Your Frankenstein CX Tech Stack is Causing Churn!

The way I like to start conversations when I'm talking to somebody in a C suite. Hey, share with me some of your recent comments. What are your customers saying? No, no, I want real comments. And if they can't put their finger on that, they don't have a system that delivers real feedback. You know, good System, puts the CEO, the VPs, the C Suite in your pocket and gives you a direct way to communicate.

Hello. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Counter Experience podcast. I am here with my co host, Carrie T. Self.

As always, hello everybody.

And today, guys, we're going to talk about something that is a reoccurring theme for Customer Gauge, which is we talk to a lot of prospects every single week and this keeps coming up. So we figured we should address it and companies, and specifically champions using a ton of manual type of applications to do their analysis. I'm talking Excel, I'm talking tableau, I'm talking the survey chimps, survey robots out there. I'm not going to say names, but I'm guessing you guys can, you know, extract from that. And Carrie, you had a great example of a prospect you were talking to that kind of was using this type of concoction of Frankenstein applications. Right?

Frankenstein's a great analogy because, you know, in this unique place that we are with account experience, we're constantly Talking to these B2B businesses and helping them understand it's much more dynamic than a CX solution. And what we do is we stumble upon these champions who get it. The light bulb has gone off. They see the complexity of what they need, but they're just not. They don't have the tool. And it was funny because I was having this moment of sheer joy seeing that she got it. I saw the sheer. I had the sheer joy that she's piecing it together and knows what she wants to get to. It's all about changing behaviors and building business and doing all these things. But she just didn't have the right tool. So she gives me this tour. Again, not dropping names.

Yeah, of course.

Not protecting the innocent here, but, you know, I get this inside tour of how she's doing it. She's using this, this survey banana in the front to kind of get surveys in. And then she's using, you know, the next tool, the Excel, to download it and then loading it into a tableau type tool. She's using emails to push it out to people. And don't get me wrong, I got to give her credit, she's hitting all the crucial points, but but, man, the amount of work, the lack or the ability to get this to people in real time, you know, she's missing some of the power that could be behind this. But, I mean, the hard part's already done. She knows she needs it and she knows what the results would be. So I did have this really great moment. And there was this moment afterwards, like, all right, we need to get you a solution quickly because we're going to give you back 30 hours of your week right out of the gate.

And that hits home with me because I've told this story before, but I remember being in her position. So I was retention marketing manager at a very, very large multinational bank. I was in charge of our experience program where I hacked together Tableau, Excel, Salesforce, Marketo to make a program. And what was happening was it was literally we were capturing the information that wasn't. I thought that would be the hard part. That's not the hard part. The hard part is once you get it in, what do you do with the data? And so there I was. I was focused on the wrong thing. I was like, all right, I got to get these out at this time. And I'm a marketer, right? So I'm like, all right, this lifecycle point would be great to send that. So I really focused in on, like, the mechanics of the interaction with the customer, which is important. Important. But what I found was, I mean, props to me. I'm going to say it out loud. I nailed that. I got a ton of feedback at the right time. But then I was like, oh, my God, I'm sitting on this mound of data that is already a week old that I need to start running analysis on. So then I started pulling in two business analysts to help me work on this stuff. And then I had to give a presentation to the management team. And so we were working on this data. It's already, at that point, two weeks old, slicing and dicing it in tableau, slicing it in Excel, great charts, beautiful things present to management team. And you know, they asked me five or six questions that great, great questions. I didn't have answers for it. I knew that in the back of my head when I was presenting that, I was like, holy crap, it's gonna be like another week of analysis that I'm gonna have to go back and do on this already two week old data. Wow, okay, this is. This is becoming a problem. And Carrie, I know you have similar instances, I'm sure, over in your world as well, that you've run into, but it really is becoming. It feels good because you have kind of like a system in place. You're running analysis, and you feel like you're doing something. But in fact, the reality of it is that you're already two weeks late. If you don't follow up within 48 hours. We know we have stats, internal B2B benchmarks that say if you don't follow up within 48 Hours, your window is gone. Yeah.

