B2B Benchmarks Series - CX Adoption & Mapping

This is where a company goes from it living in one or two departments, or it being a tool for one group to it being a success criteria for an entire organization.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. And today we dive into part two of the quick Hitting Experience Benchmark episodes. And in this episode we'll be exploring benchmark data centered around two questions. Whether or not CX is deployed throughout your organization or have you developed a.

Thorough customer journey map?

Both data points are related, as we'll.

Explain in the episode. Some really interesting benchmark data here to review, guys, so let's dive on in. I'm joined as always with my friend and co host, Kerry T Cell. Say hello, Kerry.

Hello, everyone.

And today, guys, we're going to do another episode on benchmarks. So these are nps, cx, ax, whatever you want to call them, they are benchmarks. So what we've done is we captured these over about a year and a half on our website via our email list. And we basically collected, I think it's about 35 questions from everybody and it's about a thousand responses right now. So it's pretty significant data set. And one of the things we really want to key in on today is we asked the question right, is CX deployed throughout the enterprise? Pretty simple, kind of a shocking result. And we're looking at the numbers right now. I'll paint them for you. So 39% said yes across the entire organization. 39% and then 61% said said no. Only in a department or a division. That's pretty shocking to us. So essentially 2/3 say they only have it specific to a division or a department and then 1/3 said yes across the entire organization. Now, if you know anything about customer gauge, we preach data being spread far and wide across the organization, regardless of department. So, Kerry, what are your thoughts on this one?

Well, in all honesty, I thought it would actually be even more skewed than this. I was even shocked that a third of people said yes across the top organization because of how many times we get on a phone call or how many times we're talking to a champion and we're like, okay, where does this live? Is always the first question. I'm like, what do you mean? This is like this lives everywhere. And you know, when we talk cx, the customer experience, if you're a customer centric company, your customer experience should live in every single department. So I have to say it was actually a little bit higher. But I also think maybe a little bit of interpretation you know, in breaking this down, that I think what we suffer from again, and we've seen this, they silo this customer experience into one or two departments. It lands in marketing sometimes because they think that's the outward facing component. Or it lands in maybe a wing of operations or support because they feel that's who does the heavy lift. And it doesn't live in those other departments. So, yeah, again, I wouldn't say I'm pleasantly surprised. You and I are working towards a day where it's 100%. Yes, it's an entire organization, but still, it's still a big number considering that two thirds of the people that filled this out honestly said now it lives in one place.

Yeah, I was shocked by that. I think you're probably right in saying, yeah, you expected it to be higher, but it's still really difficult for me to see that number. And it kind of stopped me in my tracks when I did see it the first time. And I think this stems a lot of a lot from like customer success, where one department does own it. Right. And they're expected to own it top to bottom. And that's okay. Again, customer success is not a bad thing. It's a great thing. But you do create that natural silo in your organization when you give one department, like customer success, all of the power around the data. And if you leave it up to them to distribute across the org, you need a pretty politically savvy head of customer success to be get that across the silos or the departmental barriers there. And I think you're right. Man is like, yes, we would love a day where it's across the entire org, but I think our customers, when they first come on board is like, who owns this? Someone always has to own it. Right. That's the thing, is like, one department will do a lot of the heavy lifting. It's like that in a lot of different things. Across New Orleans, that one department will do the heavy lifting. But how can companies cross that aisle, so to speak, to get this data from, let's say a customer success department or a operational hub within the company, two different divisions.

Do I give the obvious answer, Ian? Do I talk about what we've talked about so many times before and say, why not?

Right.

Okay. Because I think it leads to the second question that's on the survey and we could break that down a little bit, but we've talked about this numerous times. We're going to continue to talk about it because I think this is where a company goes from it. Living in one or two departments or it being a tool for one group to it being a success criteria for an entire organization. How do you shift from product centric to customer centric? And it's simple. Have a journey map. I mean, it really is that simple. I still have in my mind that picture of you going out and visiting the customer who's got that big wall. And it's designed to be scribbled on, written on, erased, and redone again and again and again. And you know, I come from the school of look, as long as you have something that you're working from and it shows where we touched or where we have that customer experience touch points, that is a healthy journey map. And I think the reason why this helps us break out of that siloing we always talk about this is because what normally and naturally happens is each department starts to own these different touch points. And I think that's if you can look at your department as an opportunity to engage or to create an experience for the customer. Now, that's a stop. That's a journey on this map. That's one point on that map.

