You may have had a peak at Rose’s blog from a few weeks ago regarding the results of our latest CRQ™ assessment. We received a ton of positive feedback from our customers, and it is clear they love what we do for them, so much so that they want more!
So why am I re-iterating what Rose already shared in her previous blog? Well as part of Deep-Insight’s response to the 2023 CRQ feedback, a new role within the team has been announced: Product Manager.
I am super excited and proud to share with all of you that I will be taking on the role of Product Manager at Deep-Insight!
Who am I?
Some of you may know me from the projects we have worked on together over the past few years, but for those of you who do not know me yet, here’s a little bit about me:
My name is Fabienne, I am originally from the Netherlands but have been living in beautiful Ireland for over 7 years now. I have been part of the Deep-Insight team for nearly 5 years and … I am a BIG fan of a good cup of coffee, so when it comes to my new role within Deep-Insight, this is exactly where I intend to start…. Coffee!
I’m not being silly here, I actually do believe that it is key that I start my new role talking to you, our past, current and future customers. I want to understand more about how you see Deep-Insight and where you envision us to be in the next few years. How can we assist you further on your CX journey as well as in reaching your business goals?
I am thrilled to be starting my new role in the next year and cannot wait to see what the future holds for Deep-Insight!
I’ll be spending the first few months in my new role chatting about all this in more detail with many of you and can’t wait to get stuck in 🙂
Please free to reach out to me directly if you have some thoughts/ideas you’d like to share!
We are genuinely delighted to announce that our NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CRQTM(Customer Relationship Quality) scores are fantastic, again! Stifle that yawn – I promise it gets more interesting.
We are very proud of this picture. Most of our customers are promoters – they love our products and services and are willing to tell the world about it. Time to celebrate and shout this from the rafters – right?
Call it intuition or call it 20+ years’ experience in understanding client feedback but far more digging into the feedback would be needed before we were ready to celebrate.
The result of this digging is the creation of a new role – Product Manager – and their first objective will be to validate if we have the correct product strategy.
So, how is this logical given the amazing feedback that I have just shared, especially around product? The answer to that is a lesson on why you should never just rely on NPS to tell you how your customers are feeling or what their future intentions might be.
Lets start digging.....
This is where CRQ™ really helps us to get under the bonnet of even the rosiest feedback, forcing us to listen to the murmurs of bubbling discontent.
The first red flag is when we asked all respondents what our greatest weakness is, not only did we have a new winner – we had a new topic entirely and it was mentioned by 15% of respondents.
Is this really a problem?
Immediately the internal arguments came that this was a blip and not that important. Arguments we used to try and convince ourselves were:
15% is still not that many!
Price (often a key indicator of competitiveness) is not raised by even one respondent.
We are in the CX business for over 20 years (long before CX was even a thing) – you will find it difficult to find a competitor in the B2B space with more global, cross industry, experience than us.
Just look at that promoter graph again, our customers love us!
The only way to answer these arguments is to establish if there are further data insights that support this feedback? (Keep Digging)
We started by segmenting the feedback into the respondents who know us best – the CX Teams we work with every day and Key Decision Makers who repeatedly choose us as their CX Partner.
Turns out that even a higher percentage of the individuals who know us best believe this to be a weakness for us.
Further investigation of CRQ™ scores only compounded that we need to listen. Focusing again on those individuals who know us best, scores that link closely to this type verbatim have slipped from Top Decile Scores to Second Quartile Score .
🙁 Our customers want more CX services than we currently offer, and they perceive that there are other suppliers in the CX space now who can give them what they want.
😐 Some of our customers also believe that other CX suppliers are better at promoting themselves in the market and raising brand awareness.
The exciting part of all of this
🙂 Our customers do not want to use those other suppliers; they trust us and believe in our integrity as their CX Partner. They want us to provide these additional services, and they want us to tell the world how great we are.
The Action - A new position in Deep-Insight: PRODUCT MANAGER
FIRST OBJECTIVE: Validate if our current product strategy is correct, needs to be tweaked or needs a massive overhaul.
FIRST STEP: Ask many customers, previous customers, industry contacts and friendsfor your input and I will be extremely grateful to anyone who can give us the time to help
PURPOSE: Change, even if that is in a way that neither us nor our customers can predict just yet
P.S. I am not ignoring the brand promotion and awarenessfeedback, our CEO John O’Connor is going to take personal ownership of addressing this. Watch this space, his thoughts will follow shortly.