First off, I think we have to have a hashtag. I want to hear from everyone. Frankenstein, B2B. What monster did you create? I heard your list, and I'm thinking, okay, we all had Excel, right? That came with my computer, so that was cheap. I didn't have to ask for investment on that. And I mean, you had tableau. I'm in awe. You know, we didn't have that. I had to use PowerPoint. But, you know, we. We all hack together something. And let me say this, all great tools for very specific needs, but definitely not a B2B solution. And. And there was this other part that when you were talking, immediately, I'm thinking. And you also left the rest of the organization out of the process. You know, there's. There's this. Sometimes we create our own silos, not even knowing we're doing it because we're working so hard to get it done. And we have really great people working at it. But your tool can also restrict who's sharing that information. I always love, you know, anyone who's listened to this before, knows me, knows that I was in food and beverage for many years before coming to Customer Gauge. I was a customer of Customer Gauge. And, you know, when we were using that tool, one of the stories that I loved the most was, you know, if anyone who's traveled on an airplane and been in an airport before, you know, you get through security, you've got a limited time to get on that plane and get out. And you walk up to a restaurant, long line, busy, everyone's ordering at the same time, orders made. Person opens their bag, wrong order, at that point, you're out of luck. You're boarding now, seating. You're rushing to your flight, and you have this manager up front who's hustling the hustling. His phone goes off, literally, and says, can't believe I just got the wrong burger from so and so, you know, and it's like, wait a minute, we can fix that. I know my flight to my terminal. It's gotta be that one. Literally opens the pos. See what was put in, talks to the person Makes it literally runs to the gate agent and goes, this belongs to so and so on your flight. His name is this. The woman's like, okay, minutes later, we're getting praise and everything because we were able to get a hamburger on a flight. And I know you're thinking, come on, Kerry, that's not major business. But you fly for four, eight hours and have the wrong meal. You know, hungry flights are miserable. But I mean, that's the game changer of having real time and changing behavior. Now you've empowered a manager to coach his staff in real time. Turn a really crappy experience into a phenomenal one. Talk about a customer for life. You think he didn't stop at that restaurant now every single time before he got on a plane and flew out? You know, and I think this, this relates really well to what we do in B2B. It's, it's, you know, how do you connect your customers? And let's be honest, if you're a B2B type business, you don't have one customer every five minutes. You have thousands of them continuously. And how do you connect all those voices to the people that matter?

Yeah. And I think just to follow up on that story, too, I love that story, by the way, every time you tell it, I'm like, man, that's such a good story. Because it turns a detractor into, like you said, a lifelong super promoter, which we're going to use again. Super promoter that will not only go back to that restaurant, but they're going to tell their friends and family, you got to hear what happened to me on this flight. Like, I got the wrong burger. I gave feedback, and they rushed it through the gate onto the plane. For me, I mean, that. That creates a fan for life. That. That's the stuff of legend. Right? Like, that's what we're all shooting for. And I think just to go back to our B2B benchmarks real quick, if you close the loop, and this is based off of our anonymous entire portfolio of customers across multiple B2B segments geographies. So this is all anonymized. If you close the loop within 48 hours and follow up on that feedback in real time, your NPS will increase by six points. If you do it two plus weeks later, it'll only increase by three points. So it doubles when you close it as close to real time as possible. I guess my point is you had that exact scenario. Proof is in the pudding where you literally had a detractor and you closed it in real time. Their NPS must be off through the roof at that point. So I think these benchmarks are really powerful because you can see the impact using real time data will have. In my example, I'm three weeks out. My NPS increase might be one point, if any. Right. Like at that point. So there's some serious power in getting feedback to the front lines and frontline management in real time so you can troubleshoot these operational issues and delight customers. I mean, that's really. At the end of the day, the most powerful thing is creating those super promoters that will spread the word of your brand as a marketer. That's gold. I mean, you can't do much better than that.

