How a Sentiment Sandwich Satisfies Executive Hunger w/ Jim Tincher

Hi, I'm Adam Durrell. I'm the host of the Account Experience podcast. You know, if you listen to us, you know that we sit at the interaction of B2B account management and customer experience. That's what we call it Account Experience. Every week I get to talk to an industry leader to share best practices and tips to help you develop your program. And by the way, don't forget to review and share us on the Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It does help spread the word. Today I'm talking to Jim Tincher. He's a customer experience expert, a speaker, and an author of a great book actually called How Hard Is it to Be youe Customer? Which talks about journey mapping and making sure that you're doing customer focused change in your business. He's a fully certified CCXP and he sees the world through the eyes of customers. And I really want to get to that on the discussion that we have. His company is called Heart of the Customer, and it's an innovative consulting firm which helps startups run up to Fortune 500 companies boost revenue and loyalty by harnessing the voice of the customer. Right now he's hard at work on his next book, which is in the B2B realm, particularly relevant to us in this podcast. And he's taking time out today to come and talk to us at the Account Experience podcast. Jim, hello and welcome to the podcast. It's great to see you today.

Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks so much, Adam.

Hey, listen, let's kick off. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about how you got onto this work.

Got into this work. I worked and led customer experience programs Best Buy and UnitedHealth Group. I was a very noisy corporate employee. I had a boss say, you seem to feel very empowered. I thought empowered was a good word. Clearly wasn't here. Another boss said, you make a lot of noise. I did recognize noise was not a good word because I was so focused on customers. My first job out of college, I was in tech support and I was going to visit my girlfriend, now wife, and I wanted to visit a customer while I was there, which confused everybody. Like, why do you want to do that? Go on vacation? But it's just I've always been customer focused. It comes naturally to me, as it does in many of our tribe. So, yeah, so I started this company eight and a half years ago after being fired a couple of times and had. I was number one on Google from a blog post I wrote and thought, well, hey, maybe there's a business Here and it seems to be.

So tell us a little bit about the area that you particularly focusing. I mean heart of the customer by the way it probably you do what it says on the tin but why don't you tell us a little bit about some of the work that you're doing in customers.

Sure. We're best known for journey mapping, hence the book. And that's our intake. Our that's how we really analyze what's true in the customer experience today. And then we help organizations, we empower them. Empower them is our emotional North Star. A phrase will probably come up later today. Empower them to be able to drive change inside the organization. And so when people hire us, they don't outsource to us. We work with them to understand what's it like to actually be their customer and how do we improve in order to create better outcomes. And those better outcomes are not survey scores. Those better outcomes are retention, cross sell, how do we make it so the customer wants to buy more from us, stay longer and engage in less expensive ways. We don't look at how do we force them into behavior but how do we get it so that they want to work with us more. And that's the real outcome we drive for.

You know that sounds like every business should have that but I mean I know from experience that every business doesn't. But you've probably run into this multiple times. So what are some of the common blocks to getting this success?

Well, definitely silos. You know when I worked in I led product at for health savings accounts and then moved from there to the customer experience side. My first six job and we were building our first survey, we asked everybody what do they think is most important to customers, what's going to drive because we knew satisfaction related to retention. And the sales team. Well actually the product team thought it was all about features. Yeah. About for pricing options. We want to give them pricing options. We want to give them a debit card with multiple functions on there. The sales team thought is more about simplicity. They were actually removing the pricing options that product was added. So that's driving up everybody's cost. Marketing thought is about education and all these hypotheses of what customers most wanted. We did the first survey, we learned out what customers really, really wanted. Their number one desire was to figure out how to log into the website so they knew how much money they had. And nobody was focused on that. They all focus on different areas nobody thought about because we didn't need to. We didn't talk to customers and we didn't need help logging in because we did it every day. But the average client logged in two to four times a year. And we forget the password. This is before there were password managers 12 years ago. But as the silos were all going in and they were no, too much. And they think customers think like they do. In fact, one of the pieces of feedback I got is, well, Jim, we don't need to talk to customers. We are customers.

I'm like, well, yeah, I'm just going to slow you down because that I'm just going to feed this back to you to make sure I'm getting this stuff. So what you're saying is that in a typical company, everyone thinks they know what the customer is. They're second guessing the hell out of it when often the answer is right in front of their nose. But they're all, everyone's got their own ideas about it. Am I right?

