The Intersection of Customer Experience and Customer Success | S01 E18

Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Breed's Adding Value podcast. My name is Guido and I'm the manager of Acquisition and strategy at New Breed. For those of you who don't know, New Breed is a customer acquisition agency focused on helping B2B companies grow and expand their business. My role at New Breed is to oversee our internal marketing team and to make sure that we're growing our own business. But I also get to work closely with our services team to learn about the challenges our clients are facing and how we're solving for them. This season on Adding Value, we're going to focus on the incredible employees we have here and how they add value to our clients and our company every day. If you like what you hear, make sure you subscribe for more great episodes and head over to newbreedmarketing.com to take a look at our other great resources. My guest today is Karen Kreischer. You may recognize Karen from one of our earlier episodes where we talked about creating compelling content. But today we're going to be talking about adding value by building the ideal customer experience and the role that she plays in bringing on new clients and setting them up for success. So, Karen, thank you for joining, and welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

So companies have always had a focus on the customer to some degree. The phrase the customer is always right has been around since the late 1800s, and while there may be some flaws with that statement, it still succeeded in getting the point across about focusing on customers and their satisfaction. Despite that, I still feel like there's been a pretty big shift recently, especially in B2B, where companies are putting a lot heavier emphasis on their customers. So HubSpot spent all of last year focusing on the flywheel and introducing this to everybody, and you just see this happening more and more. With all that being said, let's start with this. What is customer experience and why is it so important in your eyes?

Great question. I don't know if my words are the best words to use for it. Jason Bordeaux from HubSpot put it really nicely. He said that customer experience is the impression that you leave with your customer, resulting in how they think of your brand across every stage of the customer journey. So it's not necessarily just their experience as your customer, but also as your prospect and also as somebody relatively unrelated to your brand.

So you mentioned what they are as your customer and your prospect. So the customer experience begins when, before.

They even know about your brand?

I would say yeah, as a marketer, I think about the customer experience all the time. And you're starting that process from the very beginning. Like you said before, they even know who you are. Their first interaction with our marketing material is well after the customer experience begins. In my eyes, it's hard to think about how to actually create that experience prior to somebody even knowing about you. But that's how you need to think when building the customer experience.

Absolutely.

Which brings me to my next question, which is the fact that prior to being in this role, you had been leading New Breed's content team. How do you feel like that experience of working with the content team, creating content for our clients, has helped you prepare for this transition?

Yeah, I think obviously content is a lot of how people experience your brand, so that can really happen at any stage in the customer journey. That could happen. As we just discussed prior to them, even really knowing that your brand exists, just they may run across a quote or an article that you know is associated with your brand. And therefore, all of the content that you need, that you create needs to be really geared toward making that customer experience the best that it can possibly be. I think my role on the content team prepared me for that. Just having an understanding of not only the underlying brand values that are coming through, but also the fact that everything that's put out there, choose prospects to customers or just out in the world in general, is content and treating all of it as if it's going to be seen by them.

So with the role that you're starting now, you're going to be focusing mostly on the onboarding process. There's obviously going to be other aspects that come into play there. But as far as the customer experience is concerned, why is onboarding and the first 30 to 60 days of a customer working with you so important?

Yeah, a great question. I think so often service is. Is not service as a. As a product, so to speak, is not treated as products are treated, but really it should be. So if you imagine that somebody, you know, downloaded a new app and opened it and it just didn't work the way that they expected it to, or it was just difficult to use, it was a poor user experience, they might not ever open that app again. So the first impression there is incredibly valuable. Obviously, onboarding won't be the customer's first impression of your brand, but it is the first impression of your product, so to speak. And even if that product is actually services, I think treating it as a product is really important in that onboarding process. And that's how we should be thinking of that. That, you know, if they have a bad experience right out of the gate, then perhaps you'll never be able to, you know, transition them back to having a positive experience. Experience. Ideally you would be able to, but I think just making sure that you understand that, you know, a first experience with a service is very similar to a first experience with a product and treating it similarly.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Like that your first impression of anything is going to really shape the way that you feel towards whatever that thing is for pretty much your entire relationship with that thing. So those first 30 days are extremely critical. We've gone through onboarding processes with new software at New Breedwear. We basically form an opinion on whether or not we're going to renew within those first 30 to 60 days sometimes. And that can change. But that thought crosses your mind pretty early on in the process. I've also worked with a few software companies where within the first 60 days they have a call scheduled with us where they ask us definitively, like, if you had to decide today, if you were to renew, would you do that? And I loved getting that question. It forces you to think about it in the moment as a customer, but also from the software's point of view. And for our case, if we were to do the same thing, it gives us a lot of in the moment feedback that's extremely valuable for us to decide what to do next. So how do you go about gathering that type of feedback that can help you improve the experience and when, where, how do you go about that process?

