Part-1: Customer Experience Surveys are Futile if...

"We are not competitor obsessed;

we are customer obsessed"

- Jeff Bezos

?Few days back CEO of one the leading Customer Feedback Insight firm asked few thought-provoking questions – [1]

• What do companies do with the tons of data they have compiled from customer interactions and feedback survey?
• Do companies have the ability to address the continuous feedback they receive?
• Is the mindset of feedback receiving back that of acting on it?

In the field of customer experience design, management and improvement, organizations have been constantly faced with these challenges.

Despite best of intentions to 'listen and learn from customer feedback', organization struggles to act on the feedback due to following reasons -

• Customer has given me 10/10 NPS score. We are the best (is there a need to improve)
• We messed ‘one engagement / transaction’ few weeks / months back, hence this feedback (It was past, everything is fine now)
• We already know this. Due to certain constraints, we can’t do much about it (Actions are beyond my areas of influence)
• This person has always been too demanding and it’s not feasible to satisfy her / him (We shouldn’t have polled her / him)
• This customer’s contribution to our revenue / profitability is insignificant. We are focusing on ‘high priority’ customers (We shouldn’t have polled him / her)
• We don’t do business with that customer any more (We shouldn’t have polled her / him)
• S/he has very limited experience of our products / services. We shouldn’t give much importance to this feedback. (We shouldn’t have polled her / him)

In my understanding and analysis, this is not an issue of organization’s ability to address specific customer feedback by engaging people, deploying process, leveraging technology, changing organization structure or finding insights from data analysis. This is more fundamental than that. It’s about mindset with which organization engages with customer. Business leader must ask – “Are we engaging with customer with mindset of ‘customer success’ or ‘service fulfilment’?”

Though formal contracts are established between two business entities, products and services are provided by the people from supplier organization and consumed by the people in customer organization. Customer Success mindset is all about making the business entity and individuals working in the customer organization achieving their intended business outcomes within the agreed timelines while they leverage the products and services provided by the supplier organization. Service fulfilment mindset is providing the deliverables (product and service outputs) to business entity and individuals working in customer organization.

Let’s look at how would customer success and service fulfilment influence various aspects of customer engagement.

Focus –

Customer success mindset influences supplier to focus on understanding business objectives, outcomes and unstated need of the customers. Suppliers relate with purpose of customer need for the products and services. They translate the impact of deliverables in terms of business value for the customers. The value may be described in terms of financial as well as non-financial outcome.

Service fulfilment mindset guides supplier to focus on contractual commitments. Supplier focuses on engineering input, activities and stated need of the customers. They direct the plan and activities towards deliverables and timelines mentioned in the contracts. Output may be products, services or documentation.

Responsibilities –

Customer success mindset guides supplier to take 100% responsibilities for the business outcome and results. In case of dependencies, they would work with customer to resolve the dependencies. They leverage business case as guard-rails for execution.

Service fulfilment mindset influences supplier to take charge of deliverables. In case of dependencies, they call-out the same and ask customer to take ownership and resolve dependencies. They leverage milestones and deliverables as guard-rails for execution.

Relationship –

Customer success mindset makes supplier to take ‘lifetime value’ of relationship with organization as well as with individuals. They don’t limit by current wallet share and circle of influence. They bring multiple levels of attention as appropriate across both the organization. They approach human-centric way and relate with decision maker as person and end-users as persona.

Service fulfilment mindset makes supplier to take ‘transactional’ view of the engagement. They prioritized the effort based on current wallet share. ?They peg the relationship to certain hierarchy in the organization and ask the respective individuals to manage them.

Resources and Execution -

Customer success mindset drives supplier to adapt the resources and execution as per the needs of the engagement and expected business outcome. They continue to review the plans and adjust them as per the need of the engagements. They optimize the execution approach without being worried about whether its going to benefit only to the customer. They pragmatically invest the resources in relationship.

Service fulfilment mindset makes supplier to deploy the resources in accordance to plan and contracts. They agree on the plan with customer and implement the same. All deviations to plan are reviewed with change management perspective. Responsibilities for the deviations are fixed and factored in the replanning.

Attitude –

Customer success mindset drives supplier to operate as partner. They bring the needed expertise and competencies, going beyond the contracts. They are willing to take responsibilities for the outcome and match the responsibilities for the given scope.

Service provider mindset ensure supplier operate as vendor. They deliver what’s being asked and contractually agreed. They hold themselves back when the activities are not in alignment with scope and plan.

IMHO, Service Provider mindset is necessary, but not sufficient. We can achieve deliverables, mile-stones and fulfil contractual commitments. However, we miss out on the ‘life-time value and relationship’ with customers.

I have collated these thoughts based on the learning over multiple years across number of organizations. I haven’t supported this with any theory / research / thought leader’s perspective. I look forward to your brick, bouquets, suggestions on this topic.

I haven’t implemented ‘customer success’ mindset in a structured way. However, I will attempt to bring high performance practices which may help organization to demonstrate ‘customer success’ with appropriate competencies. I look forward to your suggestions and input in this regard.

“You can focus on Adoption, Retention, Expansion or Advocacy; or you can focus on the customer’s desired outcome and get all of those things”

– Lincoln Murphy

References –

• [1] – The Noise and Silence – Circuitry of Customer Experience (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/noise-silence-circuitry-customer-experience-chandramouli-srinivasan/)
• Customer-centric growth (https://sixteenventures.com/customer-success-definition#customersuccess)
• Copy Rights acknowledged
• Views expressed are personal