Yeah. And I'm going to bring in another benchmark for you guys. So we asked the question, has your company developed a thorough customer journey map or maps? And I'm not going to give you all the stats, but two of them really jumped out, which was, no, we do not have a journey map defined, which is 24%. So a quarter of the respondents said they don't have a journey map, which kind of ties into Kerry's original point of not tying it to multiple different departments. So if you don't have a journey map, it's going to be really difficult to do that and assign ownership and assign accountability. And the second stat is 47% said somewhat only key touch points, which is good. But still, if you're trying to get it across every department, I mean, you need a pretty thorough journey map to not only define the customer touch points, but the internal touch points. Right. Like, so how do you get that data from customer success to the sales team, to the marketing team, to the product team? And I think a journey map is one of those things that we've just identified as pretty integral to getting that done in a pretty efficient fashion. What do you think, Kerry?

Well, you know, one of the side effects or the symptoms of not having this journey map and being clear to all departments is what you find is these micro companies or organizations start being developed in each department. So each team then goes about creating their own marketing solution. So now they're working on their own materials instead of it being centralized in one look and feel. The sales team is out there saying and making this promise that this is what we're gonna do for you. You buy this and all your dreams are gonna come true. And then what do they do? They hand that off to the next touch point and they're done. They move on and they go to that next sale. And then what we suffer from is you have a group of people trying to keep that promise in different ways. Products doing one thing, customer success is doing another. And I just think it's one of the main reasons why I think having a really healthy journey map out really starts to bring those departments together. Then you start looking at how to keep that tied together. Metrics, common language, materials, look and feel. I mean, I'm talking to someone right now in marketing who knows the importance of if someone's going to get a piece of information from me, from product, it should look and feel the same way. Education sends it to me. I should know this is all coming from the same place. Because if not, you run into the situation I've seen with some companies like, oh, I didn't even know you got that was coming from the same company. Even it felt like it was two different solutions.

Yeah.

And there's confusion and there's. Then the customer either knowingly or unknowingly knows that there's a disconnect between the departments. I think they, they acknowledge that or they know there's a disconnect. And I think that that also impacts the relationship.

Yeah, I agree. And it's so important too to enlist those champions. We've talked about this in the past too, where. Yes, okay, great. You have a journey map and this should help you bridge that gap between departments. But also you need to get champions in place for each department that are responsible for KPIs. And that stems from middle management and, and upper C level management if they're really involved. But getting a champion in each department that's responsible for a customer KPI of some sort or a customer target like sales, upsell, cross sell, boom, Referrals, boom. Like very, very simple stuff. That's when this thing really starts to come to life. And if you're not providing the relevant data points for each department, again, you got to go back and look at the data. So again, if you're not giving sales a list of their top 15 accounts and which ones are right for referrals based off of experience data, that's probably not going to Be super relevant to them. If you tell them what the NPS score, they're going to be like, great. I already knew they were happy. Awesome. But feeding them up very specific information is important.

Well, you, you hit on a couple of things there too. Because the first thing you suffer from, if you're trying to get a relationship score or health score or vibe of you have a good relationship with your customer, if you only are identifying a couple of those touch points, you're not measuring the whole company relationship. It's not a relationship. It's very transactional. So you're measuring sales relationship with a customer or customer success relationship. Not your whole brand, not your whole organization. Yeah, that is a blind spot that you need to, like, really fix. That's a big deal. But even beyond that, sharing data. So there's a circular, if you want to call it circular, I think it's even more convoluted and more dynamic than that, in a good way. But you said something that's really important. How much can your sales team learn from what your customer success team is doing? Right and wrong? You can learn the right things to say. Marketing. What message do you want to put out there to let people know? This is what we can help you with. This is what we have to offer. And that is being fed to you by pain points from the sales team, success stories and case studies from customer success, innovations from product. You know, now when you start marrying this information together, all those other departments get to benefit from that. And instead of having these different little organizations trying to create their own little solutions, now what happens is you find your sharing in those resources to create a really great relationship, really great product, your growth takes off. Because instead of having five different departments working on one thing, working on five different things that are away from one another, siloed from one another, now you're working on one thing, one department's going to own that, feed that to everybody, and vice versa, they're going to push information back to it.

