[Podcast] How to Build Effective Customer Experience Programs

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In this episode of the B2B Insights Podcast, B2B International’s Conor Wilcock and Jennifer Strange discuss how B2B organizations can better assess and improve customer experience (CX). They cover the challenges of measuring CX in complex environments and share practical steps for building effective CX research programs.

Key discussion points:

• Why traditional CX metrics often fall short in B2B
• How to lay strong foundations for a CX program
• The value of customer journey mapping and stakeholder engagement
• Turning CX insights into meaningful action

 

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Introduction

Jennifer: Hello and welcome to the B2B Insights podcast. I’m Jennifer Strange, Research Director at B2B International, and I’m joined by my colleague, Conor Wilcock, Managing Director of B2B International, to discuss the topic of customer experience in B2B.

Customer experience covers all interactions that a customer has with your brand, your people, your products, your services, your marketing, communication—so absolutely everything.

And today we’ll be discussing four key points. Firstly, the state of customer experience in B2B markets, laying the foundations for a customer experience program, and then going on to discuss developing the program and enhancing it over time.

 

The Current State of B2B CX

Jennifer: So Conor, to kick us off, what are the key trends or changes that you’re seeing in B2B CX at the moment?

Conor: Thanks, Jen. Great to be with you. This is a subject I’m really passionate about, and I’m sure we’re going to cover a lot of ground today. I guess the starting point is perhaps to talk a little bit about some of the pitfalls or some of the things that B2B organizations are doing wrong with CX at the moment.

And I say that knowing that customer experience in the B2B world has come a long way in the last 10, 15, 20 years. But I’ve seen a bit of a stagnation—not just in terms of CX measurement, which we’ll come on to, but in terms of companies’ approaches to customer experience in the B2B world.

We’re seeing this play out in how customers are responding. One thing we’ve seen is a stabilization of key performance metrics like Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction.

They’ve been static now for a good few years. For example, we see in our annual Superpowers survey that there’s been no real improvement in those advocacy and satisfaction measures that so many B2B companies use.

Yet our view is that B2B organizations aren’t offering less to customers than they were before. So the upshot is that we believe this stabilization—no improvement in key metrics—is due to rising customer expectations not being met or matched by improvements in customer experience by the companies that serve them.

So what you see is this increasing gap between expectation and reality. That’s causing a slowdown or even, in some cases, a clawing back of satisfaction and loyalty measures. That’s one of the key things we’re seeing. I wonder whether it’s partly due to B2B organizations being slow to respond to innovations their customers are seeing in other parts of their lives—the consumer parts.

They’re carrying over those expectations into their professional lives in the B2B world.

Jennifer: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s really interesting how people carry over expectations from their consumer lives into B2B, and it’s impacting what we’re seeing in B2B CX.

 

Complexity of B2B CX

Jennifer: I was just wondering as well, are there any other factors you’d consider when thinking about B2B customer experience?

Conor: Well, there’s a few things—and I’m not suggesting I’m going to say anything groundbreaking to the B2B marketers and insight professionals listening—but one thing you have to take into account with B2B customer experience is its complexity versus the consumer world.

Due to a brand having to serve multiple stakeholders across a much more protracted and complicated purchasing and customer journey. Think of all the different touchpoints you might have as a business decision-maker versus the relative simplicity of a consumer customer experience and buying journey. So that’s one thing. And I think for that reason…

The importance of having a more tailored approach to CX within B2B environments can’t be overstated. It’s really critical that organizations serving businesses don’t do so in a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all way.

 

Further Reading

A Best Practice Guide to Assessing CX in B2B Markets

 

Common Mistakes When Measuring B2B CX

Jennifer: Do you think in that case that B2B companies are currently evolving how they measure customer experience to keep pace with those changes?

Conor: I mean, that’s the $64,000 question, isn’t it? Unfortunately, based on what we’re seeing at the moment, my answer is no—not really. I think there are a number of things B2B companies are doing wrong or sub optimally when it comes to measuring customer experience.

One example is the over-reliance on single measures like Net Promoter Score, which we’ve already mentioned. That’s not to suggest we don’t think it’s a valuable measure in the B2B world—we do. It has its place and its pitfalls.

But we’re seeing lots of businesses hanging all of their B2B CX hats on that one measure. You see it all the time—surveys from suppliers…

And the only thing they’re measuring is a customer score from zero to ten. And maybe, if you’re lucky, a “Why did you say that?” question. This over-reliance creates a blinkered view of the experience using only single-metric surveys. I think part of that, or linked to that, is the neglect of a more strategic evaluation of the customer relationship in favor of straightforward transactional number gathering.