Oh, yeah, exactly right. You've got everybody. I've not found very many people at all who don't want to do right by the customer. Clearly everybody. Right. I've talked to a lot of customer experience. People say, oh, executives just don't care about customers. Not true. Not true at all. Executives care about customers. Executives don't often understand what customers both most need. And they don't believe our survey schools. They don't believe that. And so we need to actually bring it back to how do we build an experience that has the business outcomes we care about? Starting with the customer. You get, you want to build a better experience, the customer, not as an end to itself. If you want to build a better experience, the customer end to itself, drop your prices in half. They'll be happier. Not what we're talking about. We're talking about how do we create an experience where they want to work with us more.

Yeah.

And I especially love it in B2B. B2B is where I spend a lot of our time. B2B and B2B2C. Because it's to me much more fascinating. You know, you look at your surveys. So I used to work at Best Buy.

Yeah.

Very easy to correlate survey results with sales. Very. If you can't, then you're asking the wrong question because okay, now you're. If you ask me a survey question, you're getting 75% of the best of my experience. My wife has some influence, but it's mostly me. If you look at a B2B client in the next book, do B2B better. I use the example of Ultima Chronos Group. Now Ultima Chronos Group is a HR and payroll benefits software company. And they work with maybe the chief human resources officer, a handful of vice presidents, all kinds of payroll specialists. There might be, under larger clients, 500 people involved with UKG. Just surveys matter.

UKG is the United Kronos Group.

Just, just ultimate Kronos Groups or ultimate.

Thank you.

The lessons of $they work with 500 people. Well, how do you correlate survey scores to financial outcomes in that situation? Because it's much more complex. It's doable. But it's a lot more interesting to understand that B2B relationship in my eyes than to B2C. I don't know if it's harder or not, but it's certainly different than business to consumer.

Well, you're talking my language, Jim. And it's, you know, it's, it's not that easy to find B2B specialists. So it's really good to talk to a fellow traveler in this, you know, and when I talk to people, the first assumption is that B2B is all about a very rational decision making. You know, we learn it's the decision making unit with multiple people in it. So I just want to like, you know, is that, is that how the world works? Is it all about rational decision making or is there something else at play here?

It's not at all about rational decision making. We are all emotional units. We think emotionally. It's called the affect heuristic. We make decisions based on emotions and we don't believe it, but it's true. One example we worked earlier on, this will be in the next book we worked with Wolters Kluwer Financial Services. If you get a mortgage, you'll see on the bottom of the paperwork their name. They service banks, their bank customers are banks. And they provide compliance solutions. And they wanted to understand how do banks buy compliance solutions. And this is, this has been about six, seven years ago and the CEB had come out with research saying that 57% of the B2B sales process happens digitally. It happens before the sales rep's involved. So by the time the sales rep gets a call, the organization is 57% of the way through the sales cycle. And the CEB said this is all about digital, about people going to the website, downloading white papers, reading case studies. And so when we did the journey mapping, first thing we do is called hypothesis mapping. And we ask the employees to tell us what they think the journey looks like. And same thing they thought it was all about digital solutions. So then, and when we do journey mapping we don't show the hypothesis map to clients, we throw it away. We don't throw it away but we don't use it. We come out with a why don't we talk to their customers? The bankers we heard them say is, oh yeah, well we do those digital things. Yeah. But something important happens first. See a banker that gets the wrong compliance software, they could be fired. It could slow down the loan process, it could actually cost them sales. It could be more expensive to operate. They can't make a mistake. And every compliance solutions website says that they're the best. They say that they're the easiest to use, the most compliant. So that doesn't help. So we found out just time and time again that the banker, before doing anything else would get together some other people in his or her department and they would call their friends, other bankers they met at conferences, non competitive and they would say who do you trust? It was all about the emotional decision of trust. Now once they came up with three or four providers they trusted, then all those rational things matter. They used the case study, so on to narrow it from the four. But if you did not develop trust in the purchasing bank, your chances to win was zero. You might still be invited the rfp but you weren't going to win it.

Yeah, because you get a lot of it. You're not, hey, this is fascinating stuff. Let me replay this back to you. What you're saying is, you know, it's all about the emotionality of this. Probably fear is at play, right?

Oh yeah.

Mention the thing about not wishing to lose your job. But that's a very human emotion, isn't it?

That really exactly.

Root of all of us. And then it's almost like you've got reference calls that you're doing. So if I'm hearing this right, that is the power of the referral sale. Although. Although the company who's at the other end of it's probably not even aware of that because. And then once you get to that stage then it becomes rational. But before that you've got all this emotional stuff going on. Did I hear that right?