This episode of the Account Experience podcast.

Is sponsored by CustomerGage, the leading B2B account experience software that ties revenue to your experience data in real time to help you make better account centric decisions that drive revenue growth.

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You won't regret it. Yeah, I mean, you want to talk about the ultimate organizational silo buster. Align every department around customer feedback. I mean, give them one thing to really hone in on and get right. I mean product. Get the product feedback to the product team. Customer success. I mean that is a wealth of knowledge from the customer side. They have a ton of touch points with them. Sales, same thing. Align them around the customer KPIs, get them the information they need to get more revenue out of their existing account base. I mean, it goes on. And marketing, come on. I mean customer feedback for marketing is gold. It really is a difference maker. So again guys, going back to that original benchmark, 2/3 only keep it in one department. That is just. It's not good enough. It will not work. You talk about why these programs are failing and continue to fail. I was actually on LinkedIn the other day and saw one of the Gartner analysts, Augie Ray, had a big post about why these experience programs are failing. He listed off a bunch of reasons, but ultimately it really does come down to getting that data across departments and not kind of hiding it in one spot. So, yeah, I think the stat is surprising to me. I know, Kerry, you probably expected a higher. I still was. Maybe. I was hoping it would be a little bit higher across the Org, but it's not quite there yet. Which means we have room to grow as a. As a team right across the globe of CX professionals. But, yeah, interesting.

I guess not to downplay the data. I think when most people see this, they're gonna be like, oh. And I think the first thing that's gonna go off in their head is like, all right, I don't feel so bad. I'm kind of in that bigger bucket. But I guess because the more people we talk, I think we get surprised more and more that there's not more of that breaking of silos and having that journey map. And I just. More and more, I think that's the aha moment when an organization or a group of leaders finally gets it. Hey, we need a journey map, and this is how we should use it. I think there's just really like, an epiphany of, okay, this is how we're going to lurch forward. This is how we're going to jump forward. I'm still waiting for someone to put out a research paper on how siloing benefits an organization. Like, I've yet to hear that article come out. I've yet to read that book where siloing is a good thing. The only thing it's good to is for individuals who are selfishly benefiting, you know, from that siloing. But it can only help a few people. It'll never help the organization. And I'm a firm believer it will never benefit the majority of your customer. There's no way. There's no way. I can't think of one brand I engage with that I would think, wow, you guys really need the silo. You know, it's like, no, no, no. Why doesn't he know what I'm telling you? Or why does she not understand this metric enough? And I just. I guess my mind is just. That's what really shocks me with this, Ian, is that we. We constantly see this. So I think the Big question is why? Why do we see over and over again so many companies afraid to take the customer journey leap and put that map out there and work on it? Or why does this siloing effect start to happen? Or why does CX get dumped in one department? I mean, from your perspective, is there an easy answer for that?

Not really. I think that companies just don't know any better. And usually, from my experience, you have a couple passionate champions that come forth, right. And that say, hey, we should do this. And then they have a very difficult time convincing their upper management to buy into it because it's a cost initially, and their frontline staff. So you're going both ways, top and bottom, the frontline staff, getting them on board. You're a great example of that. Carrie, you. It seemed like you were doing both top and bottom. You're kind of getting them, the upper management bought into your program. All the while you're getting your frontline staff bought into the process. So that's difficult. And I think it starts with one department. It starts with usually a couple people in one spot. And I think there are rare cases where I've seen C level come in. Like soccer shots is a great example. We had Brian Hodge on the strategy, came from the C level, the CEO and Brian's job, not to say his job was easier, but I mean, it was definitely a smoother transition to getting everybody on board because it's like, well, the CEO is making this a key part of the strategy. So I think it depends is the honest answer. I don't think there's an easy fix. But I think to your point, journey mapping is step one. Start there. Because even if it's not the perfect journey map, even if you're only mapping key touch points, which again, only 47% that are doing journey mapping are mapping key touch points, which is a starting point. Can't get down on that. But that'll start to help visualize ownership and visualize the champions in each department and what their internal processes are and how it affects the customers from the external touchpoint standpoint. So, so, so important man.

