Delivering on B2B Experience When Management Is Obsessed With Everyone Else’s Score
12 Aug 2024 · 36 min
Ben Phillips, a CX professional at Fujitsu, talks about building customer experience programs in large tech companies when leadership fixates on competitor benchmarks. He covers NPS measurement, the gap between what companies measure and what actually matters to customers, and how to shift culture toward real CX work instead of chasing scores.
One of the perceptions, of course, is that CX is a little bit like magic, right? If you put a few little ingredients in place, the rest will take care of itself. And is it really. It's all fluffy, right? Is it really roll your sleeves up and get dirty work? No, maybe not. So, you know, maybe it's a little bit Harry Potter, right? You do these few things. So that's a. We've now adopted that phrase internally. Stiax is not Harry Potter.
Hi, my name's Adam Durrell and I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. And if you're a regular here, you'll know that in every episode, I love to catch up with inspiring industry leaders and thinkers to get them to share their best practices and nuggets of information to help you develop your own B2B experience program. You know, we sit at this Busy junction where B2B account management meets Customer Experience. So sort of, I suppose, think of us as a sort of Oxford Circus of account experience. And it's kind of appropriate to say Oxford Circus, because today we're talking to Ben Phillips, who I've known for some time, and he's based in London. So I get into Ben. I just want to read out a couple of things about Ben. Listen, this guy has been around the business more than anybody else you'll ever meet, so I'm going to make him feel good about this. He's one of the biggest CX influencers out there. He's written a book which, if I'm right, something. It's called the Customer Experience Dictionary. Everything you want to know about cx, you see what he did there? He's got the same smutty brain that I've got, really. He's been to the CX hall of Fame. I mean, there's so much. So, Ben, welcome to the Account Experience podcast. Good to see you, man. You're looking great.
Glad to be here as well. Last time we met in person, I think, was at the monetized event. Yeah, that's right.
In Amsterdam. Yeah.
Yeah. Which I loved and still talk about today. Plug for you.
You're very kind to do that stuff. Today's not about us, it's really about you. I want to try and get under the surface of what's going on. So we got. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about today, and this is triggered by an email exchange we had a couple of weeks ago, is about benchmarking, you know, just like war. What is it good for? And so we got this thing so I really want to understand about what your views on benchmarking are because you've been around the industry, you've done so much, you're a market researcher, you've worked for Ipsos Nielsen and you've been on my side of the fence as well. Right. So yeah, and now you're working with Fujitso, so I'd love to get into this, but Ben, why don't you just introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll get on to what you're working on right now.
Yeah, sure. So I'm Ben, I'm a qualified ccxp. So for those of you who don't know what that is, that's a certified Customer Experience professional. Why is that label important, so important for many of us? Because then it adds that sort of level of credibility to the kind of things we're going to say and at least we know we've been verified. Right. In an equal way benchmarking right across the industry. Yeah, I worked in customer experience about 20 odd years now, all kinds of different roles. As Adam's already said today, I guess what gets me out of bed every day for that is the fact that I think that we can make a change. I work specifically now in B2B CX because actually a couple of years ago I thought where is there the least amount of really good business advice? We see a ton of content around Beta ccx. Right. We see it all the time. But part of mine and Adam's trail the other day was around how well the same rules don't apply, do they? You know, you've got this unique set of circumstances around B2B CX. So that's what I'm really passionate about today and that's what I really get stuck into at the company I work for today, which is Fujitsu.
Well, let's dig into that. So tell us a little about Fujitsu, the company, for those who don't know about it and then we'll drill into what you've been working on.