Yeah. I always like to paint the simplest picture. Guys, think of a survey. And I know everyone here surveying me cringe like, oh, not another survey. I don't care what your feedback channel is, call it a survey, call it Karen up front asking for the manager. Call it whatever you want, even reviews online, whatever you're getting your feedback from, that's fine. But think of it this way, if someone stops long enough to give you feedback, they care. Promoters, we love. Hug them, love them, empower them. We talk about charging them up and making them into referrals. That's a whole nother topic. Super important. But I keep saying this, your detractors are just really pissed off promoters. They're people that had very high expectations, missed the mark. You know, these are the group that I think you can activate the quickest you can. Wow. With very little effort, just by getting back to them saying, I hear you and let me give me a chance to do something to make the business better. We're not going to throw you a free dessert. We're not going to knock off 5% discount because at the end of the day, 5% isn't shit. Right. What's really important is we want to make our business better. So you stay with us for life. And that's what these detractors are screaming, we still care. We love you. Even though we're giving you a crappy score because we want to give you a good score, but we can't. And I think that's exactly what you're saying, Ian. I mean, imagine that if we can get back to people within 48 hours, a six point. I mean, right now everyone's wondering, how can we get our NPS to jump? How we can increase our response rate, how can we get people to spend more? Guys, they're all correlated together. Get back to them when they give you feedback quicker.

Yeah. And it really is that simple. I hate to say that to oversimplify it but I mean if you get back to customers quickly, especially detractors, I think that that's a really great point. It's really empathy, right? They want to feel like they're being heard. They want you to understand that they're frustrated. It's really a two way conversation at that point and could be wrong here guys. But there's only good things that can happen when you talk it out with a detractor because you're going to understand that the issues deeper you can improve your business. They feel heard. There's just, it's unlimited upside there, you know.

And it's. I know we have a lot of different paths we can go down with this one but it's just picking up, you use the word empathy and I think that's the key. Genuinely listening. Sometimes you can't fix the problem. Sometimes there's not a fix immediately. But just the fact you reached out and listened, just the fact that you started that dialogue and they know you're listening, that that is the point. Swing right there. That's, that's what matters. Now you're on the clock to say, okay, if enough people are saying it, we have to start taking this into consideration and do something about it. Yeah, I'm 100% Ian. It's like it's not these canned responses, not these automated reports either. It's, it's generally did you hear me? Do you understand me?

Yeah. And I think just to bring it back. And I'm going to throw a challenge out to everybody listening. If you have feedback in Excel right now and you're a CX practitioner, you're in a B2B space and you have feedback in Excel, it's already too late. Like it's already too late. The whole purpose of your program should be to set up a system that captures the feedback and then distributes it to the front line. Just like Carrie's airport example. So somebody can act and change that detractor into promoter. So that only happens with speed and a good system built around speed. It's not about running endless regression analysis on this, these amazing data points. It's not about reporting it up to management. There's a little bit of that. But the core of your program we really would challenge you should be based around getting that feedback to the right people as quickly as humanly possible and following up with your customers. B2B contacts. That could be three different levels. Right. C suite, middle management, frontline. You want to have a good structure for all of those different types of Personas. Capture that feedback in real time. Make sure you have a playbook to follow up with each one of those types of Personas in real time. Again, that's going to have a massive impact on your renewal cycle. Right. For B2B, your buying cycle, your upsells. I mean, if you get the CEO gives you feedback and they say they're pissed off, I mean, you better follow up with them within like 10, 15 minutes. And it's going to have an impact on that relationship. It's going to really. I bet you take that CEO and put them on their back heels and say, wow, that was amazing. Like, you guys heard it, you followed up immediately. That changes the relationship. It went from a very negative space, probably from a detractor comment of some kind. And you can turn that around. I think that if you waited on that feedback for two weeks, I'm not so sure that would happen.

Yeah. And take it a step further. You never hear a really good customer service story come from. Yeah, I went in and they gave me what I wanted. It never happens that way. I was in pain. Either they screwed up or I wasn't figuring it out. And they heard me. They rescued me. Upswing. I'm not saying to go out and intentionally create problems to solve them. That formula is way too much work. We have enough problems that we need to be made aware of. And what are you missing and how can you get that to your whole organization? Because I think there is this reverse side and we talked about a couple examples of the frontline getting that information and acting on our changing behaviors. Every CEO right now wants to know, how can they change behaviors on the front line in mass and scale it? That's one way. But what about that next level of management? How can we get them to start making smarter purchasing decisions? Smart strategic people decisions, Developing the right training? You know, I keep seeing a pattern of this in the last couple of weeks. I need to put some messaging out about this. This now becomes a tool that other people are hungry for because you can build your success on immediate feedback and be in the know. It's literally like standing next to each of your frontline people as they're doing what they're doing.

