Best Practices

Most brands are keenly interested in creating experiences that move their customers on an emotional level—the trick lies in figuring out which factors companies can and should wield to elicit that response from the individuals they seek to serve. 

Experience outcomes have a lot to do with all the usual elements, like brand professionalism, but they also have everything to do with how customers feel before, during, and after an experience. Companies can only do so much to manage customers’ feelings, of course, but that does include evaluating how those individuals feel as they share experiences and using that feedback to make meaningful changes.

Today we’re going to touch on four ways that companies can create more emotionally meaningful experiences:

• Identifying Customers’ Emotional State(s) of Mind
• Evaluating Emotions’ Impact on KPIs
• Shifting Customer Emotions
• Empowering Staff & Processes with New Intelligence

Method #1: Identifying Customers’ Emotional State(s) of Mind

As we mentioned, companies can’t control customers’ emotions, but they can gauge how those individuals feel before and after an experience. Whether it’s via a quick post-purchase survey, social media, or other listening tools, organizations can easily learn not just how their customers are feeling, but also how those feelings inform their decision to come to the brand for a specific need and what their impression is after the interaction.

This information is invaluable for meaningfully changing and/or improving experiences, and gives brands a real shot at better managing customers’ emotions as they interact with the organization. Of course, it should also mean a better experience for all parties involved.

Method #2: Evaluating Emotions’ Impact on KPIs

This one probably goes without saying, but it really can’t be understated how large an impact customer emotion has on KPIs. A customer who’s made to feel angry, for example, probably isn’t going to do wonders for a brand’s retention or cross-sell/upsell KPI. Brands should thus always view KPI improvement through the lens of customer emotion.

This topic connects heavily to the idea of meaningful experience improvement as well. The most transformational process changes can ripple through an entire organization from the bottom up—a better experience occurs, customers become happier, and all the best KPIs light up as a result of the positive emotions that experience improvement instills toward the brand.

Method #3: Shifting Customer Emotions

This point definitely forms a Venn diagram with our first method, but the idea of shifting customer emotions during an experience really deserves its own bullet. Brands shouldn’t restrict their emotional evals to seeing how customers feel before and after an experience—they should also evaluate what can be done to elicit positive emotions (and quash negative ones) in the midst of customer interactions with a brand.

This lens affords customer experience (CX) practitioners a chance to tweak experiences in truly meaningful ways and can be thanked for conventions such as, say, auto dealerships offering customers coffee while they wait for repairs. Likewise, every experience a brand provides should also be thoroughly evaluated for pain points, bottlenecks, and other broken touchpoints that risk upsetting customers. Brands that find and fix these areas will have shifted their customers’ emotions mid-experience, which is powerful.

Method #4: Empowering Staff & Processes with New Intelligence

To expand upon the point made at the end of the last section, knowing how customers feel only really means something if brands execute on those emotions. It also means that companies shouldn’t confine that execution to a CX or customer-facing team. In fact, why not share those learnings throughout the business? Even teams who work far from the frontlines usually have something to do with providing a great experience, and should thus be let in on new learnings.

Finally, as we already talked about, process fixes are a must once companies have learned how experiences make their customers feel. Besides, actual fixes are really the only way that brands can create emotionally moving experiences for their customers in the first place. Using these methods as an improvement taxonomy can help any brand actually reach that goal.

Check out our full report on the importance of customer emotion created by longtime CX expert Simon Fraser.

Unanticipated costs can quickly become the bane of any business project, customer experience (CX) or otherwise, if they’re not carefully considered before pens have been put to paper. It’s thus imperative for CX practitioners who want to pitch their programs to anticipate and prepare for unexpected costs as much as possible.

We’ve listed the three most effective considerations that practitioners can use to anticipate and avoid unexpected experience program costs:

• Vendor Scalability
• Vendor Flexibility
• Nonparticipation Costs

Factor #1: Vendor Scalability

This tip may seem gratuitous, but program scalability actually isn’t considered as often as it should be, and brands can end up paying extra for that mistake. Practitioners can avoid a lot of headaches with their own teams, the C-suite, and the accounting department by selecting an experience partner that can scale programs from the very beginning.

This approach enables brands to select and begin a program that grows alongside both their CX accomplishments and aspirations. It also allows organizations to reduce operating costs from the very beginning, which can result in both a much healthier program and a CX budget that always stays in the black. CX practitioners can use this method to strive for an ambitious program while still avoiding unanticipated costs.

Factor #2: Vendor Flexibility

Though picking an experience partner and implementing its capabilities is no small task, the days of rigid, prepackaged experience programs are drawing to a close. This is great news for businesses because they can now work with vendors to create a versatile experience solution instead of attempting to wrap themselves around an unflinching list of features (many of which a given company may not actually need).

Solution flexibility enables CX practitioners to avoid unanticipated costs by paying only for what they need from a vendor. For example, would your brand benefit from an analytics team or does that capability already exist within your organization? What about a self-service approach versus full management from the vendor? Once practitioners consider these questions, they should select a partner that’s flexible enough to meet their needs without showering them in unneeded extras and—you guessed it—unnecessary costs.