Yeah, so we're a global technology and services provider, probably very well known since we've been running. I think this was, oh, I'm going to get this wrong, but this was our 82nd or 83rd birthday last week. We're headquartered in Tokyo. That's not my birthday by the way, it's Fujitsu's birthday. We're headquartered in the Shyer Dome, which is in Tokyo city center in Japan. We've got about 120,000 colleagues worldwide. I think across about five operating regions. The business identity is a little bit different from region to region, but we're very swiftly moving from what you would call maybe kind of legacy IT service provision to becoming. We've repositioned ourselves as a digital transformation partner for the future for our clients. We've got a big company strap line which our CEO Takita San talks about all the time, which is to drive sustainability and to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation. Right. So it's quite wordy, but you know, it's a real vision statement that the rest of us try and get behind. And we, me and my team execute on CX transformation within Europe with a bit of a global influence as well. Because mine is a practice. It's really the first place in our company where the business has invested in a practice built around customer experience. And that practice is for our colleagues. So I'm not out there selling CX to our customers. We're there educating and driving CX know how and best practices with our colleagues so they in turn deliver a better experience for their clients.
First of all, great introduction. Thanks for setting the scene on that. So what does good experience look like for a Fujitsu B2 customer?
Yeah, well, and again, just referring back to that straight away, reposition your mindset if you're thinking about B2B CX versus B2CCX. Because things become infinitely more complex in this area, as you well know, Adam. So what I mean by that, to answer your question, if I'm thinking of maintaining a relationship in the B2C sense, I'm pretty much doing that with an individual. Right? I'm a company providing a service to a paying customer. Now what do I know about Ask Customer? Well, it'll be my past relationship with them, which is probably all in some CRM Salesforce record and all that cool stuff that any agent can pick up if the customer contacts the contact center. What about in store? You might know your customer one to one, you know, there may be a regular customer. They come in all the time. You get to know them, you get to build a rapport. You're really building relationships with customers there at the one to one level. Which is why personalization is such a big theme in B2CCX. In B2CCX, let me get my acronyms right. If you twitch to B2BCX, what happens? Well, straight away you may be maintaining a relationship with multiple stakeholders from the partnership company that you work with. The relationship is infinitely more complex. Why? Because you probably sold a service to the organization you work with that's supported across many regions. So therefore time zones, cultures, languages, platforms, systems. You are talking the language of B2B which is much more business oriented rather than service oriented most of the time you have maybe gatekeepers to your relationship. And now we're an it, we're related to the IT company future digital transformation business. We're trying to get through to our customers organization sometimes through a CTO or IT systems contract manager. Right. So these are very influential people, but they hold all the cards. So it's really quite difficult for us to sort of drive those relationships through and demonstrate value if we're dealing just with maybe one or two or three really seeing a really important people. So, you know, I could go on, but there's a range of things that make your B2B relationship management in that much different to working in B2CX.
I'm just going to build on that. That's okay. You know, it's not. You said that there's multiple stakeholders in the business also on your side as well. You've got a whole delivery team. So it's a, you know, it's a huge matrix. You have to maintain. Right. Stakes are higher obviously because you're talking about millions of dollars invested. And I can tell you something else in a way came as a surprise to me when I first started to work on this, but it's the, there's often a more em buy than a B2C thing. And that sounds weird, isn't it? But it's often personal relationships that drive this and that chemistry is important in any relationship. But it can also often trump the sort of rational buying decision.
Yeah, you're absolutely right because you see that emotion coming through so strongly when things go well, equally when they go wrong. When things go wrong, you know, it rots. And you see that emotion really coming through and people's, you know, reputations, you know, livelihoods are all sort of bound up in this as well. So it's extremely important to get these relationships right in the senior level.
And I'm going to say something else as well, often that you know that when, when you say when your stakeholder moves, moves to another role or something like that, then you know, and you've really got to make sure that you've not got what we call Spock single point of contact. I realize I'm, you know, just egging this, but this is, it's a really good explanation, I think you said there, Ben, of how this is different. Okay. So from the client point of view is There a sort of an ideal vision that you have of a great experience. Is that templated or, you know, tell a little bit about what you think a great experience could be at the client side.