Again, I’m not suggesting that shouldn’t be done—it’s just being done instead of a broader relationship evaluation through a bigger set of surveys.

A couple of other quick points before we move on: I think there’s been a lack of internal buy-in and accountability. Lots of B2B organizations—whether intentional or due to difficulty gathering resources and budget—are just focusing on measurement. Get the data from the customer, but don’t think about how to turn it into insight. And crucially, they’re not thinking about how to bring everyone in the business along with them.

That’s the only way you’re going to improve customer experience—having buy-in from all functions that touch the customer directly or indirectly. Without that, you’ve gathered a number, you’ve got data, but it doesn’t mean anything and you can’t do anything with it.

So we argue—what’s the value if that’s your approach? And I think for that reason, we thought the time is right to put our money where our mouths are and come up with a B2B customer experience playbook we can share with customers and other B2B organizations as a blueprint for how companies should approach CX in the B2B space.

So I guess now is a chance for us to move on to what companies should do about all of this. We don’t want to paint too bleak a picture. I think over the rest of our discussion, we’ll go step-by-step through what we think organizations should be doing.

And I think there’s a temptation to try and do it all now. But we know success comes from walking before you can run. And we know the hardest thing is getting started.

 

Laying the Foundations for an Effective CX Program

Conor: So I guess my question to you, Jen, is: what are the things brands can do to lay proper foundations for valuable, actionable customer experience research?

Jennifer: Yes, I think it’s really important before you begin to take a step back and think about a few different factors that you’re going to consider. So firstly, really thinking about what are the key aims and objectives of the program? What are you looking to get out of this program at the end of it?

Secondly, I think it’s really important to look at where the information gaps are within your organization. So where are your blind spots? What do you not know about your customers currently?

Thirdly, I think it’s also really important to think about the scope of the program. Your program could cover either a small scope or a wide scope. It’s really important to think about who are going to be the customers that you want to include, and also the countries as well, because a lot of our clients—and a lot of the customer experience programs we work on—are global in nature. So definitely worth thinking about who is included within the program.

And then as well, I think it’s also good to look internally and think about who are the stakeholders within your organization that you really need to engage and involve in the program. Because for it to be successful, everybody needs to be on board from the beginning.

Conor: And that’s the key point, isn’t it, Jen? We’ve mentioned this a couple of times already—that with the best will in the world, it doesn’t matter how structurally organized you are with building a CX research program, if key people within the business aren’t bought in, it’s just not going to go anywhere. It’s not going to happen. So what are some of the practical ways in which brands can engage stakeholders early and in the right ways?

Jennifer: Yes, I think the first thing to think about is who within the organization needs to be involved in the program. This could include country managers, business unit managers—whoever is close to the customer and should be involved right from the start.

I think actually getting them involved from the beginning is a really good way to clarify the aims and objectives of the customer experience program.

A really good chance as well to go over any challenges they foresee, any concerns they might have which would stop them being bought into the program later on. I think it’s also really important at the start to get everybody involved because at the end of the customer experience program, you obviously want to drive change within your organization. So getting everybody involved at the start can mean that you can have more meaningful and active actions at the end and drive that meaningful change.

And I think it’s important to get those customer and country managers, those business unit managers involved at the start because they’re going to be the ones providing the all-important customer lists, and the ones informing the customer about the research that’s happening. So definitely key to getting everybody involved and bought in at the start of the program.

 

Further Reading

A Best Practice Guide to Segmentation in B2B Markets

 

Mapping the Customer Journey

Conor: So you’ve got everyone brought in, you’ve got the required investment, everyone’s aligned on objectives. How do businesses know what they’re actually going to measure—that they’re measuring the right things?

Jennifer: Yeah, I think one of the key things to do, which is really important to include at the start of a customer experience program, is to think about customer journey mapping. This is where we map the customer journey right from the start—when your customer is becoming aware of your brand—all the way through to when they hopefully become a repeat customer.

This customer journey mapping outlines all the different touchpoints a customer might have with your business. Once you’ve mapped these touchpoints, it’s really important to think about where we think we’re doing well currently, where there might be pain points, and also critically, those moments of truth for the customer—those interactions that are most important for the customer experience.

There are some real key benefits of doing this before you start a full program. It can be really good to compare your internal views of where you’re strong or weaker with the perceptions of the customers at the end of the research. It gives a nice comparison between what we think and what the customer thinks.

It can also help identify the areas we want to focus on. Seeing which of those important touchpoints might be good to focus on a little more within the research.

And it’s also going to provide a consistent view across the organization of the customer journey, how we interact with customers, and definitely set us up well for designing a questionnaire for the research program.