I came across two posts on LinkedIn recently where two separate business-to-business (B2B) companies – one professional services company and one IT services provider – announced the exact same Net Promoter Score results from their clients: +91. The spokesman for the profession services company was particularly chuffed: “We were delighted with the results of the survey resulting in an NPS of 91.”
“We were delighted with the results of the survey resulting in an NPS of 91”
The calculation for Net Promoter Score is simple: just subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The resulting score will be somewhere in the range from -100 to +100.
Promoters score you 9 or 10. Detractors score you 6 or less. What about the 7s and 8s, I hear you say? Well, they’re called Passives and the sad thing is that they don’t get counted at all.
A NPS result of +91 equates to a combination of Promoters, Passives and Detractors that might look something like:
91% Promoters, 9% Passives, and no Detractors (91 – 0 = 91)
You get the picture. To achieve a Net Promoter Score of +91, almost everybody has to love you. Not just LIKE you, but LOVE you. And I mean REALLY, REALLY love you!
+91 is an astonishingly good score in the B2B world.
A bit more context: In Northern Europe we generally think that a score of 8 out of 10 is pretty good. 9s and 10s are reserved for experiences that are truly special. I’ve written about this before. It’s conditioned into us in school and at university not to give 9s and 10s when we rate somebody or some service that we have received. Think about it. If you have a college education and graduated with a First Class Honours degree, you scored 70% (or maybe a little higher) in your final year exams. That’s 7 out of 10.
If you’re a Premier League footballer and score a couple of goals in a Cup Final, you might be lucky enough to get a player score of 8 from the sports writers commenting on the game. When Liverpool won the Premiership for the first and only time in 2020, they did so with a Net Promoter Score of MINUS 45.
We’re a difficult bunch in Europe. A dour lot. And the further north you go, the harsher we score. Other countries are different.In America (both north and south), you can get 10/10 if you do a good job or provide an excellent service. There are major attitudinal differences from country to country when if comes to scoring – you can read about it here.
An 'average' B2B Net Promoter Score is slightly above zero
So what happens in real life? How many B2B companies score +91 on the NPS metric?
At Deep-Insight, we have been running large NPS programmes for nearly two decades – mainly in Europe – and the reality is that there is a surprisingly wide spread of scores ranging from -50 to +50.
So am I saying that the professional services and IT firms claiming Net Promoter Scores of +91 are lying?
Not necessarily. Theoretically, it is possible to get a NPS result of +100 from your customer experience (CX) programme but in nearly 20 years we have never seen this happen. In fact, we’ve never seen any B2B company get close to +75.
In practical terms, the only way you can get a NPS result of +91 is as follows:
First, you really do have to be excellent at what you do – particularly when it comes to delivering excellent service every time
But that’s not enough. You also need to ‘frig the system’ by selecting a small number of clients who are Ambassadors for you and your service
You also need to select only those individuals in those client organisations who you believe will score you 9/10 or 10/10
You need to carefully deselect any client that is likely to give you a poor score – you can use the excuse: “Now is not the right time to ask them their views” or “We’ll only antagonise them if we approach them now”
Never send a survey to somebody who doesn’t know you really well, even if it’s a senior decision maker that you’d love to have a conversation with – as we’ve seen already, the chances of them giving you 9 or 10 are very slim indeed
Finally, don’t outsource the survey process to a third party who will give the option of confidentiality to the survey participants – confidential surveys are likely to elicit lower scores even if they provide a more realistic and honest view of your product or service
You might think I’m being cynical. Surely B2B companies don’t act in such a manner? Surely the leadership and CX teams will prevent this happening by putting an appropriate governance process in place?
Even if companies aren’t that cynical – and in our experience most are not – subtle biases always creep in to soften any hard messages, inflate the true Net Promoter Scores, and water down the recommended actions. Sometimes these biases are blatant. But they always exist.
What’s worse is that leadership teams often compound the problem by setting inappropriate targets (“We’re expecting a completion rate of 75%”) or by incentivising a completely biased result by paying bonuses if certain NPS targets are reached. We all know that if you give good sales managers a target and an incentive plan, they will do their best to achieve it.
Don’t fall into that trap with your CX programme. Work hard at getting what we refer to as ‘unvarnished truth’ about what your customers really think.
Things that never happened: a NPS of +91
Back to our professional services and IT companies and their +91 NPS results.