I think given the nature of our organization, bearing in mind that we work across, we provide IT services across multiple different industry sectors. Manufacturing, public services, private, retail, pharmaceutical, finance, automotive, you name it. Yeah, that then means that. And maybe I should have said this earlier when explaining B2B relationship management. It's a bit like having micro businesses within your business. Each one of them, yes, carries some sort of foundational principles of what good CX looks like with them, but then they vary immediately once you hit the delivery of the service to the customer and you have your framework and your models moving forward. I think, to answer your question, though, the foundational principles are things that we're developing very much internally right now, and we've been doing this for some time, that come through in the form of something we're piloting. It's a customer experience maturity assessment. And within that customer experience maturity assessment, what we're doing there is we're reaching out to our colleagues internally and saying, hey, just how customer centric do you think we are at the moment? You know, we've got our read from customers, they send us their voice to the customer survey. So we've got our mps, we've got all that good stuff. But that's just one aspect of it. We also do employee engagement surveys. We know how you feel as an employee of Fujitsu. There's still a piece of the jigsaw puzzle missing. What is that jigsaw puzzle piece? It's how customer centric you think you are in the services you provide to your customer. Why don't we get together and we take a look at that and there are some foundational principles built into that model. It's things like, and this is probably the top one for me and actually probably goes across all business. It's the C word, maybe, not the one you think. Communication.
I was going to say culture.
I was going to say customer communication is the number one. I mean, it seems obvious when you say it, but it's the number one thing to get right at all levels of customer centricity. If you're not communicating properly, if you're not relaying your proposition, if you're not listening, if you're not acting on it and telling someone that you're doing it, all of those things is interpersonal, interdepartmental communication.
I love what you're saying. I completely Agree, Ben. And let's just frame this because, you know, we talked about these big contracts that you have and you're measuring the, the deliveries and stuff like this, but it's so easy to forget that human interaction and check in, you know, how are we doing is how am I doing? How am I doing? This stuff is. It seems that when we go into that particular part of measuring by metrics, we forget what it takes to be human. So I'm so glad you said that.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Well, okay, so you touched on a couple of things about measuring with Net promoter, that sort of stuff. So can you share a little bit about how you're measuring the experience and frequencies and stuff like that? I'd love to know some of the metrics.
Yes. So when I joined the organization in early 2021, what I saw was a survey. And the survey had CSAT in it. But. And all of us acknowledged this and was part of the reason why I was hired. The survey was a box ticking exercise. Right. It gave a metric to the business, but we didn't really see anybody ever do anything with the insights. So this is classic how not to do CX measurement. And the way I always describe it is why have we used up that survey favor with our customer and not repaid them for their time by getting back to them and saying, thank you, here's what we're going to do. We didn't do that second crucial bit. We asked them for their time, Please fill in the survey. We just sat on the data. The data was vital for our business, Right. It told us how to change things, told us how to influence things. When I saw CSAT was a bit flat. And my personal opinion on csat, take it as you will, and I've said it before, is that it always levels out, right? It always levels out about 70, 80%, something like that, rarely ever, Lou. So it just becomes a kind of regular KPI everybody's used to seeing. Does it actually give you any intelligence? Not really. Does nps? Yes, you know, contentiously, but it's kind of almost like spiking the lion or the dog or whatever the animal is, you know what I mean? It's like preventing ask NPS and you will get emotive outcomes. And that's kind of what we needed to fuel the fire a little bit more within the organization. So fast forward to today. We ask NPS in our global customer service, which comes out once a year, we ask it across other measures as well. So we've got that understanding and kind of relational and transactional levels of this metric. The biggest challenge of all is focusing not on the number. The number is a consequence of the things you do to change it, not the other way round. Right. So we use NPS as our global corporate measure of customer. We don't publish the score, we publish the change in the score since the last version.
That's interesting.
Yeah. So we're a little bit more private about it, but we do semi reveal how we're doing to the industry, which I think is important because it said we're making progress. But don't get hung up on the number. That change is important because we also didn't but now do much more of understanding the why behind the change. You know, what is it we did well and executed against that we said we would do that have led to that being the case. We must always, and as you said earlier, I'm a bit of a researcher, be conscious of the difference between correlation and causation and not get those two things mixed up. So we're really careful around understanding what's really influenced the change that we see.