And that that can have a huge impact on your, not only your business, but your culture. Right. And we've talked about this at length. I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, Kerry, because I know you could talk about this for hours.

Did you mention culture? Let's do it.

But I mean just seeing that real time feedback as it comes in and there's a story that one of our sales reps had that I'll just go through real quick. Where we were doing a. I believe it was almost like a pilot review on site pre pandemic where our sales rep we were kind of doing like a presentation and they had very basic survey process up and running with CG and it was early stages so they weren't doing a bunch of the advanced stuff. But it was enough where they were getting feedback in from customers. While we were giving a presentation, they got a notification from a customer that was detractor that was very unhappy. And it was brought up in the group setting. And the CEO or I think it was like a very high up director saw the feedback and then looked at the management. I was like, are you guys going to do something about this? What's the plan? And so that kind of started the gears turning with everybody in the room. And then all of a sudden the entire business unit that were pretty much all of the heavy hitter decision makers in one room started putting a plan in place to follow up with the feedback. And we used it as a talking point to Great. Top down. Awesome. But you know, you need to have a process in place to follow up with this feedback. And then that really started the snowball conversation of it's all about following up on the feedback. It's operationalizing that feedback from customers and getting to them as quickly as possible. And you could see that the director in there just got it immediately and was like, great. This is real time. Awesome. What are we going to do about it right now? And he didn't care. We were in the middle of a presentation. Feedback first, right? I mean that's really what it's all about. And I still love that story because it's, it's the immediacy that really gets me is like if you see it come in immediately real time, you feel like you got to act on it immediately.

And what Ian's failing to tell us, he's the one that sent that comment. No, but I think we've all had that moment where we're on the phone with one of our customers or prospects and that happens. I mean, same thing, we lose that. It's so neat to see a leader of this initiative and the first time you turn on their platform and that first send starts coming back and it's feeding that information in immediately you see them starting to work. Like is someone calling that person, hey, why did what and they're. All of a sudden, we lose them. And I'm like, yes, that's the kind. That's the distraction we really wanted, because that's your business. I'll tell you the way I like to start conversations when I'm talking to somebody in a C suite. Hey, share with me some of your recent comments. What are your customers saying? No, I want real comments. And if they can't put their finger on that, they don't have a system that delivers real feedback. Good System. Puts the CEO, the VPs, the C Suite in your pocket and gives you a direct way to communicate to them. I just think that's always my question. What are your customers really saying about you? How many. I mean, Ian, I think we've done three or four podcasts now in the last couple of months where. What was their bragging point? You know? You know, I can go down the list. H and R Block and Intuitive Health. And they all said real feedback that we can make decisions on. You know, we don't panic. We pivot because we have that voice. We hear it. These comments are shared. We get them live. That's the game changer.

It's.

That's what's really important at the end of the day.

Exactly. And I think that we had a quote from a customer CEO, a big customer. They run event software. I won't say the name, but it was an amazing quote that I'll never forget. It's like, yeah, I'm addicted to it. I'm addicted to seeing the customer feedback come in. And it's the first thing I do every morning. It's the last thing I do before I go home. They get addicted to the feedback. And that's an amazing culture driver when you're literally. You hear all these stupid stories about companies that leave a teddy bear in a seat. Right. I think there's one local Boston company that has a very orange logo that I won't mention out loud. We're not dropping names today, Kerry. No free pub. No free pub.

You're right. Edit out and bleep out all the ones we dropped.

But you hear these stupid stories about, like, oh, we have a teddy bear in the chair to remember that the customer is in every single meeting. We have, like, okay, guys like it. That's important. But there's nothing that can replace getting real, raw feedback from customers and directly infusing it into your operations. Like, that's really what people should be focused on. Not the dog and pony show of the teddy bear in a chair. I think you can do that, but it should follow the other side, which is literally having the live feedback in real time.

And you just defined customer centric more clearly than anyone you know. Are you really listening? Are you really acting on that? Or is that what's guiding you? Perfectly defined?