I don’t believe they deliberately set out to ‘frig the system’ in order to achieve a score of +91. I also suspect they genuinely do deliver a really good service. But even without knowing the full details behind the surveys, I know in my heart that they were administered to a small sample of hand-picked clients. The individuals administering the survey were probably not even aware that they were ‘frigging the system’. After all, they had to ask to account managers to nominate the people to be contacted as they don’t manage the client relationships themselves. They weren’t to know that the leadership teams had (unwittingly) conveyed to the account teams that a high NPS result would be good to promote their company on LinkedIn and other social media. They didn’t tell the CEO that she needed to put a robust governance process in place.
With a good governance process in place to elicit the ‘unvarnished truth’ from clients, European B2B companies will never achieve Net Promoter Scores of +91. That’s simply a fact. It never happened.
B2B leadership teams shouldn’t be targeting high NPS scores. Instead, they should be trying to identify key areas for improvement, and then implementing changes based on real unbiased feedback from clients. If they are successful, the NPS results will improve slowly and steadily over time.
So don’t just chase a NPS number. Listen to your customers instead. Act on their suggestions. Resolve their issues. The NPS result will take care of itself.
If you would like more information on how to run an effective CX programme that delivers real and long-lasting change, do get in touch with us. We’d love to help!
A lot of words have been penned on the topic of customer experience (CX) in recent years. But here’s the thing. Most of what’s written relates to CONSUMER experience.
There really is very little out there about CX purely written from a business-to-business (B2B) perspective. That’s really surprising when you consider that B2B commerce is significantly larger than its business-to-consumer (B2C) counterpart.
So let’s try to redress that with this blog. Let’s explore how CX is, and should be, measured in B2B companies.
The answer to the first question is easy. Most large B2B companies use Net Promoter Scorethese days. The second question – how should CX be measured – is harder to answer. There are other measurement systems out there so is NPS really the best metric? Does it even work in a B2B context?
What is Customer Experience anyway?
Before we answer these questions, I need to provide a little bit of context to how we got to where we are today. The reason is that the term ‘Customer Experience’ is actually a very recent term. As the Box below shows, the term was first coined in 1999.
‘Customer Experience’ was called something else for most of the last century. In fact, CX was called a lot of different things over the last 100 years.
The book itself starts with a wonderful example of how the value in a cup of coffee is in the experience, rather than the quality of the underlying commodity (in this case, the humble coffee bean).
This example above is from the consumer, or B2C, world but the concept is equally applicable to the B2B world. Experiences are subjective. They tap into the emotional as well as the rational side of the brain.
A Brief History of CX in the 20th Century
So if CX is a term that only came into common usage at the turn of the 21th century, what was it known as before then? Time for a short history lesson.
A hundred years ago, there were practically no formal customer-related performance measures in existence. That’s not to say manufacturing companies didn’t think about the customer. And it was all manufacturing back then. The services economy didn’t really take off until much later. In fact, it was only after the end of the Second World War that services became the dominant component of western economies. The graphic below shows that in the UK, the services sector hit 50% in 1950. Today, it’s closer to 80%.
Back in the 1950s, it made sense to focus on product quality. By then, management gurus like W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, and Philip Crosby were rolling out a series of techniques and approaches for Total Quality Management, or TQM. That’s what customer experience was all about in those days.
By the 1960s, management theory had become a little more sophisticated. People started thinking not just about the quality of the product being manufactured, but also about whether the customer was satisfied with the product. Did it meet expectations? Did it exceed expectations? This is when Customer Satisfaction, or CSat, measurement started to take off.
It’s strange to think that this was the first time that management gurus started thinking explicitly about the customer.
By the 1980s, most economies in the world were dominated by services rather than by manufacturing. Service Quality became a fashionable, if fuzzy, topic led by American academics like Valerie Zeithaml and Leonard Berry. They proposed measuring concepts like reliability, responsiveness and customer care.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that people like Fred Reichheld (the guy who later came up with the concept of Net Promoter Score) really started thinking about the value of a customer over the lifetime of that person buying from a company, rather than just the value of the individual transaction. Customer Loyalty became the new buzzphrase. Reichheld’s book The Loyalty Effect is still one of the most sought-after management books of the last 30 years.
Also in the 1990s, another couple of American academics Morgan and Hunt came up with their views on the critical role of Trust and Commitment in business relationships. I’ve written about Morgan and Hunt before, in this blog.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
While CX is only a little over 20 years old as a concept, it is in fact built on a series of measures going back as far as the 1950s. Here’s the important thing. All of the concepts and measures in the following table are STILL relevant today. Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score may be the most commonly used metric at the moment, but it’s not the only one. It’s not even the best one. But, in its favour, it is a simple concept to understand and equally simple for leadership teams and boards to implement.
