One of the most important elements of a customer experience (CX) program is a customer journey map. These maps serve as visual guides to the interactions customers have with your brand, including product purchases, talking to employees, and more. Customer journey maps can help brands hammer out the steps customers take on the road to a better experience and, just as importantly, do so from the customer’s perspective.

Today, we’re going to walk you through how to quickly create an effective customer journey map that touches on elements like key evaluation points, positive and negative experience components, and more. Let’s jump in.

A Certain Point of View

Though a customer journey map focuses heavily on seeing your brand’s experience through customers’ eyes, it actually starts with a different perspective: yours. The first step to building an effective customer journey map is considering that journey as your organization sees it. 

First, identify the key interactions that customers have with your brand. Are these interactions limited to one-step transactions, or are they a bit more involved? The answer to this question varies from company to company—it’ll even vary between the different stakeholders that you bring in to help just at your brand. This can make creating a shared framework a more involved process, but brands can’t build a truthful, effective customer journey map without it!

The Next Level

Once you, your team, and stakeholders from other departments have agreed upon your customers’ steps, it’s time to expand on every step by identifying some key elements. These elements include: the customer’s desired outcome; time or duration; attitudes and thoughts; emotional responses and needs; customer pain points; strong and weak areas; and the importance of and satisfaction with the step.

At first glance, hammering these details out for every step in your customer journey map may seem a bit overkill. However, similarly to getting everyone’s opinion on what those steps actually are, doing this legwork enables a more educated approach to your customer journey map. This, in turn, will give your brand a greater understanding of its experience, the strengths and weaknesses of that experience, and what you can do to meaningfully improve it.

Bridging The Divide

Now that we’ve talked about building out the customer journey and the elements of its every step from your brand’s point of view, it’s time to circle back to what we talked about up top: understanding the journey as your customer sees it. Starting with your brand’s perspective on the customer journey is important because it gives you a perspective to compare and contrast to your customers’.

The Value of Understanding the Customer Journey

In short, a customer journey map encourages brands to consider what makes their experience great while also giving them a means of seeing why customers may (or may not) agree. Brands then have a better chance of knowing how to bridge potential divides and work toward a more connective, meaningfully improved experience for customers, employees, and the organization itself.

Want to read more about uncovering the real customer journey? Check out our eBook on the subject here, where we break down the process in five simple steps!

Few elements of customer engagement matter more than well-designed transactional customer surveys. You need feedback from your customers and they deserve a chance to provide it. And a well-designed survey can help everyone achieve these respective goals. With that in mind, we’re going to take you through a few principles that can turn any survey from a questionnaire to a conversation. Let’s get after it.

  • Key #1: Design With The End in Mind
  • Key #2: Keep It Short
  • Key #3: Invitations are Everything

Key #1: Design With The End in Mind

A lot of brands out there believe that the best way to get information from their customers is to throw a bunch of questions at the wall and see which ones stick. That strategy may get you some intel, but it’s nowhere near as effective as designing with the end in mind. This strategy is all about considering what you actually plan to do with the info you want to collect.

For example, do you want to better understand why retention is looking a bit down this quarter? Maybe it’s time to assess how well your employees and locations adhere to company standards? Whatever business goal you have in mind, designing your surveys around specific objectives will make them far more useful to you and your customers. You can gather information vital to accomplishing your goals, and customers can alert you to problems and process breakages that a more general survey wouldn’t have picked up.

Key #2: Keep It Short

One of the reasons customers either abandon surveys halfway through or outright ignore them is because they’re too long. The funny thing is that a lot of brands don’t mean for surveys to become long-winded. They usually start out short, but slowly accrue too many questions from other stakeholders over time.

A good rule of thumb for any transactional survey is that it should take no longer than five minutes to complete. That limit is important to bear in mind as you decide which questions to include and which to cut. Additionally, save ratings-based questions for the most important parts of the experience.

Finally, consider what data you may already have from other systems and listening posts. If you’re asking questions related to those areas, consider cutting those questions out.

Key #3: Invitations Are Everything

Creating an enticing invitation is one of the most overlooked parts of survey design. Recipients pay a lot of attention to how well invitations are designed and factor that into accepting whatever it’s for. Thus, it’s never a bad idea to put some time into making your survey link or invitation look good. Whether it’s a beautiful design or a funny one-liner, think about what your customers might appreciate seeing in a survey invite and act accordingly.