It's not marketing. It becomes a process for your business to improve and grow. Right? Like that's the difference, but just to bring it back to the original topic, guys. So Frankenstein excel type of applications, good when you're first starting out, but it becomes a problem as you try to scale the, the, the program, as you try to get that feedback to frontline staff to make changes for your business. It's really difficult because I've been there. Cary's been there. Cary didn't have cg. He was a previous customer. He bought CG and he was looking to solve for that original pain of having a Frankenstein style system. Right. So we have been in your position. We know the shortcomings of both sides. Listen, we work for customer gauge and we will say flat out, customer gauge is not the perfect solution for everybody. But specifically for B2B BE, we think it's pretty damn good. And automation, real time feedback, that's really what is driving these gains for these companies that we have. Again, bringing it back to the benchmark, if you follow up within 48 hours, you're gonna get a six point NPS increase. If you do it two weeks or more, it's about a three, you know, that's double. So it really does matter. It really does impact and nps, if you do it in the account experience way where you're correlating to revenue, those six points, those three points that you have, difference doesn't seem like much, but that might be millions of dollars for a lot of our customers, which we know is for a lot of them. So yeah. Kerry, any closing thoughts on that? And I just wanted to wrap up on that benchmark real quick.

That benchmark always speaks louder than anything I will ever say. And again, put your finger on it. Be immediate, you know, and remember why you're doing these programs. Remember why that person standing in front of that board and reporting on these numbers. Are you trying to grow your company? Are you trying to figure out what your future is? If all you're trying to do is like, like you said, dog and pony show off and make you look good in the moment, you're only going to look good in the moment. You're going to feel the pain very quickly, you know, and I think being able to have that CEO and that person in your pocket, that connectivity, that's customer centric. And I love the addiction. That was my favorite thing.

Addiction?

Yeah. People who come in the morning, you lose half your day sometimes scrolling through that, what's important to your business. I always think of that entrepreneur who starts up that restaurant, that first business they have, they stop and talk to every person that walks in because they want to know their business. I think it's capturing that magic again at scale, right?

Yeah. Which is huge. So, yeah, I think that's where we'll end today, guys. Automate, automate, automate. Wherever you can. It will catch up with you 100% if you don't. So thank you for listening. This has been the Account Experience Podcast. Thank you to my co host, Carrie T. Self, and we'll talk soon again. This episode of the Account Experience Podcast is sponsored by Customer Gauge, 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. Quick question. What do you guys think is the number one reason B2B experience programs fail? Believe it or not, it's lack of C Suite buy. In Customer Gauge's research with mit, they've found the quickest way to align yourselves with the C suite is to actually align with what they care about most, which is revenue. That's why CustomerGage is literally built from the ground up to maximize and track the revenue contribution from your experience program in real time. Companies like dhl, Anheuser Busch, Heineken, yeah, we get a good amount of free bear1 login, Iron Mountain, H&R block, SuperOffice and Sugar CRM are already using Customer Gauge to make maximize their growth by tying their programs to revenue. And with over $10 billion worth of account revenue actively being managed in Customer Gauge, yeah, that's billion with a B, they're the leader in the space. But maybe even more interesting, they found that once you get alignment with that C suite, the needs of these B2B practitioners or the program champions are evolving too. In such a complex account environment, it can be really tough to measure and act on floor feedback quickly across multiple departments, divisions or even locations. Luckily, Customer Gauge has you covered there as well. With account native features that easily help you not only measure the feedback for multiple stakeholders in an account, but act on that feedback in real time. Because at the end of the day, if you're not empowering your frontline staff with the right insights to address customer issues, you're going to be dealing with a churn issue. It's not a matter of if, but it's really a matter of when. Customer Gauge helps you distribute this experience data across your entire organization, regardless of department, regardless of location, regardless of division, all in real time. No manual spreadsheets or a team of analysts are needed. CustomerGage's mission is to help B2B companies harness the power of account centric growth to drive meaningful change in their businesses. And that's a powerful thing. If you want to see Customer Gauge in action, go ahead and check out CustomerGage.com and get a demo of account experience today. You won't regret it.