Okay, let me just back up a bit, make sure I unpack that a little bit because I think that there was a lot there. You're using NET Promoter as your main metric, asking the recommend question. If I'm hearing that correctly. It's a little bit more emotive than Are you satisfied? And seems to be sort of.
Yes.
It follows Fred Reichel's logic on this. You are using the delta in the trend overall as a company to go that and actually I wanted to follow up on that, using that internally as well. Are you using the delta in the NET Promoter score internally or is that. Are you also publishing NPS internally? I'm just curious.
Yeah. Our internal colleagues have access to our CX platform system so they know what the CX results are. And by the way, again, we've made a conscious decision and some companies do this for various reasons. We made a conscious decision not to set up a CX team that manages closing the loop from the results. We empowered our account leads and relationship managers with the ability to log into the platform. They get a notification right as soon as the survey comes in. Ping notification is their inbox and it's labeled in a certain way for them to take action. And we try and drive a 48 hour turnaround on that because we think that's best practice.
I would absolutely agree. That's exactly what we stick with as well.
48 hours is the same thing. So we follow the same Logic. And what we're really trying to say is why? Because it makes a difference for future loyalty and trust if you get it right within that time frame. But we've empowered the organization to really own it. We meanwhile get that visibility across the regions the company. We do make our cross comparisons. We are trying to push that insight through. As you can imagine, with 120,000 colleagues, some of them are in contact centers in India, in Poland, in Costa Rica. You know, we've got huge business diversity, cultural geographical diversity. Does the message always get through to the front lines in all cases? Not always. But that's very much what our practices are here to try and provide. You know, that throughput of customer voice to the front line so they can hear what's happening. And that also is 360 thing. Right. They then understand whether they're influencing that customer rating because of the actions they take when the customer gets in touch with them. So we know customer experience. That should be very, very visible. 360 activity I'd say. And maybe stops A silly analogy, maybe 270something like that. @ the moment it should be getting all the way through to permeate the business. Right.
Congratulations. I mean you've come a long way then since 2021. That's really great. That's. I think this takes a long time. So let me just go down a little bit on that. What was most resistant to that change in the business? How did you meet those challenges?
Business priorities. There's a great phrase which our head of delivery in Europe always says and he says, hey look, we're not command and control. Okay. Right. So the individual countries.
Yeah.
Within which Fujitsu is a unique proposition. You know, it's known as a certain branch of certain things within different marketplaces. That means that does CX always sit at the top of everybody's to do list? Almost feeling like it's a task to be done rather than underpinning everything you do. You know the approach.
It's a tax on my job role. That's what's over here. So I'm really curious to say, how did you switch that?
Yeah. I can't say to you in all honesty, we have done it completely. We are in the process of now that's going to take a long time. And just like presenters that I'd seen at Monetize, you know, there were some great presenters that I remember who stood up and did timelines, you know, how we looked over time and what we did. I'd say we're maybe draw a nice Timeline from beginning to utopia. You know, we're somewhere along that line. We haven't fully engaged every single one of our markets around this being the most important thing to think about when they come to the office every day. What we have achieved is that they have much more of an awareness of this now than they ever did before. And things like NPS we try to position as the indicator of the success of that, not the KPI you should obsess and get hung up and upset over if it all goes wrong and you get one survey, because that's the other thing. At the B2B level, of course, we're dealing with micro volumes, sometimes a feedback measurement, right? It's not a B2C program. We're not a bank. We're not sending out 5 million invites and getting a million and a half back, which would be a great survey ratio if you did, you know, we're sending out a few hundred and getting couple hundred, maybe tens back sometimes. And it makes trusting that data that much more difficult.
I love that I've never heard that word before. Micro volume. That absolutely sums up the challenge in B2B because very few pieces of feedback you get back and yet it relates to millions and millions of dollars of business. Every one of those is important. So by the way, if you are following it up, you should really be in trouble.