Exactly. Exactly. It all comes back to the experience Wolters Kluwer provides their existing customers. Are you creating experience where they will actively advocate? Which by the way, Net Promoter score really doesn't measure. We all think it does. I worked with one bank that tracks referrals and they found no correlation between likelihood to recommend and actually recommending. Very few people actually track Referrals. They assume if they're likely to recommend, they must be giving us referrals. There's no correlation. It could not. At least not in this experience. There could be, but nobody verifies that. It's about creating experience, though, where your customers trust you because they don't want to give a bad recommendation. I've had people ask me for referrals and I say, well, here's who I use. But I don't recommend them because I don't want to look bad. Yeah, you've got to create an experience where your customers trust you because they are ripping. They are risking their reputation and they want to know that you're going to do okay with them.

Yeah, I agree. And B2B, it's almost. It's more than a reputation at stake. It's more of a professional. You know, professional reputation is much more powerful than that personal reputation. I have to say we've also done our research on the Net Promoter stuff. We think there is a correlation and we can definitely see how if you activate promoters, it can work. But I'm going to say with the jury stood out from us. So let's agree to put our research aside and talk about that another day.

Okay. Well, I think it just varies by organization. There are some where Net Promoter Score is very predictive. There are others where it's not at all. It's just not a blanket statement.

Yeah. And also, you and I know how different Net Promoter is applied in all of these organizations.

Oh, yeah.

Let's move into this. Because, you know, you talk about culture change a lot in your business. So. And we just picked up on fear. So I don't know when you think one of the things that we really see in the B2B application is fear of people letting feedback go up to the executive level. And which is just. So how do you break through this kind of like feedback ceiling in the work that you do?

Well, it starts with. It doesn't start with feedback. So we build, for example, a dashboard. One of the things I learned from these hundreds of interviews with great B2B customer experience organizations is a dashboard is a critical tool. I didn't realize that. I probably should have. And we find the great programs, they're communicating sentiment, but sentiment encapsulated in business data. We create what we call sentiment sandwich on a dashboard, which has the sentiment in the middle. But that's Net Promoter Score, although I like the driver scores further down, but then surround it with the operational behavioral data as well as the financial data. And that's what gets executives excited. One of the things to talk about in the book is Dow, they're a client of ours. We worked with them on their product availability delivery journey and Jen Zamora led their customer experience team. She's now been promoted to a global change management role and she had my favorite favorite customer experience business problem ever. So I went there and visited them just before the pandemic. It was in early February 2020 and she was having her overall CX program meeting and for her the she had a team at that time, about 15 people. The business units hired another 20 people customer experience and reported to them because they saw the value of it. So she had about 35 people at this meeting and she shared that their dashboard, their product availability delivery dashboard was so popular they had a thousand licenses and they ran out. They had to start shutting off executives from seeing the dashboard. And the reason was she put up there the operational data. The two key factors which were on time delivery and get it right. Get it right was deliveries on time, right product, no defects. And then she surrounded that with sentiment. She had their overall, they used CXI as their measurement effectiveness, ease and enjoyability as well as specific survey parts. And so she exposed them to the sentiment in the context of the business operations. And so that's again, they had to go back to Qualtrics and renegotiate for unlimited dashboard views. I want every one of our clients to have that problem that your dashboards are so popular you run out of licenses. That's a fabulous problem to have.

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Another thing, hang on, I'm just also coming back to this. The sentiment sandwich. That's a brilliant way of putting it.

All right, I'm stealing that from our cto Sean Phillips, so I got to give him some credit for that. But yeah, what we found if you surround the sentiment with what the executives care about because yes, they care about happy customers, but they care about doing their job well first.

Yeah.

And so that is showing how when they deliver on time, right product, no defects, then that also drives up customer sentiment. And they've done other work to say that that sentiment links to higher order velocity as well as higher margin.

Again, this speaks to one of my pet hobby horses, which is about how you know, CX is really an extension of the quality management process in a company like Dow. It's all about quality and safety, isn't there? And customer experience I think is the natural extension of that. So it's great to hear that. The way that you have that on the same dashboard, I think it's really wonderful.

Yeah, I learned a lot about dashboard just visiting these organizations and how they really communicate to executives and they tie executives roles to the customer output, customer outcomes, they they show how. And Jen's I love this comment from Jen, which is that a better customer experience will make it easier for you to accomplish your goals. So she says to middle management, she ties in whether it is, you know, inventory term, she can tie back to customer experience even, you know, a number of different outcomes. Innovation. She can show that when Dow does a better job at enjoyability, enjoyability is their emotional North Star. Customers are far more likely to work with Dao for co innovation, which is what Dow really cares about. Dao gets jazzed about coming with new products to the world and working with customers to do that. And she can draw a direct line from a better customer experience to joint innovation.