The Benefits of Transactional Customer Surveys

Keeping these three principles in mind can supercharge any brand’s survey design and create a noticeable uptick in customer responses. Armed with that new intelligence, brands can be more aware than ever of their strengths, their weaknesses, and how to go about both of these elements to create a peerless experience for their customers.

Click here to learn more about survey design best practices from expert Dave Ensing.

Be honest: what do you think of when you hear someone is “managing” something? Is a person performing a task well if they are just “managing” it? Or are they barely keeping their heads above water? That’s why at Pearl-Plaza, we have done away with simple experience management and have fully embraced Experience Improvement (XI)!

The truth is, simply managing experiences isn’t enough. You need the right combination of valuable data, effective technology, and human expertise. Not only that, but you need to understand where and how you can take action to actually improve your experience—and your bottom line.

Curious what Experience Improvement looks like? Here are three brands who have it down to a science:

Foot Locker

Techtronic Industries (TTI)

Allianz

Interested in Improving Customer Experiences?

Improving customer experiences is why Pearl-Plaza was created. Learn more about our approach here!

The Doctor is (Virtually) In: COVID and Telemedicine Experience

Many patients—especially those at high risk—prefer virtual visits and consultations with their doctors. As a result, there’s been a sharp uptick in telemedicine over the course of this year amid COVID.

I recently talked about COVID-19’s effects on hospital visits and how the pandemic has reshaped patients’ healthcare facility expectations. But this isn’t the only experience arena that the Coronavirus is impacting.

Many patients—especially those at high risk—prefer virtual visits and consultations with their doctors. As a result, there’s been a sharp uptick in telemedicine over the course of this year.

Of course, just like hospitals themselves, virtual consultations face new experience challenges amid COVID. Therefore, healthcare brands must address those challenges directly in order to build trust with their patients. Those challenges, and their solutions, are the focus of this article.

Consultation Considerations

The telemedicine experience is dramatically different from a walk-in visit, especially when it comes to collecting feedback. A virtual visit presents more immediate opportunities to collect feedback from patients, though this poses a new challenge: healthcare brands need to avoid inundating patients with countless questions.

The best approach for hospitals and providers to take here is to provide feedback opportunities at the beginning and end of virtual visits. This gives patients an opportunity to voice their expectations at the start of the consultation and follow up on how well those expectations were met. This one-two strategy strikes a careful balance between survey frequency and patient comfort (which is obviously key to building a great experience for them).

Telemedicine Experience Checkup 

It’s important to remember that anyone who submits feedback expects brands to act on it. This is especially true for hospitals, which means it’s vital that healthcare brands parse through virtual visit feedback carefully. An experience platform that can ingest and analyze feedback, especially unstructured data, is key to this end. Hospitals can succeed by considering their audiences, designing their listening programs around those audiences, then executing an action plan.

Taking action on patient feedback is especially important these days. Healthcare customers have always expected providers to act on their concerns, but the pandemic has sent that expectation into the stratosphere. Thus, patients are paying especially close attention to their virtual visits—and how hospitals respond.

To recap, hospitals can ensure that their patients are receiving the best telemedicine possible by:

  1. Designing their listening program around tangible goals and important audiences
  2. Listening carefully to those audiences
  3. Ingesting feedback, especially unstructured data, to heighten patient understanding
  4. Applying subsequent learnings to the wider organization
  5. Achieving a better virtual experience for patients

Healthcare providers that stick to this strategy will not only make it out the other side of this pandemic, but also do so in a far better position for themselves and the patients for whom they provide quality care.

To learn more about the lasting effects of Coronavirus on the patient experience, check out this full article by Jason Macedonia here.

What Holiday Shoppers Expect In Store & Online

Do you know what holiday shoppers need from you this season? What about what matters most to them in store? Or what is most important to them when it comes to their experience on your website?
Holiday Shopping at a Mall

Do you know what holiday shoppers need from you this season? What about what matters most to them in store? Or what is most important to them when it comes to their experience on your website?

If you’re unsure, don’t simply guess what your customers are looking for. Instead, check out this infographic we created based on a study we did that surveyed 5,000 North American customers about their expectations for the holiday shopping season!

What Holiday Shoppers Expect In Store & Online

Text Analytics Terms You Need to Know

Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started in the world of customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX), you need to be fluent in the language of text analytics.

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just getting started in the world of customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX), you need to be fluent in the language of text analytics.