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But I just want to sort of close off a little bit on the culture side. I mean, I've. My personal experience has been it gets driven into the business or pulled in, actually, when you can show revenue out of the back of it, you know, so if we do this, if we keep regular checkups with the customers, we get better relationships with customers, we sell more. And here's the proof that is the best thing for that I can ever see. But it's. I agree it's challenging. So can you pick out any examples of where you've had some wins in this area?
Yeah, I can actually talk specifically about wins we've had because of improved customer centricity. And a great example, I won't name the client for privacy reasons, but there's a hospitality restaurant business in the UK a couple years ago who even said, you know what? We just feel like, you know, we're not really moving forward very much with Fujitsu as a service provider, so we want to see more. So one of our big things was we looked at our customer feedback over time and we'd seen that innovation kept coming up as a keyword scoring low. So we said, okay, why don't we build a proposition around this internally? So a couple of our grads, a few of our really clever technology people got together and they built a unique innovations hub within our internal intranet sites, launched a podcast very much like this one on a regular basis for multinational colleagues to dial into, brought best practice speakers in to talk on a regular basis about what innovation looks like then for them in Sweden, Germany, you know, lots of other France, lots of other countries that we operate within the area, brought those best practice stories to the fore that was leveraged by some of our account teams. And this particular example I'm thinking of that customer then went on and renewed the business. Several million euros worth of renewal business and an increase to the contract value precisely because we brought that innovation story to the table. Now, don't get me wrong, if we were traditional buy services by the book company, it would have been because we've got, you know, 500 of these and we sold them 20,000 of these. You know, that wasn't the nature of the sale or the sales that we do anymore. It's much more a bespoke, tailored service for the organization around how they want to purp aircraft.
That's a really great story. Thanks for sharing that, Ben. That's really good. So let's just sum up the journey that we've gone so far. So You've gone from sort of a passive customer satisfaction score to really stepping into this. I can really see how you've got close the loop in there as well. You're bringing. You're measuring monetization. You're not quite there yet, but you can see where you're going on this journey. So I can really see operational changes in your program. But how we came into this was a discussion of benchmarking. If everything's going great in the business, why do you need to check on what everybody else is doing? And is this the obsession with the management team or are they happy with the operational increase that you're making?
This is really good. And this is what we're talking about, us talking in the first place, wasn't it? I think it's an inevitable point in your CX journey when you've got your measures right and you're looking at them and you're understanding your insights and you're driving change. But then you say, all right, we think we're doing much better, but just how much better are we doing versus anyone else a in our space? Now, that's an obsession for management, I think. You know, we often see leadership teams want to obsess about their nearest competitor set, how am I doing? But there's a little anecdote I always tell. I'm a storyteller, right? I prefer to tell the story to reposition and reframe people's mind. I said, okay, how did you feel when you bought that coffee this morning that you're sitting there drinking right now? The service that you got, you know, how did you feel when you got your car serviced last week? Or the telco that you just called up to talk about the service contract you have? You're making an unconscious comparison at all times between these service experiences you've had. And I guarantee you, some of them you think are good, some of them you think are poor. And sometimes you'll think, why can't we be more like that? Or, I'm glad we're not that bad. I think there's this subconscious comparison all the time that we're making as individuals about how we want our brand to be perceived and whether our service could borrow those best practices from anyone else. So you're sitting there with your CNX scores. You must be thinking, I want to understand how we look within our industry and how we look outside of it. And I want to understand if there's any overlaps now, it's no good to you if the top performer is. And I always Quote the old sort of Harley Davidson, JetBlue, Amazon, Dell, you know, they all achieved high NPS in the early days. Right. All these companies and it was always forged around what a fantastic and wonderful customer experience they delivered on every visit. You know, you could rely on them being pretty consistent on these things. You know, customer experience excellence was not a one off. It's kind of Disney's template. You know, every time you go you should have this amazing life changing experience and be very memorable for that reason. I think we use benchmarks somewhat obsessively to get that gold standard and understand what it is and then understand just how far off that we are. I think what's wrong with that is that you then come back in and you beat everybody up about why we're not them. I think what's healthy about it is if you know you've got a way to go and you can see the differences, then you know what you can build on. Yeah, but whilst useful, I think they're useful. I don't think that what we shouldn't live and die by. Because there are reasons why companies have these wonderful mps. You know, their customer base is completely different, their service model is completely different. They've had way more investment, they've got an army of CX people doing this stuff. Other businesses are very lean and they don't have the, you know, the opportunity. So yeah, what's useful by way of comparison, are they ultimately very valuable and should every company have one? Not so sure.
