A few years ago, a customer shared feedback after working with one of our teams about how easy and reassuring the experience felt. What the client didn’t see was the collaboration happening internally. Team members supporting one another, sharing knowledge, and working together to make things right.
That’s where the real customer experience began. And it all started with a quick phone call.
What seemed like a small interaction became something much bigger. The client felt heard, supported, and confident that they had the right partner by their side. That’s the thing about customer experience. It often starts with the smallest moments.
Exceptional customer experiences start with employees
On CX Day, it’s worth remembering that exceptional customer experiences don’t start with the customer. They start with employees. In the B2B world, every interaction is powered by people who build relationships, solve problems, and create confidence in the partnership. When employees feel engaged, supported, and empowered to do their best work, they bring that same energy to every client conversation.
The result is stronger relationships, better outcomes, and experiences that customers remember.
CX starts on the inside. Invest in your people, and they’ll create the experiences that keep customers coming back.
Investing in your people means more than offering training or benefits. It starts with understanding what employees need to succeed, whether that’s clearer communication, stronger leadership support, opportunities for growth, or better collaboration across teams.
In short, when organisations invest in their employees, employees are better able to invest in their customers.
Happy CX Day to the people behind every great customer experience.
Learn more about Deep-Insight’s Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ) methodology and how employee feedback can help create a stronger, more engaged workforce.
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!
U P D A T E : I originally wrote “Who is Kim and where is she based?” in February 2020 just after Atos restructured itself into market-facing units. In June 2022, Atos announced that it was looking into an even more fundamental restructuring of the business. If the plan gets approval, a brand new company called Evidian will be spun out of Atos.
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Becoming more Customer-Centric
Don’t be confused by the title. This is actually a personal blog post about global organisational structures and why companies sometimes change them to serve the customer better. It’s about becoming more customer-centric. Honestly!
What triggered me to write this blog was today’s announcement of a new global organisation structure for Atos, a client of ours and a true leader in the IT and digital world. Atos is also a great case study in how leaders change their organisation to become more customer-centric.
Atos Announcement
Today, the new CEO of Atos Elie Girard announced a major global restructuring of its operations. You need to read between the lines to figure out how dramatic this change actually is. No longer will counties the UK, France, Germany and other countries be responsible for their own P&Ls. These will now be run by six global industry heads. The axis of power will shift and the shift is seismic.
Paris, 19 February 2020
Moving the Group to an Industry approach
As of 2020, the Group initiates a transformation, called “SPRING”, aiming at reshaping its portfolio of offerings, reinforcing its go-to-market approach, and setting-up an Industry led organisation. In this context, six Industries are created:
– Manufacturing
– Financial Services & Insurance
– Public Sector & Defense
– Telecom, Media & Technology
– Resources & Services
– Healthcare & Life Sciences
At the same time, the Company gathers Global Business Units into 5 Regional Business Units (RBU), each of them under a single leadership:
– North America
– Central Europe: former Germany, and Central & Eastern Europe excluding Italy
– Northern Europe: former United Kingdom & Ireland, and Benelux & The Nordics
– Southern Europe: former France, Iberia, and Italy
– Growing Markets: former Asia-Pacific, South America, and Middle East & Africa
Why?
It all sounds a bit complicated: GBUs, RBUs, Industries and so on. And yet Atos is moving to this new organisation structure in order to become more customer-centric. Here’s why.
Atos’ customers are typically large international organisations. To serve them better, Atos needs to move to a more global organisation structure, with deeper industry skills that can be deployed across international boundaries for the benefit of those clients. If your clients are global, you need to be global. This change is absolutely the right thing for Atos to do. That said, there will be challenges along the way. I’m only saying this because of personal experiences in a previous life.
Execution
Becoming more customer-centric requires four elements to be in place: Leadership, Strategy, Execution and Culture.
Atos has shown leadership and determination in making such a significant restructuring of its business. That leadership has driven a new strategy for delivering more effectively to global clients. Profit & Loss will no longer reside in each country. It will reside in an Industry or Global Business Unit (GBU). Now Atos is in the Execution phase. This is where the new organisational structure must work for both clients and employees. If Atos gets this right – and I’m sure it will – the culture of the new company will be changed utterly. And that’s good for Atos’ clients. The trick in the Execution phase is to involve both customers and employees in transformation. In other words, don’t just think of Execution in terms of ‘hard’ activities such as processes, technology, targets and KPIs. The human side of the equation is arguably more important. We call this Investing in the “Soft Side”.
A Personal Experience
More than 20 years ago I used to work in Andersen Consulting (since rebranded as Accenture) at a point when it was moving from a country-based organisation structure to a global GBU structure just like Atos is now doing. It was a painful experience for a number of reasons but – no different to Atos – it was absolutely the right thing to do. Accenture’s clients were large global organisations and that required Accenture to become a truly global organisation as well.