Conor: Those are some really good points, Jen. And we should say at this point that we know customer journey mapping in the B2B space is not a completely new concept. But you’d be amazed at how many businesses dive into CX measurement without actually knowing the detail of the customer journey.

There are a couple of ways you can do that. You can make it an entirely internal exercise. But I think our recommendation, if at all possible, is to involve the customer in that journey mapping exercise—so you’re not just moving ahead with measuring internal hypotheses about the different touchpoints the customer experiences. Get the customer’s view to start with.

I think it’s a critical part of laying the groundwork for success. There’s a tendency to think of CX measurement as a largely quantitative exercise. Many brands, as I’ve said already, are reducing CX to a single metric or surface-level data gathering. But another benefit of journey mapping is it forces people to think more deeply about the customer experience. Rather than thinking purely in terms of headline numbers and ratings, you’re stepping into the customer’s shoes and thinking in detail about their ups and downs along the journey.

 

Using Qualitative Research to Build Insight

Conor: Should that then translate into the type of insight we’re gathering from our customers in the broader program as well?

Jennifer: Yeah, I think it’s a really good point. I like the point where you said we should think about not just measuring the customer journey and experience, but also really trying to understand it. Because sometimes it can be hard to action insights that are just a single measurement number. You need rich data behind it.

So I think another good thing to include as a starting point for a customer experience program is to involve some qualitative research at the beginning.

This is a really good starting point and can help explore different themes and topics with customers before you start to measure. Again, it can be really good for building the foundations of the questionnaire. Once you understand from your qualitative research what needs to be measured later on, you can build a better customer experience survey.

I think qualitative research can also do a lot more than just measure what’s happening with customer experience. I really like creating personas for customers—it helps bring the research to life, and you need qualitative data to do that.

It really helps dig into what matters for customers and the personas you’ve created. It’s always a really interesting and exciting activity.

Looking at the needs, expectations, and pain points of your personas can really help bring the research to life later on.

Conor: I completely agree. Just a quick point on that—I think it’s important when designing or even thinking more philosophically about customer experience measurement, that the aim isn’t just to figure out what you’re doing well or poorly.

The aim is to understand what’s important to the customer. Because if you align that with what you’re doing well or poorly, then you can make improvements, prioritize, and invest in the right areas to make a real difference in how the customer perceives you and experiences their journey.

Jennifer: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s a really good point—thinking about it in the wider context of what our customers actually want from us, not just what we’re doing well or what we’re giving them.

 

Further Reading

Rediscovering Customer Needs in the Age of AI: Why Deep CX Insights Matter More Than Ever

 

Designing the CX Program

Jennifer: So I suppose that we’ve laid the groundwork for our customer experience program. If we’re going to move on and develop that program further, what do you think is the most important thing to think about when developing a program?

Conor: Well, I guess the views I have on this are really practical. We can and should think aspirationally about everything we want to achieve—big ideas, big improvements.

But you have to have the right type of program in place. That means various people across your business are going to have to provide you with certain information. You’re going to have to think about the structure and frequency of the survey.

How long are we expecting to survey customers for? What do we want to ask them? How many of our customers might we expect to respond to a survey we send out?

And I think here it’s again important to make the distinction between relationship-based CX and transactional-based CX.

We think the optimal CX program has both. You need to be doing both transactional measurement and, crucially, relationship measurement. We’re going to keep our focus today on the relationship side of things.

A couple of things you need to take into account are, as I said before, frequency. We probably don’t want to be doing this every week or every quarter. Remember, this is a relationship survey.
We tend to find the sweet spot is annually. Some of our clients do it every six months, some every two or three years. We think annual is usually the sweet spot because it fits nicely around all the more day-to-day transactional measurement you might be doing.

The length of the survey—again, you want to capture enough insight from customers, so avoid the temptation to go for a quick one- or two-minute survey. But also, you probably don’t want to be surveying your customers for two hours—they’ll lose interest and won’t give you the insight you need.

And don’t go into the program expecting every single one of your customers to participate. This is not a census—it’s a survey, a piece of research from which you gain a representative view of your customers.

The response rate will vary depending on the method. Are we sending out a survey online? Are we picking up the phone and speaking to customers? It will also be impacted by how involved account managers and salespeople are in warming up and motivating customers to participate. These are all things to think about before you start the bigger-picture thinking of all the great things you’re going to do once you get the insight.

 

Common Pitfalls in CX Programs

Jennifer: Yeah, I think it’s great to start thinking about the pitfalls when measuring customer experience. Are there any other common pitfalls you often see in customer experience programs?