Factor #3: Nonparticipation Costs

There’s another element to cost consideration that often goes, well, unconsidered when brands talk about implementing an experience program, and that’s what happens when companies don’t have such an initiative in place.

Feedback collection, experience improvement, and customer centricity are all more important now than ever before. These ideas are the means by which brands can both create a better experience for customers and use that capability to plant a flag at the top of their vertical. Therefore, brands should consider the very real opportunity cost of not collecting, analyzing, and implementing feedback. An experience program isn’t a luxury anymore—it’s non-negotiable for any company that wants to succeed.

Taken together, these three methods can empower brands and the experience practitioners who work for them to avoid unanticipated costs and keep their programs viable. They can then use their programs to achieve what we just talked about: a meaningfully improved experience for customers and thus a more commanding presence in their marketplace.

It’s not uncommon for organizations to consider customer experience (CX) programs a nicety—something powerful, no doubt, but also just a luxury instead of an essential component of business success. This attitude prevails even as today’s marketplaces become more competitive and the COVID-19 pandemic changes customer wants and needs faster than many brands can keep pace with.

As we outline in our recent paper on this subject, proving experience programs’ worth isn’t easy, but it needn’t be the bane of CX practitioners’ existence. In fact, we’ve discovered three ways to convince the C-suite that experience programs are much more than just a garnish. These three methods are:

• Aligning Capabilities With Strategic Objectives
• Pitching Customer Centricity
• Demonstrating The Power of Real-Time Feedback

Method #1: Aligning Capabilities With Strategic Objectives

As we just mentioned, marketplaces and industries are all becoming more competitive, which means that brands must strive to provide the best customer experience possible if they hope to stand out. The specific goals that businesses put forth to accomplish that vary wildly from industry to industry, but there’s one common denominator here: CX capabilities that enable these goals can take a company all the way to the top.

With that in mind, CX practitioners who want to prove the necessity of their programs need to select software that can enable business objectives. A lot of organizations take this to mean that CX software is useful only for measurement. Measurement is important, of course, but the best technology empowers brands to execute something much more important than measurement: action. A brand’s ability and willingness to take action on CX learnings determines whether that organization is a transformative leader, or a follower that’s content with management.

Method #2: Pitching Customer Centricity

This tip may sound too general, maybe even like it’s a Herculean task, but consider that the organizations that do best within their verticals are the ones that effectively disseminate CX learnings throughout the business rather than leave statistics siloed up with an experience team. CX practitioners can pitch their programs by pointing to this example and encouraging their organizations to follow suit. All it takes to create a culture of customer centricity is desiloing CX intelligence and handing it out to the right departments and stakeholders.

This approach has another advantage in that it can help CX practitioners create grassroots support for their initiatives. Creating customer centricity can help employees become more invested in their work and more strongly feel that it matters. Their own insights and feedback is also an invaluable component of any CX initiative, and collecting it can make them feel heard. With this approach, practitioners can ride a groundswell of bottom-to-top support all the way to the boardroom.

Method #3: Demonstrating The Power of Real-Time Feedback

This tip overlaps somewhat with the first method we talked about, but the power of real-time feedback truly deserves its own special mention. Real-time feedback is the only truly effective way for brands to know which customers are promoters and which are detractors, enabling them to both save at-risk customers and identify the themes common to both groups’ view of the business.

Real-time feedback also empowers brands to achieve four business goals that practitioners can use to further assert their programs’ value. These goals include acquiring customers, retaining existing ones, cross-selling or upselling to established customers, and lowering cost to serve. Practitioners who pitch real-time feedback through this paradigm can both better tie it to financial goals and give the C-suite something more specific to chew on than, say, “becoming more customer-centric.”

These three strategies are effective means of introducing or ensuring the longevity of CX programs at any brand, and can help CX teams make the case that experience initiatives are no mere flight of fancy but rather the key to transformational success in today’s business world.

If you’re a practitioner who won support for your B2B experience program and have since implemented it across your organization, congratulations! Garnering sponsorship for experience programs is not easy, but doing so means that you’ve built trust at and received investment from both the frontline and executive levels.

Now comes the hard part: proving results and justifying ROI.

Tying experience program results to improved outcomes often proves to be the most challenging aspect of running an experience program, especially since stakeholders usually express at least a little skepticism alongside all the buy-in. Luckily, there are several tried-and-true metrics that practitioners can track to justify ROI, and we’re going to hit them all right now:

• Customer Acquisition Growth
• Customer Retention & Recovery
• Upselling Established Customers
• Profitability From Lowered Costs

Metric #1: Customer Acquisition Growth

This is one of the biggest goals that most brands set for their experience programs, which makes it a vital metric for practitioners to keep track of as their initiatives take off. Acquiring new customers is neither simple nor cheap, and if there’s one group of stakeholders who constantly bears this fact in mind, it’s the C-suite.

Tracking customer acquisition is thus a must for any B2B experience program. Doing so demonstrates an experience program’s merit to all stakeholders involved, especially since, as we just mentioned, acquiring new customers is no small task. Experience platforms that can track changes and monitor new growth are especially useful here since they make proving acquisition relatively straightforward.