Wow, that's great. Let's open the box on the emotional north style part. Yeah, we were going to talk about that earlier. Let's dive into that now.

So we've found, and this came from Ultima Kronos Group, they have an emotional North Star of confidence. They can show when clients are confident, their behaviors change. To be more likely to purchase new products, to be more likely to use self service, to be more likely to be referenceable when they create an outcome of confidence. Now she measures four positive and four negative emotions. We found this as well. We're working with a software provider, a different one. And they've also found that confidence. When we look at confidence, when a customer says they're confident, their likelihood to buy products next 18 months goes way up. If they are frustrated is the emotion they choose. They can choose more than one. It drops if they're exhausted. If you've ever implemented software, you know, it can be exhausting. The likelihood to buy goes to almost zero. And so they found that that is far more predictive of business outcomes than is something high level like a net promoter score. Satisfaction, overall satisfaction, customer satisfaction. The emotions are most predictive of business outcomes.

Interesting.

It's also way easier. So let's say, you know, Adam, you're a product manager and I come to you and say your product is a net promoter score of 15 versus 25 for the company average. Like, okay, well I need to work on that. What if I came and said, said overall, 45% of our clients are confident customers of your product. It's only true 15% of the time. And whereas 20% of our customers are frustrated for your product, it's 37%. Well now you're much closer to acting because you recognize and so you know, how do I make them more likely to recommend me? Do I give them links to Twitter? But how Do I make them more confident? Okay, now that's more action oriented. I can see I need to build better communications, maybe self help tools. And if we tie that back to the behavioral and financial data and say when you create a confident customer, they're far less likely to tie you up on a call. They're more likely to use cell service. Yeah. They're way less likely to escalate. We bring it to those behaviors and now you can see the business benefits of focusing on emotions and emotional north star. And so you design your experiences around that, you measure it. And I only found a handful of organizations who are doing that but those that do it have found it's very predictive of the customer outcomes. It's also hard to game. Yes, gaming confidence. I suppose you could ask for a top score but it's far more predictive and harder to game than satisfaction. I don't mean pick a nick promoter score, just a common one out there. A satisfaction ease of doing business is a little bit closer to an outcome. But yeah.

So in your findings, whereas you research this for the book, this getting closer to an emotional North Star, does this drive the value from the program? Let's talk a little bit about that.

Oh yeah, it does. So Hagerty, they're B2B2C. The half their business is B2C. Half is B2B2C. They have found that they have tied net promoter score to renewal, to adding different products as well as to better outcomes for their agents. They have found that happiness predicts net promoter score. So we've created this customer experience flywheel, this loyalty flywheel where when you change the customer experience do you measure that it actually gets better or not usually through behavior and operational data. From there then does it create an engaged customer? And they found that it does. When it does, then customers the next step is customers buy more because they found is true. And then the business gets healthier and you repeat they have found that for them happiness predicts net promoter score which predicts financial outcomes. In the case of Dow they found that when again enjoyability. So I first met Dan Futter who's their chief commercial officer. We were working on their complaints journey. He said, Jim, my goal is to create a complaints journey that's enjoyable.

That's intuitive, right? But a bold statement.

My internal voice is what the outsider says. Tell me more about that, dad. But they have the data. Jen was on a conference with me where she showed that because they measure effectiveness, ease and enjoyability.

Yeah.

And effectiveness does not change behaviors. We all have heard about the effortless experience. She's found as many that effortless experience doesn't actually create loyalty. It just prevents disloyalty. Behaviors don't change when it becomes more effortless. But when customers say it's enjoyable to work with Dao now, behaviors change and that's their emotional North Star. And yes, Dan did create an enjoyable complaints experience. Amazing what they did. And they showed tremendous results by doing that.

I agree it sounds counterintuitive, but it's a little bit like from our own experience, if you have a detractor and you're able to flip the experience for a detractor, often that person becomes your most strongest promoter. So yeah, that's something really in the human emotional experience for us is that you've done a lot to my loyalty. That's really how it works.

Oh yeah. I will be at a conference. In fact, I was at a conference this week. And so I'll ask a question first. What's most predictive of loyalty, effectiveness, ease, emotion or likelihood to recommend? And most people get it right that it's emotion. That Forrester says that Ex IM Institute says that as well, as do these clients I referenced earlier. Who I'll measure that. But then I'll ask the second question, which are you measuring emotions? And I say, yes, no, or how would I do that? And the vast majority of people choose how would I do that? In fact, at the conference this week, only one person said they measure emotions.