I think over time we'd like to implement even more of a feedback mechanism. Right now we're using NPS and also focusing on NPS by service. So what that means is understanding how we're functioning as a company overall for our clients by delivering that Net Promoter Score survey, but also on a piece by piece sort of basis. So after kind of each piece of our engagement has concluded, if it does, in some cases it will with our foundational products. We would then ask that question, you know, along the same lines of, would you renew today? If you were asked gathering that feedback, whether it's negative or positive, it just really shapes the trajectory of how you deliver your customer experience.

How do you go about translating some of that feedback into actionable things that the company can do to improve? On the one hand, you could get an NPS survey. That's great. That says that you're doing all the right things. If that's the case, then you probably shouldn't change anything. On the other hand, you could get a really low NPS score, but I would think that you'd want to collect a decent amount of responses before you decide to make any significant changes to your organization. So what does that process look like of understanding where we want to focus our time based on the feedback that we're receiving?

Yeah, I think one piece of that that you said is obviously having your goals tied to that. So perhaps your goals don't need to be that you need a certain net Promoter score, but you should be aiming for a high response rate. So you want to be able to identify trends. And in order to identify trends you need enough data. And in order to get enough data, you need a high response rate. That should really be your goal. Which means you need follow up mechanisms in place. You really need to be focusing on, you know, making sure that the customer or the client understands that that feedback survey is, you know, a valuable piece of the engagement and a way for us to, you know, improve our services. I think the main thing that you would need to focus on there is making changes once you have clearly identified those trends and not before as sort of one off approaches to things.

So apart from nps, which is one of the first things that we're starting to roll out, you mentioned a few of the others, but what are other types of feedback that you should try to be soliciting from your customers on a regular basis?

Good question. We really enjoy asking for reviews and just understanding sort of a detail, deeper level of how the experience is going for the customer. You can leave those types of comments on the net Promoter score survey, but it doesn't always happen. And really getting sort of that, you know, longer form response from people has been quite beneficial. And usually we'd ask the person who's working directly with the client to seek that feedback. If they have, you know, the strongest relationship with them, then they're most likely to be honest with them. And, and it's also direct feedback for that person. So enabling our service team members to really gather that feedback at the appropriate times during an engagement with the client, I think has been one of the best ways that we're tracking it.

How do you feel on incentivizing feedback responses and reviews and all of that kind of stuff?

Incentivizing to the client? Yes, that's an interesting question, I think. I mean, if you portray it correctly, you won't need to incentivize the, the ideal is that they understand that the incentive is that your services would consequently improve. Right. And if you're sort of teeing that up from the beginning of the conversation from the beginning of the engagement that we'll be asking for their feedback in order to improve our services, then they're already aware of what the incentive is for them. If we're offering, you know, $5 gift cards, $10 gift cards for review. Not only does it seem like I think we are trying to get positive feedback instead of just any feedback, but it also seems like it may not be exactly what the client wants to do and therefore not contributing positively to the overall experience. I really think there are other ways to positively contribute to the customer experience that don't involve incentivizing directly with some monetary value.

We talked a little bit about nps and that's a hard number, hard metric that you can look at to be able to understand what the customer experience looks like. But there are plenty of others. I even think about the marketing side. Our funnel, in some ways is a representation of our customer experience. I've been trying to encourage the team lately to not think about how do we improve our MQL to SQL conversion rate, but rather how do we improve the experience at this stage of the buyer's journey. You might get to the same exact result. You might come to the same conclusion of this is what we're going to do. But, but the approach is different. But what are some other ways that we can go about measuring the experience and thinking about the levers that we can pull to change things here or there?

I really love that idea right out of the gate. I think another big way, and I think it's really important, Lincoln Murphy talks about this quite a bit, is understanding the desired outcome for a client where the desired outcome is not necessarily, you know, we, we produce a beautiful website. The desired outcome for that client is that we produce a beautiful website that nets a certain number of leads and they look really amazing to their boss and they receive a promotion. Understanding where people's motivations lie and delivering the experience that allows them to focus on those motivations, I think is a big part of it. But in terms of measuring that, you really just need to know, know the desired outcome from the beginning. So that's a, it's a tough thing to get to in those initial conversations. I think the best place to tee that up is, you know, obviously with the marketing materials that speak to those possible desired outcomes, but also with the sales conversations. If your salespeople are having conversations with your future clients prior to them actually coming on board and really teeing up that understanding of what their desired outcome is, then everyone that's Delivering the service will be much better and able to measure it and whether we're actually tracking toward that desired outcome. And again, that's not the same as the metrics and the goals that we set to work toward those metrics. Instead, it's a bigger piece of it.