However, that’s more easily said than done. With technology evolving so quickly, it’s hard to keep up with the latest and greatest. That’s why we’ve put together this quick text analytics glossary. Check it out below!

Top Terms

Accuracy: The combination of precision and recall for a given tag or model. 

Emotion: A measure of positive/negative feelings. Must be strong and clear-cut enough to be categorized as a specific emotion.

Human Translation: This translation method has a human translate each comment individually as the customer submits it.

Intent: Intent identifies what the customer is trying to achieve based on their response.

Keyword: A word or term that occurs in unstructured customer feedback data.

Machine Translation: Translation done by a machine that has been trained by humans.

Native Language Model: A text analytics model that is purposely built for a specific spoken language.

Natural Language Processing: A field of computer science and artificial intelligence that draws intelligence from unstructured data.

Precision: Correctness; represents how often a given concept is correctly captured by a specific tag. 

Recall: Coverage; refers to how thoroughly the topics or ideas within a given tag are captured. 

Sentiment: The expressed feeling or attitude behind a customer’s feedback. Categorized as positive, negative, or neutral.

Sentiment Phrase: Also referred to as a Sentiment Bearing Phrase or SBP. A phrase or sentence identified with positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.

Sentiment Score: A measure for both the polarity and intensity of the sentiment within a given comment.

Tag: A label generated from text analytics that groups together similar customer comments around a specific concept or topic.

Text Analytics: The methods and processes used for obtaining insights from unstructured data.

Text Analytics Model: A natural language processing engine that uses tags to label and organize unstructured data.

Theme: A dynamically extracted concept from a collection of comments, generated by an unsupervised machine learning algorithm.

Unstructured Data: Qualitative data or information that is not organized according to an easily recognizable structure. Can include comments, social data, images, or audio recordings

Making the Difference with Text Analytics

We hope this quick glossary helped you on your journey to find the best solution for your business. After all, text analytics make the difference between getting a meaningless score from your data and getting actionable intelligence. And without that intelligence, you can’t make experience improvements in the moments that matter. That’s why it’s so important to get your text analytics right!

If you want to learn more about world-class text analytics solutions, including new approaches like custom layered models and adaptive sentiment engines, you can check out our full eBook on the subject here!

The Most Important Conversation You Can Have About Your Customer & Employee Experience

That’s really the goal, isn’t it? It’s not just to measure the state of your experience. Not just to deliver insights from your data (regardless of if they’re actionable or not). The point of a CX or EX program is to improve your experience to improve your business!

One of the most important pieces of advice we give our clients as they dig into their customer or employee experience strategy is to “design with the end in mind.”

This is really just our way of saying that when you map out your listening posts, choose your text analytics approach, or designate internal teams to lead program governance initiatives, you need to know what you are working toward. 

And that brings us to the most important conversation you can have with your customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) stakeholders. It starts with this one question:

What business challenges are we trying to solve with our experience initiatives?

Because that’s really the goal, isn’t it? It’s not just to measure the state of your experience. Not just to deliver insights from your data (regardless of if they’re actionable or not). The point of a CX or EX program is to improve your experience to improve your business!

For some, that might mean acquiring new customers or retaining existing customers. For others, it might look like reducing costs and increasing cross-sell and upsell efforts. Whether you fall into one or all four of these areas, your experience program can help you deliver value. 

Solving for X with Experience Improvement

This principle, what we call Experience Improvement (XI), is why Pearl-Plaza exists. Our mission is to help our clients improve experiences at the intersection of value—where customer, employee, and business needs come together.  

Ultimately, our clients are able to move the needle and go beyond managing their experience to actually improving it. With the right intelligence, businesses can empower the right people to take transformative, informed action in the most effective ways, achieving better results for the business and better experiences for their customers and employees.

And it all starts with one conversation: What is the “X” your business is trying to solve for?

If you want to learn more about how your experience programs can solve for X, you can learn more here. You can also reach out to our knowledgeable experts to see how experience improvement can benefit your business today! Reach out and talk to us here.

Four Ways to Create Emotionally Moving Experiences for Your Customers

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. 

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.

Three Factors That Help Experience Programs Avoid Unanticipated Costs

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.

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.

Three Ways to Convince The C-Suite Your CX Program is Essential

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.

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.

4 Ways to Measure (and Prove) B2B CX Program Results

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.

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.

Three Ways B2B Brands Can Promote Experience Programs Internally

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.

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.

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