More than 100,000 Atos staff are now going through the very same restructuring process as I did all those years ago. For most, the impact will be small; for many it will have a significant impact on their lives and careers. As for Atos itself, the impact will be transformational.
So here’s a small personal perspective on what it’s like to be a small cog in a large wheel going through a global organisation restructure. In the late 1990s I was working with Accenture in Dublin, having transferred from its London office a few years earlier. My boss in Dublin was a guy called Mark Ryan. We both worked in the Irish Financial Services practice – our clients were the local banks and insurance companies. When the new organisational structure was announced, Mark called me in to his office. He said: “John, you’re no longer working for me. We’re now part of a European group within Financial Services. Your new boss is Kim Zimmer.”
Who the Hell is Kim and Where is She Based?
I don’t remember my exact response but it was probably something like “Who the hell is Kim and where is she based?” Mark laughed. At the time, I didn’t really see what was so funny.
After a while, Mark stopped laughing and said “Kim’s actually a guy. And he’s based in Oslo.”
As it turned out that Kim Zimmer was a wonderful man. Kim and his fellow partners had built a great business for Accenture in Norway based on long-standing relationships with senior leaders in the local banking and insurance community. For me, it was a great opportunity to work in a more European role (and spend more time on a plane). The European aspect of the work was great but the time spent in airports and hotels eventually got to me. A few years later I resigned from Accenture after a wonderful 13 years in what was always a very international company. I ended up in Deep-Insight where I’m still travelling but on a more manageable basis.
Footnote
I was going to name this blog “Who Do I Need to Buy Drinks For?” One of the most important aspects for anybody in a large multinational company is knowing who to talk to in order to help you develop your own career. Mentoring is important in any large organisation and organisational changes disrupt the linkages that people build up over time. It’s something that senior managers need to bear in mind when they suddenly find themselves with a brand new team of people reporting into them. Being customer-centric also means being employee-centric.
Similarly, for staff, it’s important to get facetime with new bosses. You don’t need to ply them with alcohol but it is important to engineer the opportunity to spend time with them to understand what their motivations are and how you fit into their plans.
Peter Whitelaw and I wrote a book last year called Customer at the Heart. It was a fun experience interviewing CEOs and sales directors from large B2B companies across Europe and Australia.
One of the consistent messages we heard in those interviews was the importance of investing in the ‘Soft Side’. In other words, focusing on people as much as on process.
This is a really important point: if you are responsible for running a customer experience (CX) programme in your organisation, don’t under-estimate the importance of investing in ‘Soft Side’ activities if you want to generate real long-lasting results.
This means spending significant amounts of time with both your leadership and client-facing teams planning for success.
The Importance of Investing in the ‘Soft Side’
A quick recap on the four quadrants in the Customer at the Heart model before we go any further:
1. LEADERSHIP. The most important quadrant. Good Customer Experience (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 CX 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.
Our Approach
We have a different approach at Deep-Insight. We spend a lot more time with leadership teams and sales or account teams BEFORE we think about asking our customer’s clients for their views. If you want to run a customer survey in a hurry – “I need to get the results back by the end of the month…” – we’re probably not the organisation for you.
At Deep-Insight, the first 14-16 weeks of our process are critical and must be done properly. If you don’t invest the time up-front, your CX 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.
Planning & Onboarding
The first phase in our approach is ‘Onboarding’ the organisation; The very first step is to secure the buy-in from the senior leadership team to the journey that they are about to embark on. And it is a journey because cultural change takes time. The second step is to onboard the rest of the organisation, primarily the sales and account teams. They own the customer relationships and if they don’t embrace the programme with gusto, the entire programme is at risk of being seen as a box-ticking exercise.
We typically work with dispersed sales and service teams in online workshops, and always with senior leadership support and involvement. These onboarding workshops are critical to driving up response rates and completion rates, as well as delivering action and improvements.
Insights to Action
The final phase is where the rubber hits the road. The online survey is complete. We have gathered some key insights from the feedback. Now it’s time to assemble the sales and account teams again. This time the focus is on their role in ‘Closing the Loop’ with the client. This is arguably the most critical part of the entire process. The account manager – sometimes with a member of the senior leadership team – must meet the client to discuss the feedback from all individuals in that client’s organisation.
In many cases, these discussions are straightforward because everything is fine and the relationship is on an even keel. In some instances, the client may be a ‘Stalker’ or an ‘Opponent’ and a much tougher and more honest conversation is needed.
The key outcome of these ‘Close the Loop’ meetings is agreement on the appropriate actions that are needed to improve and deepen the relationship. This gets built into the Account Planning process for that client.
Investing in the ‘Soft Side’
If your CX programme isn’t working the way you hoped it would, it’s probably because you’ve under-invested in the Leadership and Culture quadrants. The symptoms will be clear: disengaged account teams; limited insights; complete absence of action.
If you notice any of these symptoms in your CX programme, do get in touch.