ERA
MEASUREMENT
1950s & 1960s
Total Quality Management (TQM)
1970s
Customer Satisfaction (CSat)
1980s
Service Quality
1990s
Customer Loyalty
Trust & Commitment
2000s
Customer Experience (CX)
Customer Experience Management (CEM)
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
When CX met NPS in the early 21st century, it seemed a marriage made in heaven. If the customer experience was excellent, we could measure just how good it was by asking a very simple question: “Would you recommend it?” NPS turned out to be a really straightforward way to measure consumer experience.
But is NPS a good metric to measure B2B customer experience? After all, the business world has had nearly a century of research into product quality, satisfaction, service quality, customer loyalty and business relationships. Should all these metrics be cast aside in favour of NPS?
As Isaac Newton famously said to a letter to Robert Hooke in 1675: “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” CX professionals need to do the same when they consider what metrics to use in the B2B world. By all means, use NPS as a key metric. But also look back to the giants of the 20th century for inspiration.
Measuring B2B Customer Experience – is NPS Enough?
In short, No!
Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score may be a great metric for measuring advocacy and is well suited to consumer environments and brands. Don’t get me wrong – it also has applicability in B2B environments even though I haven’t always been a fan.
The great strength of NPS – its sheer simplicity – also turns out to be its main failing.
Everybody understands intuitively the concepts of ‘Promoters’ and ‘Detractors’. They also grasp the ‘net’ concept. In other words:
NPS = % Promoters minus % Detractors
Boards and leadership team love the fact that it works on all types and sizes of customers. It’s easy to administer as it’s a single question. But therein lies the problem. It’s a single question. It’s very one-dimensional. It ignores all the giants of the 20th century and the work they did to understand what customer experience really involves, and how best to measure it.
NPS tells you whether you have a problem or not. It doesn’t give you the deep insights you need in complex B2B environments about the nature of the underlying problems. Or how to fix them.
Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ)
The answer to the question at the top of this blog – how should you measure B2B customer experience – is to combine the best of all worlds. To stand on the shoulders of the giants of the 20th century. And to do so in a pragmatic way.
The Net Promoter question is worth asking, but in conjunction with a handful of other questions that are built on a foundation of nearly a century of good research. The result is a methodology that we call CRQ – Customer Relationship Quality – which covers six building blocks:
The approach we take at Deep-Insight is to stand on the shoulders of giants such as Deming, Juran and Crosby way back in the 1950s. I’ll come back to this topic again in the near future as I believe one of the most fundamental building blocks on customer experience for any B2B organisation is consistently good service delivery. Our own research shows that service delivery is the most important driver of long-term trusted relationships.
If you’re interested in finding out a bit more about customer experience and how to measure B2B customer experience, download our white paper by clicking on the image below.
Last month, we asked our clients what they thought of us. We do this every year and take our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) feedback seriously. We try to follow the advice we give to our own clients: give your customers the opportunity to tell you what they think. Listen to what they say. Then act on their feedback.
As we did last year, we cast the net for our 2022 CRQ assessment quite wide. We didn’t just limit the survey to a handful of key decision makers in current clients. We included many operational and administrative contacts. Their views are equally important. We also asked dormant customers what they thought of us.
Last year, you said…
The main message that you gave us last year – actually for the last two years – was that you needed more than just a survey provider. In practice, that meant providing more assistance AFTER your customers gave their feedback. You needed a partner that could help you deliver meaningful change across your whole organisation. You also wanted us to be more flexible and supportive.
We listened, and here are three of the things we did in response to your feedback.
1. Deliver more than just a survey
We have always strived to be more than just a survey company. Our mission is to help companies become truly customer-centric. Getting customer and employee feedback is part of that process, but there’s much more to it than launching a survey. That’s why we completely redesigned the way we work with clients, based on what you said to us.
Today we spend a lot more time with leadership teams and sales or account teams both BEFORE we think about asking our customer’s clients for their views as well as AFTER they give their feedback. The BEFORE piece is critical and must be done properly. If you don’t invest the time up-front, your CX (or EX) programme will not deliver the results that Management and the Board expect from it. More than likely, it will end in failure. It’s as simple as that.