If you're measuring yourself up in a changing room, for example, it doesn't necessarily make you a better lover. Yeah. Because it really, you're not quite measuring the thing that necessarily means, that means to customers. So I think that companies obsess about it. Yeah, someone missed the point. And can I just rant on about this for a second? You know, see companies out there delivering bits to research where it's a little bit like, you know, if you ever have a kids party for your small kids, you've got to make sure that everybody gets a prize. You know, everybody goes home with the prize, otherwise you're going to get tears on there. And I definitely think there's an element of that, especially industries that we're in. This is a survey, you go, you're terrible here. But look, look on this particular benchmark you're doing really well. So that's a thing I've got. But why don't we flip it over and drill in a little bit? Let's defend it. Why is, have you seen how a Benchmark can actually really help lift up a company.
So what it does do, I think, and we have a particular benchmark where we measure ourselves in the IT industry actually against other IT outsourcing companies. Now we might say at the moment because we want to be this fantastic digital transformation company. Well, that's our legacy service business that we're looking at. But that's fine. We've still got a call base of customers. They take all of that from us, so we've got to look after them. So we do run an IT outsourcing industry benchmarking report. Now we get a really clear read of how we rank. And what we also get is a good understanding of what's driving that positioning. We don't necessarily get the cross pollination, I suppose you could call it, of knowing what the best practices look like of the top achievers versus the worst practices and the bottom achievers. We understand where we are and rank. The good news with that is it's high profile. I always think, you know what, even if it's maybe not the most optimal measure, what I'm glad to see is I've got an engaged audience. So they're turning up to the presentation that we get that comes with this thing every year. And people are asking a bunch of questions. You know, they're asking all the button push, why are they better than, you know, why does our school look like that? But who said that? And all these questions are coming out and it's telling me that people care about how our brand is perceived. That's really, really important. You know, you almost want to run out of time for questions at the end and then the questions are still firing into the chat afterwards because that's the way we work now, right? We're all in this giant call with hundreds of people. So, you know, I feel that's a really good thing. What does it show? It shows engagement, it shows that it matters. And the measure is simple enough for people to get it, get it, understand it, you know, it either upsets them a little bit or it makes them happy, you know. So that level of engagement in the organization is the probably the number one thing you're fighting against for CX change and transformation some way down the line. Because if it's just a few little voices saying we need to change, not a lot's going to happen, isn't it? If you galvanize your army of colleagues around that, then a lot more happens. So that's probably one of the good things, I think, you know, they're high Visibility really good for engagement. Most people get it.
I think that's a really nice way of phrasing it. You know, as we speak, the Olympics are on as we record.
Yes.
You know, it's like, you know, this is the once a year or once in case of the Olympics wants to be four year way that you measure yourself against the best in the world. But you've got to keep training all the way through the year. And I think this is for me, the biggest argument. You got to do both. One is research to figure out how good you're doing in the eyes of everybody else and the other one is how you just get and you improve your process. So when you come into that competition, so to speak. Yeah, you're doing the best job. So for me, you got to do both things and.
Yeah, and one of the phrases I've used internally recently in a presentation actually was CX is an evolution, not a solution. You know, it's not just something you do on one day and it's done. I've even had instances where those conversations have happened, you know, oh, we did CX last year. Okay, well, I've got news for you. You know, it's an evolution. Just is it a little bit like, what's that analogy? You paint the four bridge and you get to the end of it, then you have to go back and start painting it again. You know, always changing and adapting to the environment situation.