Metric #2: Customer Retention & Recovery

There are two big reasons why customer retention is a powerful and pertinent B2B experience metric: first, retaining customers is far cheaper than acquiring new ones, and second, most brands begin experience programs to, well, improve experiences for their existing customer base. Experience practitioners can prove their programs’ effectiveness at hitting both goals by tracking customer retention and recovery.

There’s a myriad of ways to demonstrate experience initiatives’ value when it comes to customer recovery. For example, these programs often make it simple for practitioners to survey customers who reach out to contact centers, garner feedback, and turn it into actionable intelligence. That intelligence can then be used to meaningfully improve both call center processes and customer retention along with it. All of those metrics can be tied directly to experience programs.

Method #3: Upselling Established Customers

Retaining existing business is great, but many B2B brands set their sights on a more ambitious goal: increasing their share of wallet with their established customer pool. The tools, improvements, and processes afforded by experience programs make this goal possible, and practitioners can and should tether the improvements brought about by their efforts to any increase in share of wallet.

Practitioners commonly use experience programs to upsell existing customers by honing in on those individuals’ needs and wants. They can also use these programs to call upon a backdrop of operational and financial data, which grants B2B organizations a 360-degree view of who these individuals are. Practitioners and customer experience (CX) teams can then identify and act upon upsell opportunities.

Method #4: Profitability from Lowered Costs

This ROI metric can be less flashy than sporting new customers or increased share of wallet from existing ones, but the C-suite loves it no less.

In addition to providing meaningful experience improvement opportunities, a well-run experience program can help brands identify ways to eliminate waste and save costs. Experience practitioners can establish their programs’ value by showing stakeholders such opportunities as their initiatives reveal them, giving B2B organizations the chance to save money while also being empowered to improve experiences. To put it candidly, nothing screams “value” to an organization quite like increased profitability.

Acquiring sponsorship for an experience program isn’t easy. Harder still is proving that program’s worth. However, practitioners who focus on proving their programs’ worth through these four lenses will have a markedly easier time actually doing so. They can then secure additional resources to expand their programs’ scope and reap additional success for themselves, the B2B brands they serve, and the customers who sustain those organizations.

Learn more about B2B experience programs, proving ROI, and creating continued success here.

At face value, pitching an experience program internally may sound like a no-brainer. Experience programs enable B2B brands to listen to clients, gather intelligence from employees, and attain a holistic understanding of where they fit in the marketplace. Who doesn’t want that?

Well, as any customer experience (CX) practitioner knows, it’s not that simple. Organizations are hemmed in by the very real restraints of time, budget, and resource allocation, which usually determines whether experience programs get greenlit at all.

Fortunately, there are effective ways to sell experience and listening programs to everyone from the boardroom to the front line, and we’re going to show you three of them:

• Memorable Branding
• Success Stories
• Educational Tools

Memorable Branding

This is a great technique to generate awareness of and affinity for a CX program. Practitioners can begin building the case for an experience initiative simply by giving it a catchy or memorable name, which helps the idea stick with potential stakeholders. More importantly, it will foster connections between employees, create grassroots support for the initiative, and help drive a customer-centric culture.

Additionally, practitioners can put tools like newsletters, training videos, and even employee competitions to great effect marketing their B2B program. This strategy incentivizes employees to remain engaged with the initiative no matter where they’re located, which also helps build the same sense of unity we mentioned in the preceding paragraph.

Success Stories

Catchy names and team exercises can help CX practitioners win employees over—executives, though, are usually a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. Make no mistake, executives love clever branding ideas, but the only way to truly sell this group on B2B experience programs is success stories. It’s even better when these stories are quantifiable; nothing garners executive sponsorship quite like provable numbers.

While on the subject of numbers, practitioners should try to integrate their experience initiative into as many corporate KPIs as possible. The reasons for that are to ensure executive involvement in all sectors of the company, foster interconnectivity between offices in different countries and cultures, and to create program champions in multiple departments who can help you sell your program again in the future.

Educational Tools

Educational opportunities are an oft-overlooked benefit of experience programs, and pitching them is a great way to build the case for these initiatives. Indeed, practitioners should strive to build experience programs on education, which only makes sense when you consider that continuous improvement is these programs’ chief purpose!

With that in mind, practitioners should strive to fold white papers, training guides, videos, and other useful tools into the branding process. These resources should be complemented by in-house survey tools, customer templates and any other support mechanisms that employees find helpful.

Once all of these resources have been consolidated, it’s essential for practitioners to not only make them accessible, but also push employees to use and become reliant on them. Giving frontline employees access to real-time dashboards, for example, can help experience programs feel more familiar and even second-nature. This technique will cement an experience program’s integration into any organization.

Making the case for a B2B experience program can be a challenge at the best of times, but these techniques will enable those programs’ advocates to build organic support, gain the executive stamp of approval, and place continuous improvement at the very heart of the brands for whom they work.

Learn more about championing experience programs, acquiring B2B customers, and retaining their business by clicking here.