Conor: I think, not to belabor the point, but just to say one more time—disregarding relationship evaluation in favor of touchpoint or transactional surveys only.

It’s really important not to forego that broader assessment of how well your company is doing with customers. Another thing—organizations may not want to hear this—is the tendency to lean your thumb on the scale. For example, salespeople or account managers only providing contact details of customers they know will rate them positively.

Again, this is about getting a fully representative view of your customers’ experience. You can’t do that if you pick and choose your favorites.

Another thing we’ve seen quite a bit over the last few years is the desire to incorporate customer experience metrics into executive bonus schemes. It’s a sensitive topic. It’s not wrong to want to include customer feedback in bonus calculations…

But we also know there are lots of other factors that impact a company’s performance. Customer experience is important—but it’s one part, not all of it. So we urge companies to avoid basing bonus schemes solely on customer metrics.

If you want it to be part of that, that’s fine—so long as the program has the right structures in place and is big enough to ensure there’s not too much noise in the results.

And a couple of other things to quickly mention—avoid the temptation to over-survey your customers. Customers get frustrated by a lot of things, and one of the biggest is being asked for their opinion again and again.

It creates the wrong impression—that you didn’t listen the first time. So be choiceful about when you do this. Think carefully about how you fit your transactional surveys around your core relationship survey. Don’t go out to customers too often.

They don’t want to feel like, “I told you this two weeks ago, I already gave this score. Why haven’t you done anything about it?” You never came back to me. There’s no suggestion you ever listened. So why would I participate again? That’s when engagement drops off a cliff.

Finally, on metrics—and we should talk about this in more detail—choosing the wrong metrics, or not enough, or maybe too many. You need to make sure you’re not just throwing in questions and metrics for the sake of it.

Each thing you measure has to have value. Otherwise, there’s no point in including it in the survey.

 

Further Reading

Buyer Personas: How to Research, Develop and Activate Buyer Personas in B2B

 

Key Metrics and Frameworks

Jennifer: So what do you think are the key metrics or frameworks that should be included in a customer experience program?

Conor: Well, if I maybe split these into different groups, starting with your key measures of customer experience and your brand’s performance. These include some metrics that most B2B brands will be completely familiar with and probably already using—overall level of customer satisfaction and the Net Promoter Score. It’s important to understand how the Net Promoter Score has evolved over time as well, so I encourage people to read about NPS 3.0. It’s not a completely different metric—it’s more about what you do around that singular question to support how valuable it may be.

A third one that is a bit less known but becoming more so is the Customer Effort Score. This ideally measures the perception of the customer in terms of their effort put into the relationship, and critically, their perception of your brand’s effort put out to the customer.

What you tend to find is that failing B2B brands are perceived by customers as not putting much effort into the relationship from the supplier’s side.

So what you want is at least equilibrium between the amount of effort put in versus put out. Those are your core metrics. Now, in addition to that, I think satisfaction along the customer journey is important—a more granular measure of satisfaction.

But perhaps to bring B2B CX into the modern world and our modern way of thinking about how B2B brands grow, we need other measures aligned to more recently established thinking.

If you think about the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, for example, or Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow philosophy—the importance of mental and physical availability. So how top-of-mind is your brand, and how easy is it for your brand to be found when a customer wants to make a purchasing decision?

The importance of memorability—how quickly does your brand come to mind when the category you operate in is thought about? And distinctiveness as well, as opposed to differentiation.

So thinking about how distinct your brand is in terms of its proposition, but also how it shows up in the market visually and otherwise. We need to be thinking about those measures.

How available is our brand in different purchasing situations, different category entry points? How responsive are we throughout key points in the customer journey? How easy is it to do business with the brand?

And how recognizable are our brand assets? I’ve used the word “brand” about ten times there, but it’s a key point. There’s been a tendency to separate brand and CX in B2B thinking.

I don’t think they can be separated at all. It all feeds back to the customer experience—how your brand shows up outside of the purchasing journey, in your communication, marketing, brand visuals, brand identity—in addition to the more traditionally thought-of touchpoints like calling customer service or receiving a product.

Those things are important, but you also have to tie in how your brand shows up in various ways to customers.

And finally—thinking about key frameworks to make the research more actionable. Some examples we really like are:

• Revenue at Risk: Linking CX measures with the revenue of that customer.
• Momentum Matrix: Measuring your brand’s perceived momentum—are you on the way up, down, or holding firm relative to competitors?

There’s nothing like putting a dollar, pound, or euro sign behind a piece of research to make an executive team sit up straight. It’s one thing to say your NPS dropped from 37 to 24. It’s another to say that $114 million of revenue is at risk.