Yeah. Just before we came, just before we started recording, you started to tell me a story that you'd had with your Dutch outfit. Can you share the rest of it? Because I didn't get the punchline of that was waiting till we.
Yeah, this was a story where what we were trying to do, really. So mine is a practice and we're constantly trying to educate our colleagues around the importance of customer experience in everything you do. One of the perceptions, of course, is that CX is a little bit like magic, Right. If you put a few little ingredients in place, the rest will take care of itself. And is it really. It's all fluffy, Right. Is it really roll your sleeves up and get dirty work? No, maybe not. So, you know, maybe it's a little bit Harry Potter. Right. You do these few things. So that's a. We've now adopted that phrase internally. The X is not Harry Potter. Absolutely. It's not Harry Potter. If anything, I don't know what the opposite Harry Potter would be, but it's like a dirty big earth digger, right, where you have to shovel a load of stuff around to get stuff done and galvanize people, get them behind you and you know it's not that soft and fluffy. So we have that now occasionally scatter into presentations and it makes us laugh a little bit because it reminds us of that whole conversation that we once had. So yeah.
Okay, let's start. I'm just going to fire a couple of questions for you as we get towards the end. So you know we were talking about benchmarking. You hit me up to see if I could share some benchmarks with you. But what about can we get one stat from you that you could share? So if I were to say can you tell us your response rate in B2B, would that be something that you might be willing to share?
Yeah, yeah. So we get between 20 to 30% response rate on our sample. And by the way we used a lot of Ian's benchmarks B2B benchmarks book to guide us around what good looks like around all of that. And now we also know I'll put.
A link in the show notes to that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, really important and I would advise anybody just digest it all. You know we knew what B2C response rates look a little bit like. Now I might be misquoting but from my experience that was anything between 5 to 10%. 10% if you're lucky. Yeah. But we know that around as a different kettle of fish. As we said from the start around B2B CX management, 30% we think is pretty good. We're pushing ourselves for more. I can give you some insight as to how we do it. We frame personally, we do all of the right things around making sure it doesn't go to spam, giving our customers a warm up that you're going to get an invitation soon. We really welcome your feedback. It's vital. It's important to us. We close loops, we send two to three reminders through the survey window. We ask our account leads to personally encourage the respondent to respond. And I've written four conversation guides to help everyone. A conversation guide for the customer. What's the survey for, what does it do, how do we use your data, so on, so forth and then a pre, during and post survey follow up guide for the colleague. So know exactly what they're supposed to do when the results come in and to get them to come in in the first place. And then to cap it all, we send a you talked, we listened email to our entire customer base afterwards with some insights about what you told us. And now what we're going to work on and what we're going to change. So we kind of have this structure in place. It's that C word again, communicate it, communicating with your customer, colleagues and again with your customers throughout this cycle to drive those response rates. And what does it do? It drives a trust that we're listening and we'll do something with your insights. And then when you send someone a survey response the following year that maybe didn't answer the year before, they might think, oh, Fujitsu listens. I'm going to answer the survey this year because I can see that they're telling me they're going to do something about it. So try to trust.
Thank you so much for sharing that best practice. I think that's really good. I think you put so much of also what I believe in, to be honest, in a nutshell. So it's really great to do that. And also, thank you for sharing your time today with us. And I would say, how can people find you? Or if they want to follow what you say, then pop onto LinkedIn.
I'm on there. I'm pretty active. I'm pretty busy. You'll know I'm not afraid of sharing my opinion every now and then.
You are the funniest and wittiest and most controversial commenter. I love looking out for yourself, actually. You always put it in the comments of other people's, which is really great, actually. That's like I really love that and I'm always entertained by the stuff you do. So if you're out there, definitely follow Ben Phillips CTXP out there. Really do that. Thanks a lot. And we didn't even get to talk about our mutual love of bass guitars. And maybe another time. Please do come back to the Account Experience podcast. We'd love to have you. It's always great to have you.
Great to be here. Thank you, Adam, very much.
Take care. Catch you soon.
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