2. Assist with Customer Relationship Quality ‘Healthchecks’
Last year we conducted CRQ ‘Healthchecks’ for clients in the UK and Ireland. The objective of a ‘Healthcheck’ is to benchmark how good a company’s Customer Experience or Customer Satisfaction programme is. That doesn’t just mean assessing if the right questions are being asked of the right people. It’s a more fundamental look at whether all the right components are in place to deliver genuine and meaningful benefits. We do this under four headings:
1. LEADERSHIP. The most important quadrant. Good Customer Excellence (CX) programmes are ALWAYS led from the top
2. STRATEGY. Good CX programmes link customer, product, operational and organisational strategy explicitly to customer needs
3. EXECUTION. Success requires properly resourced teams that are brilliant at executing the Strategy
4. CULTURE. Finally, Customer Excellence must become integral to the DNA of the organisation: “it’s how we do things around here”
All four quadrants are necessary for a successful CX programme. The ‘Hard Side’ quadrants of Strategy and Execution are all about metrics and processes. ‘Hard Side’ activities lend themselves to key performance indicators (KPIs) and while the activities in these two quadrants are important and easily measurable, the quadrants of Leadership and Culture are actually more critical.
In our experience, Leadership is the most important quadrant while Culture is the most challenging. And yet, here’s the strange thing: in most CX programmes the ‘Soft Side’ is often overlooked and almost always under-resourced.
3. Run Customer Centricity ‘Masterclasses’ for managers and leadership teams
One of the key ‘Soft Side’ challenges is making sure your entire organisation is on board with your CX (or CSat or NPS or Customer Relationship Quality) programme. Over the past 12 months, we have partnered with the world-leading HEC Business School in Paris.
That collaboration has helped us develop and deliver a ‘Masterclass’ to educate leadership teams, managers and partners about the importance and benefits of putting the customer at the heart of everything they do. The ‘Masterclass’ also helps employees understand the crucial role they play in making their companies customer-centric.
Already, these ‘Masterclasses’ have been delivered both virtually (for COVID reasons) and face-to-face to clients in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
How did we score this year?
Having made the investments over the past two years, we were very curious to get your reaction. In short, you were very generous in your responses this year.
This is the highest NPS result we have ever achieved to date and the third time we have scored over +50. Our CRQ score is also the highest we have ever achieved and we are honoured to be thought of so highly by you, our valued clients.
Result: new client wins
I honestly believe that it’s because of the trust that our clients place in Deep-Insight that we have been able to announce some great new wins in recent months.
We have a 10+ year relationship with Atos but primarily in the UK & Ireland. Earlier this year, we extended that relationship to Germany and over the next three years we will be partnering with Atos on one of their most important and strategic global accounts.
One of our largest accounts in Australia was the logistics company Toll Group. Last year our key contact at Toll moved to Scotts Refrigerated Logistics and we recently signed a new 3-year contract to help ScottsRL become one of the most customer-centric companies in Australia.
Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods is a Dutch milk powder manufacturer that operates in Barneveld, Scharsterbrug, Gorinchem and Madrid. Its 500 staff process 1.4 billion kilograms of milk each year. Over the next three years, we will be working with the Vreugdenhil leadership team to turn a company that creates great food products into a truly customer-centric organisation.
Agenda for 2022
While we’re really proud of these Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) and NPS scores, there is more to do.
For starters, we got feedback from 48% of the people we asked to participate. While that’s not bad, we do see some room for improvement. Last year our response rate was 55%. We know that some of our clients achieve rates of 70% or more. We will be working hard to improve on this figure next year.
Second, the main feedback we received this year is that our new consulting services are great BUT not enough. Our clients are looking for Deep-Insight to provide even more support. The two customer quotes below confirm to me that we need to support clients on a year-round basis.
“Would like to see greater insight on how we can really make a difference for our customers. How do we truly address those recurring themes that come up each year? It would be great to get insight on how we can do this better – beyond the data”
“I would question to what degree on a continual basis Deep-Insight provides interaction and insight as a partner to the business. Also, to what extent there are follow-up meetings post results as you as experts help inform our response and strategy.”
Third, the feedback process is not finished yet. We need to ‘close the loop’ with all clients and discuss their specific feedback. We will be in touch shortly and will be looking specifically for more insights into any additional support needs they may have.
I need to finish off by thanking Fiona Lynch for planning, organising and running this year’s client assessment. Fiona joined us earlier this year from Atos where she was part of a global service delivery team. It’s great to have her on board.
So, well done Fiona, and thank you to all of our clients. We really do value your feedback.