I think, I think I served you up intentionally a little bit. So I wanted to hear your. I did want to hear what you had to say, but I also think what I would say and thank you for the compliment. Yes. I had done this before, and it was the most miserable first couple of years and the most rewarding couple of years because you feel like you're fighting everybody and like everyone's got their guards up, everyone's you know, living behind their little siloed spaces. And it's rewarding to break through. But you said something that was key. And I think a lot of people don't know it's a good place to start. And I think that's where I wanted to get to start with a customer journey map. Even if it's just yours, when you walk into a meeting or you go to meet with a department, say, hey, does this make sense to you? If I'm trying to look at it from the customer, take off your company hat for a second and pretend you're one of our customers. Would you say, this looks like our journey, like their journey? And then this is your department where you touch. Do I have it in the right place? Am I missing something? And I think that's how you start to chisel away a little bit at those walls, is by at least you yourself, if you are the owner. And what I would say to upper leadership, because you brought up the CEO and C Suite, understand that you do have some passionate people in here that believe this or maybe don't know it yet. But if you're that person who believes in this, say it, do something about it. Soccer Shots was a great example. We're blessed with a CEO and COO who get it. I mean, that's what we do. So hopefully they do, you know, But I had a CEO in my past that believed in it, where the rest of the C suite just didn't understand. It didn't necessarily set in at the beginning. It took a lot of people a lot of time to figure that out. But if you are in that leadership role, you have a responsibility to empower and to encourage and to kind of motivate that getting out there. So a couple of good points there. Where to start, and I would say there's the responsibility is the champion level journey map. Do something. And then C suite upper leadership. Empower someone, say it, put someone on the project, even if it's in secret somewhere to get started. But get the get, get it motion gives empower it and talk about it. It's so, so important.

Well, another interesting point too is once you get that journey map and you understand, let's go back to sales again, how they're involved, then you can start to give them a target. So literally, sales, you're in charge of getting $250,000 of referral sales from this data once a quarter. And then that conversation with the C suite becomes super easy, right? Like, wow, we're generating X amount of dollars from this Program. Look at this journey map. This is how we mapped it out. We have champions in each department. I mean, that is a much, much smoother conversation. Once you have that journey map established and you give sales targets, CSM targets, whatever it is. Right, whatever department. But again, we preach this day in, day out. You guys are probably sick to death of hearing about it, but leading with revenue with your C suite is one of the most effective ways to get buy in.

Yeah, and it's funny, I don't want to go too far into targets. I know. It's another question that I can't wait to tackle with you. It's on this assessment and it's just interesting to see who sets targets and who doesn't. And listen, I'll let you all in on a secret, guys. The numbers are about the same across the board. If you're not customer journey mapping, it's probably living in one department. If it's living in one department, you probably don't have targets set up around it for the whole organization. I mean, it goes down the list. This is all a trickle effect, so. Yeah, but you said it, Ian. I think we've always talked about this. Put money on it. Right. But something that's important, the line on that journey map and if you can map out now revenue on that journey and those other metrics that you hold, important as an organization. Wow. Talk about your. Yeah, it takes off.

So just to give you guys another brief overview. So we have all these data points that we're going to slowly leak out. We're going to do little mini episodes on maybe one or two metrics. Interesting. As Kerry said, in the overall data pool you can start to see there are leaders and there are laggards and I hate to use that very basic kind of analysis, segmentation, but they're very much are. And like you said, the people that keep it to one department don't have a journey map, don't set targets. I mean, they don't map to revenue. It's difficult to show just in this data like how they're performing. And actually we have data that's, you know, the leaders that are doing everything right are actually growing faster and they're producing revenue and they're increasing the retention rate, their net promoter scores all across the board. So it is super, super interesting data. Again, thank you guys for coming on this journey with us. We're going to start doing these once a week with a couple tidbits and then eventually we'll be releasing the full report for everybody for public access free of charge as we always do and believe in customer gauge. So again, thank you guys for joining us. This is the Account Experience Podcast. Thank you to my co host, Mr. Carrie T. Self and we'll talk to you all soon.

Sam.