Interesting. And that sort of feeds into some of the things you were talking about in your other book, which is like only a very small percentage. A smaller percentage of companies measure the value of the program, and even smaller numbers show value from it. So it seems like complete common sense to invest in this. So what is the block to companies taking this on?

Well, first of all, in terms of emotional North Star, it's a concept nobody's really thought about. From what I can tell, Roxy was on a Roxy is the leader of customer experience at Ultima Cronus Group, and she and I did a webinar together. And she said, you know, this is not rocket science. I she said my professors at school, she has a master's of behavioral psychology, so they would be upset with me for using surveys. But I can't really hook up my customers to a galvanic skin response system. I never knew what a galvanic skin response system was. But anyway, so she has this rich language, but she said this is all I can do. And she says it's not rocket science. It just hasn't been done in a systematized way.

Yeah.

Now you do have to understand what emotions are most tied to the business outcomes. You can't just take somebody else's. I would not recommend you choose confidence, trust, enjoyability. I would say first identify what most matters to your customers and is tied to the business outcomes and then go from there. You know if UnitedHealthcare wanted to use enjoyability as theirs I think that's even harder than chemicals. I really think that's an impossible goal in their case. Probably not being annoying is their North Star. I don't know. I may be a little biased my time there but in those negative service areas such as health care, health insurance I should say you're going to have a different North Star than Disney. You know Disney is going to be looking at Disney would look for confidence would make sense. They're going to be much more about joy. It varies by company, by brand and by type of experience. But the stopping custom base really is having a systematized way of doing this as well as the fact that it's not the norm. And so it takes a gutsy customer experience leader to say we're going to measure emotions and we go back to that software client I referenced earlier. I haven't given their name. One of the options in their survey is I'm embarrassed when I think of this company sharing that with your CEO. That that's an option takes guts.

Yeah, I agree.

Thinking about emotions in the B2B experience takes guts and most programs aren't confident enough to do that.

That's a really good takeaway for people to think about emotions. Take guts to talk about CEO. I really agree. That's really something. Now you're working on your new book at the moment.

Yep.

You allowed to share the title of this now I'd love to hear about.

You bet it's do b2b better so it really is targets b2b and b2c b2b and b2b 2c but do b2b better drive growth through a game changing customer experience and the so Olga Buddieri is one of the change makers. I profile there's over two dozen different people involved in it and there are four recurring case studies which are Dow Ultimate, Kronos Group Salesforce as well as Haggard and haggard Egan is B2B2C and just use those four in every section talk about how they implement these four different findings I had from my interviews and the book comes out on customer experience day October 4th and yeah so we found the four things these great programs do is that first of all they start by tying to the financials that the survey is not the score. The score is customers who want to stay with you longer, buy more and operate in less expensive ways. The score might be net revenue retention, it might be customer lifetime value. That's the score. The surveys of diagnostics number one is a tie to value. Number two is the emotional North Star. And for that part of the chapter I had to use a few B2C examples just because there are not a lot of B2B organization doing it. But I did. All four of those companies do measure emotions. Third then is they bring in the behavior, the customer ecosystem data, the behavioral, descriptive and the financial as well as the operational data. It amazed me when I talked to these great programs. They would talk about how survey scores vary by channel that you come in and how that changes customer lifetime value. And the last one is they use a very deliberate change management approach. I introduced both Cotter his model as well as the Ad Car change model. Ad Car is more common. We found a number of great customers using them. Most have no real knowledge of change management and how it applies to customer. They all acknowledge its importance. They haven't figured out how to apply it to their work. So those are the four things. The title, financials, motion North Star use, the customer ecosystem data and tech and change management. We found these four programs do that regularly as well as a number of others that we interviewed in the book.

I think it's fascinating you really touch on the things that I believe are important. It's a wonderful way that you've summarized those things and that change management model I'm really fascinated to read. I cannot find for one. Wait till, wait till the book comes out so I can get that. Jim, you've got to promise to send some copies.

Also I'll send you caviar. Maybe one for your readers as well.

That's great. So Jim's book Do B2B Better Drive Growth through a game Changing Customer Experiences out on in October on Customer Experience Day. I for one can't wait for that. Jim, you've been a wonderful guest and thanks for summarizing everything and if people would love to, sorry people would like to get hold of you. How do they reach you?

Probably easiest way is LinkedIn or they email me at jimheartofthecustomerspilledout.com Jim, thanks so.

Much for your time today. I really appreciate it. You've given me a number of things to think about. The effect heuristic I'M going to look up on Google because I've never heard of that before. And once again, thanks for being the guest on the podcast today.

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Adam.

Take care. See you soon. Sa.