And then, going back to customer needs assessment—models like the Kano Framework help us think about the hierarchy of customer needs. What are the core entry-level hygiene factors? What are the higher-order needs? What are the differentiators that make our brand distinct?

So plenty to think about there, Jen. But we’ve still only covered the core parts of the program. There’s still loads of work to do—recognizing the value of CX research, turning data into insight, and insight into action. And then keeping that momentum going over time. This isn’t a one-and-done thing. We want these programs to be successful for years.

 

Sustaining Long-Term CX Success

Conor: So… what do you think are some of the things B2B companies can do to achieve that longer-term success with CX measurement?

Jennifer: So I think the first thing to consider is customer engagement and keeping that engagement going over time. You want to be able to go back to your customers maybe a year later, ask them again how their experience is, what they’re thinking about, and what their needs are.

And you want them to want to give you that information again. So keeping that momentum and engagement is key. One of the best ways to do this, I think…

…is through “You Said, We Did” campaigns. A little while after the program has finished, once you’ve collected and digested the feedback, you can share clear action plans with customers. Send communications that say, “Here’s what you said, here’s what we need to improve, and here’s what we’re doing about it.”

I think that really helps customers feel their responses are being listened to—and that actual actions are being taken based on their feedback.

Another thing some of our clients do is called “closing the loop.” If a customer gives negative feedback or lower scores, and they’ve allowed us to share that with the client, then the client can go back to them and ask what they can do to improve. It’s about closing the loop between the feedback and the action.

Customers need to see that their feedback is being used, valued, and turned into action.

Conor: We see the power of that, don’t we? When we’re doing multi-year customer experience programs with our clients, if the client is successful in closing the loop, the customer feels listened to. They see the value in participating.

 

Further Reading

Customer Journey Mapping in B2B Markets: A Comprehensive Guide

 

Driving Internal Engagement

Conor: Next time, you see response rates skyrocket, and the richness of insight improves as a result. It strikes me—could we apply the same principle to internal engagement? How can CX leaders in B2B organizations ensure that teams and internal stakeholders stay bought in for the long haul?

Jennifer: Yeah, that’s a really good point. We spoke earlier about how important it is to have stakeholders involved from the start. It’s definitely key to keeping everyone engaged internally.

One way to do this is to refresh the survey each year. You want to keep your key metrics, but you don’t want the survey to become stale.

Include space for guest questions that focus on a key topic relevant to the organization at that time. That keeps it fresh and ensures it stays relevant.

Also, if there’s an opportunity to integrate the customer experience data with other internal data…

…then different teams can see how it fits with what they’re doing.

One of the most important things is keeping employee engagement and celebrating success stories. That helps create a culture of customer experience—not just a program that happens once a year and is forgotten.

Ways to do this include creating training videos around customer experience, setting up a CX function, and appointing ambassadors who champion the customer and act as the voice of the customer in meetings.

This reminds me of one of our clients who really took customer experience to the next level and embedded it into their culture. They created training videos that all new starters had to watch. So it went beyond the program—it became part of the culture.

 

How World-Class Brands Put the Customer First

Conor: I love that idea, Jen. A few other examples come to mind of what leading businesses do to put the customer first.

There are lots of things you can do—creating CX champions, setting up a customer experience function. You want to make it core to your strategy, not optional. If CX is the hub and everything else is the spokes, companies that think that way are likely to be very successful.

One of my clients, who we’ve worked with for years, has a physical cutout of the customer persona in every meeting room. So when they’re discussing finance, training, or a new product, the customer has a seat at the table.

You have to think: What would the customer think about this? How will it affect their experience? Because if you put that first, everything else flows from it—profit, margins, product success, etc.

It all flows from the customer feeling that their needs align with what you offer—and that they’re listened to and looked after. We’re talking now about what world-class B2B brands do. Do you have any other examples of how they stay ahead?

Jennifer: Yeah, I think it’s about taking customer experience out of the PowerPoint and bringing it to life. Move beyond the central report.

Think about infographics, videos, audio, creating personas—things that bring it to life for people in the organization. That’s key.

Also, driving action from the program is critical. If people see actions being taken from the research, the program will be more successful going forward.

This could include workshops, new ideas, and figuring out how to implement change across the business to improve customer experience.

 

Conclusion

Jennifer: So, Conor, thank you for joining me today and talking about customer experience. I think we’ve covered a lot—from the current state of CX in B2B markets, to laying the foundations, developing your program, and embedding it into your organization.

If you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast episode and want to hear more, make sure you rate, review, and subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes.

Conor: Thanks so much, Jen. Thanks, everyone.