Why You Should Consider Having a Dedicated Customer Experience Team

We all have brands that we love.?

Most likely it’s because through those brands we’ve had exceptional, delightful experiences that we remember fondly. So much so that, more often than not, we tell our family, friends, and colleagues about the most unique ones.??

But how to create memorable customer experiences is rarely documented. Most likely an individual within the company took their own initiative to make your experience special, without anyone’s permission.

From Starbucks to Zappos, to Ritz Carlton and Disney, brands that empower their employees to make in-the-moment judgement calls reduce the friction that allows for the creation of memorable experiences that lead to brand loyalty.??

We’re inspired by those brands; those legendary stories that become business lore. When a brand’s culture empowers employees to act in a way that makes the experience memorable, both the brand and the customer win.?

And what company isn’t trying to grow brand loyalty with their customers??

Purpose Unlimited is, for the most part, a B2B business. The prevailing expectation for B2B companies is that individuals in customer-facing roles, like sales, also manage the customer experience. Except for the most part, they aren’t.?

It’s not because they don’t want to, or because they aren’t good at it. In reality, sales teams are focused on either managing their top relationships or prospecting new ones, and to do that well takes a considerable amount of time. The volume is just too great to ensure that focusing on customer experience is done in a consistent manner across an entire customer base.?

That’s why we decided earlier this year that our customer experience team was going to set some parameters and manage our clients’ experience, complementing the great work that our sales team is doing by simply expanding our capabilities so we can support them.?

Our customer experience team is a multi-disciplined group spanning design, content development, marketing, business intelligence, and technology. A team member once told me that the reason our team “works” is because each person in the group has their own specialty that complements the overall initiatives that we work on collectively.??

We look at solving problems from as holistic of a standpoint as possible. There are lots of decisions that need to be made, but they’re all made from a customer-centric viewpoint to ensure that the final result, whatever that is, benefits our clients.?

First, we set out to see where there are lost opportunities or low-hanging fruit. We started with a thank-you initiative that we called our VIP program, with VIP standing for "Very Important Purchases." In our VIP program, there are two sets of purchases we look at: first-time purchases and really large purchases that are over a certain threshold. First-time purchases are easy to cross-reference with our CRM. For significant purchases, we set a base amount and each month review our sales, cherry picking the top purchases for that month. From there, we share the list with our sales team to understand if there’s any further context we should know about. Then we curate a “Purpose package,” thanking them with a personalize note. And that’s it.??

Except, that’s not it.??

Our customers really appreciate it. Why? Because we’re being grateful, thoughtful, and considerate that they chose one of our products. In a B2B model, this is even more important—mostly because it’s so rare. Sales cycles are traditionally long, so we know that our customers take a lot of time thinking about the right products for their clients, and we appreciate that in that one decision, they chose us amongst all the options available.?

A member of our sales team once said to us, “Purpose does an excellent job with welcoming new hires. I was at my previous job for 31 years and didn’t get a single thing from the company. If we could just replicate that with our clients, that, in itself, would be a huge win.”

That was an Aha moment for me. For context, our People & Culture team send a really nice curated welcome package to each newly hired individual, making them feel a part of the team. If brands applied that same type of effort to their clients, we’d all be further ahead than we are today.?

It’s not hard.??

The hard part is integrating customer thinking across organizations. We can lead it, spearhead it, ideate, and execute, but the true power of a Zappos-like customer experience is when every single individual feels the need to make the experience special for our clients.?

That’s when the real magic happens and the fun starts.??

- Matt Coyle, Chief Customer Experience Officer, Purpose Unlimited