So I want to change topics slightly. Maybe I want to talk a little bit about the differences and comparing and contrasting the relationship between marketing, sales, and servicing when it comes to customer experience. How should those three functions work together when it comes to the experience? And like, the reason I'm asking this is because your new role is going to force you. And I. I'm using the word force as if it's a bad thing, but I'm excited about it. But we're going to be working a lot more closely together now, being the leader on the marketing team and you handling a lot of the customer experience. So how should we be working together? What else should we be thinking about in terms of the sales side of things?

Well, the first piece of it is that we should be working together.

Yes.

So you kind of said it right there. I, you know, obviously New Breed believes, and we've implemented this in our organizational structure, that we're all working toward the same goal. It's all the same flywheel, and our customers are in that flywheel. And therefore all sorts of. Of three sections of that, so to speak. Right. Marketing, sales and service need to be very well aligned. So that's the first piece is just working together, period. And not viewing yourself as a silo. Right. Not viewing those teams as silos. In terms of translating that to the sales process, I think, you know, there are a lot of pieces of that that have to do with content. Again, so using sort of the same content ideas or I guess drivers in the conversations in marketing and in sales and in service, I think can be valuable. Repeating the same ideas across all of those in order to facilitate a cohesive experience, I think can be valuable. So it may be that we need a document that just sort of outlines what those key brand values are. If you're attempting to bring customer experience into every piece of the flywheel, marketing, sales and service, and into every team's actual work. I think having those guidelines is probably a good starting point.

Yeah.

In terms of. Yeah, again, bringing in sales, I think a lot of that is making sure that the conversations are aligned with those same ideas. So having. Having those guidelines is a great first place.

Yeah. That the, the guidelines in alignment are getting me thinking about things. The fact that you're only going to be able to create a great experience for your ideal customer. If sales and marketing bring a customer through the door that never has the potential to have a good experience because you don't solve for the challenge that they have, then you're only setting the team up for failure. That's one of the key issues with the way that those three teams should work together. That feedback doesn't come from anything other than service and the customer. I as a marketer am not going to know if I'm bringing the right customers through the door if I don't hear from our services team or ideally from our customers directly about what their experience is like. But since they don't necessarily always get the chance to speak with our customers, getting it through the person at New Breed that's going to be managing that function the most is going to be extremely valuable for me. I'm incredibly excited to get that. The last thing that I wanted to bring up in this discussion was I guess, the difference between customer service success and experience. There's three terms that are out there that I think are used interchangeably very often and there's a big difference between the three of them. What do you see as being the differences between those three terms? Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. I have to think about it for a second. So I see customer service is really being. That's a piece of it. That's happening during the service portion of the flywheel. Right. So I think there is a way to provide good customer service using materials created by marketing, using the conversations with sales, so to speak. But the service is really when you're being provided the service. So let's say in the case of the app, after you've downloaded the product and the service that happens from that point forward, it also seems to be more of a one to one interaction than it is a brand interaction, so to speak. The other piece, customer success, I think is it depends on how you define it within your organization. I think some organizations define customer success as long term retention and from the organizational viewpoint versus the customer viewpoint. But ideally you're defining it from the customer viewpoint and customer success. And the that case means reaching those desired outcomes. Customer experience is about the more holistic piece of that. So I would say customer success and customer service fall under customer experience as the big picture.

Yeah, I think those three things are so closely related, but there are differences between the way that people in those functions should be operating and the types of ways they'll be interacting with your customers. We have each of those functions at New Breed and most companies do, whether they call them that or not. But yeah, those three things are always really confusing, I think, to some people about the way that they interact with each other and whether or not there is a difference. But there definitely is.

Like customer success is a piece of customer experience. Sorry. And so is customer service, but not the whole thing.

Exactly.

Customer experience is more overarching. And then each of those is a component of that.

Agreed. So any final thoughts that you wanted to share with the audience before we close out for the day?

I think the most important thing to really, if you're going to take one thing away from this, it's really understanding your desired outcome for each customer and then really understanding your brand as a whole so you can deliver that to every customer. Obviously, desired outcome varies based on the challenges. And as you say, you can't deliver the ideal customer experience unless you know your ideal customer. But there will always be some outliers. So it's best to understand desired outcome on an individual client basis. And it's best to understand customer experience from sort of the holistic approach. That's probably the takeaway for me. The last thing is, I too am super excited to start doing more work across the whole team, so thanks for having me.

Yeah, definitely. Well, this was a lot of fun. Thank you for joining today, Karen. We've got more great episodes on the way, so make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that we can. So that you can get notified when our next episode comes out. In the meantime, check out newbreedmarketing.com for other great resources. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time.

Sam.