
• Customer
• Client
• Constituency

In the Age of the Customer, all enterprises need to deliver better experiences to whomever they serve, but how to go about doing so, and what to prioritize, is different for each case. In this series of blogs, we are going to look at each one in turn. The last blog focused on the consumer’s experience. This one focuses on the customer’s.

Customer Experience

The primary difference between a consumer and a customer is that the latter makes considered purchases justified by ROI analyses that are typically reviewed and approved by at least one other person. This makes for radically different sales and service dynamics between a B2C and a B2B business.

When it comes to customer experience, there isn’t just one person to satisfy. As the diagram below shows, when it comes to a technology enabled purchase, there could be as many as six:

Here’s what each of these roles is looking for from a customer experience.

• Finance Executive—Save us money. Your company should be a going concern with a reputation for integrity and dependability and be easy to do business with, especially when it comes to recurrent purchasing processes.
• LOB Executive—Empower my team to achieve our objectives. Your sales team should understand and appreciate the business value opportunity that is driving this purchase and construct an offer that can credibly deliver on the desired value proposition. During the implementation, the service team should not only enable the offer but work with the other members of the customer company to ensure that the business value is actually achieved.
• Departmental Manager—Make my org more effective and efficient. The sales team should demonstrate a general understanding of the processes that are affected by the purchase, and the implementation team should have domain expertise in the specifics of those processes. 
• End Users—Make me personally more productive. The service team should include a customer success function that monitors end users’ experiences, ensures they are successfully utilizing the offering, and provides help in a timely manner when they are not.
• CIO—Integrate with my existing systems to support a sustainable enterprise architecture. The pre-sales team needs to consult with the CIO’s technical staff to scope out an integration strategy, and the post-sales team needs to coordinate with the system integrator partner to ensure that best practices are known and followed, and that technical problems get escalated in a timely and effective manner.
• Technical Expert—Show me how this thing works, warts and all. The customer’s technical staff needs access to product expertise on an on-demand basis. For lower levels of priority, self-service portals are ideal. For higher levels, video conferencing with the expert is what’s needed.

The above snippets are just sketches, of course, and even from these one can see that the B2B customer experience is a multi-faceted phenomenon. This, in turn, means that vendors need to field a multi-talented team to address it, led by an executive sponsor whose job it is to connect with the economic buyers, and to ensure good governance practices are in place and being exercised. When there is a strong program office overseeing these efforts, the rest of the roles typically fall in line. Left to their own devices, on the other hand, each team tends to optimize its own work and then shrug their shoulders when the intended ROI does not materialize.

Finally, in the out years following any major B2B purchase, there are innumerable opportunities to improve the return on investment, be that through proactive maintenance, upselling or cross-selling, or ongoing customer success efforts. Vendors who neglect these opportunities in order to pursue new logos are letting their number one competitive advantage—incumbency—go to waste.

The net of all of the above is simple. CX in B2B has little to learn from the best practices of CX in B2C. Yes, you can use the latter to create a better experience for end users, but in the greater scheme of things, that is a low priority. All the complex stuff needs a bigger battle plan.

(NEXT UP: Client Experience)

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Follow Geoff on LinkedIn | Geoffrey Moore Mailing List

__________________________________________________________________________

Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube