Temkin Group research shows that good customer experience (CX) drives loyalty with business customers. These same business customers, influenced by their personal experiences as consumers, have raised their expectations in their business-‐to-‐business (B2B) relationships. While most large B2B organizations have a low level of CX maturity, our research shows that 56% of them have the goal of delivering industry-‐leading customer experience within three years. To understand how B2B organizations are improving their customer-‐centricity, we compiled case studies of five organizations that are raising the bar in CX: Ciena, Crowe Horwath, Fiserv, Genworth Financial, and Oracle. To assess your organization’s CX maturity, use Temkin Group’s Customer Experience Competency Assessment, and compare the results to data from other large B2B firms.
The State of B2B Customer Experience: A Work In Progress
Temkin Group research continues to show a tight connection between customer experience and loyalty, including a high correlation between CX and additional purchases and willingness of customers to try new offerings. This relationship holds true for both business-‐to-‐consumer (B2C) and business-‐to-‐business (B2B) relationships.1 As we look across the B2B CX landscape, we find that:
B2B companies are in the early stages of CX maturity. We examined the B2B results from 75 B2B organizations that completed Temkin Group’s CX Competency and Maturity Assessment.2 Less than one out of eight firms are in the top two (out of six) stages of CX maturity (see Figure 1). Of the four CX core competencies, B2B firms perform the poorest at Compelling Brand Values and Employee Engagement.3
Business customers have rising expectations. Companies may be the B2B customers, but it’s people who ultimately make the decisions. That’s why B2B organizations increasingly find that their customers—buyers, users, and other stakeholders—are comparing them to the experiences they have as consumers. As a result, B2B firms are being judged against Apple-‐ and Amazon-‐like experiences when it comes to ease of doing business and gaining extra value. This includes elements of the experience such as problem resolution, self-‐service, and transparency.
B2B firms aren’t fully applying lessons from B2C. While 71% of B2Bs rate the experience their customers have over the phone with an agent as good or very good, performance still lags in other channels. Only a quarter of B2Bs rate their online self-‐service experience as good or very good, trailing B2C and other companies by nine percentage-‐points (see Figure 2). B2Bs also lag in applying user-‐centered design approaches to interactions, despite outpacing B2C and other companies when it comes to executives regularly meeting with customers in target segments and employees understanding how company values apply to their role.
1 See Temkin Group Insight Report “2013 Temkin Experience Ratings of Tech Vendors” (July 2013) 2 See Temkin Group Insight Report “The State of CX Management, 2014” (April 2014) 3 See Temkin Group Insight Report “The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies” (January 2013)
Internal barriers are getting in the way. The path to delivering a differentiated customer experience is not always a clear one. The top obstacle impeding B2B CX efforts is other competing priorities. Compared to their B2C colleagues, B2B CX leaders are facing greater challenges securing funding and defining a clear CX strategy. CX vendors aren’t helping—in most situations less than one in five B2B organizations feel external assistance has helped improve their company’s CX (see Figure 3).
B2B Customer Experience Is On The Rise
Despite the lack of progress in B2B CX compared with B2C, we are seeing a strong pickup in CX activities. As they recognize the effect customer experience has on customer loyalty, more and more B2B organizations are making CX a priority. We’ve found that:
B2B firms have strong CX ambitions. While only 5% of B2B organizations feel they are the best in their industry today, 56% of them want to be industry leaders in CX over the next three years (see Figure 4).
B2B firms are organizing for CX success. While they still lag behind B2C organizations—only 48% of large B2B organizations have significant, coordinated CX efforts underway compared to 60% of B2C companies—B2B organizations are becoming more customer-‐centric. Sixty percent of B2B organizations have a senior executive in charge of customer experience across channels, and nearly a quarter of B2Bs have more than 10 full-‐time employees on their centralized customer experience teams.4
VoC programs and metrics reporting are making a strong positive impact. Two-‐thirds of B2B organizations are seeing a significant, positive impact on their customer experience efforts from their voice of the customer program, from reporting on customer experience metrics, and from their customer-‐focused process improvement efforts (see Figure 5).
Five B2B Case Studies Highlight A Variety Of CX Best Practices
To help companies understand the extent of effort that it takes for B2B firms to become more customer-‐centric, we assembled details from organizations that have successfully infused good CX practices into their B2B relationships. These five case studies highlight different approaches to customer experience transformations (see Figure 6):
Ciena: When Ciena began its customer experience journey 18 months ago, it set out to “engage, inform, and transform” the organization. It started its journey by using deep customer insights to hone in on what matters most to customers and now focuses on strengthening its culture and continuously improving.
Crowe Horwath: As a professional services firm, Crowe’s employees are its customer experience. Therefore, Crowe focuses its efforts on capturing and sharing all client feedback with its employees, and it uses a variety of tactics to involve them in shaping its CX efforts.
Fiserv: While technology underpins the customer experience tools, analyses, and reporting that drive Fiserv’s CX efforts, the company also integrates a human element into its efforts by using
4 We surveyed 75 B2B firms with revenues of $500 million or more. See Temkin Group Insight Report “The State of Customer Experience Management, 2014” (April 2014).
employee coaching, performance management, and rewards and recognition programs to engage employees in their work.
Genworth Financial: The CX team at Genworth uses a combination of approaches—from customer journey mapping to service dashboards to innovation ideation—to involve employees across the organization in its customer experience efforts.
Oracle: Oracle continues to raise customer-‐centricity across its global footprint by listening, responding, and collaborating with customers to identify and take action on customer experience improvement opportunities.
Ciena: Customer Insights Highlight What Matters Most to Customers
Ciena delivers specialized networking and communications infrastructure products and services to clients across many industries in 80 countries, including enterprises, service providers, and public institutions. Although Ciena has always focused on customers and innovation, recently its rapidly changing marketplace and the plateauing of its customer satisfaction metrics motivated the company to reexamine its approach to customer experience. We spoke with Sandra Fornasier, the Global Director of Customer Experience, to learn more about Ciena’s 18-‐month transformation to drive deeper customer engagement across the organization.
During our discussion, we uncovered three key elements of Ciena’s CX efforts:
Organizational effort started with structure and sponsorship
Revised metrics shine a light on what matters most to customers
Communication and training build collective awareness
Organizational Effort Started with Structure and Sponsorship
When Ciena was ready to combine all of its disparate efforts together and focus on creating a shared customer experience vision, it set up an internal organization to lead the efforts. This organization included:
A global team to define and lead CX strategy. To start its transformation, Ciena formed a dedicated five-‐person team in January of 2013. This team, known as the Global Customer Experience Specialists Group, defined three components of its CX strategy: Engage, Inform, Transform (see Figure 7). This team is responsible for developing and advancing Ciena’s CX strategy. Their responsibilities include overseeing Ciena’s voice of the customer (VoC) program, partnering across the business to drive CX improvement actions, and nurturing the Ciena culture through employee engagement efforts like training and hiring.
Cross-functional CX Champions to extend reach across company. A cross-‐functional team supports the work of the Global Customer Experience Specialists Group by shaping and implementing improvements. The 25 members of the team represent 20 different groups across the company, including product management, quality, IT, R&D, sales, regional customer support, legal, and deployment services. These CX Champions bring their own subject matter expertise to CX efforts and are key change agents within their respective departments. The champions take the lead on tiger teams, groups that take action on CX improvements to ensure that teams are making progress. These CX Champions are also mentioned in articles and other internal communication
messages about CX, enabling employees across the organization to see who is involved in efforts and reach out to a champion in their personal network with questions or suggestions.
Executive sponsorship to embed CX into its operating model. Ciena’s executives had long agreed that the company’s success started with its customers’ success; in-‐fact one of Ciena’s five core values is Customer First. However, the executive team was determined to push beyond conventional B2B ideas about customer experience. Once there was agreement around the right CX framework, then instituting formal CX practices became part of the strategic agenda. These approaches ranged from investing in richer VoC sources to embedding CX into three-‐year strategic plans and account-‐specific plans. The common objective was to ensure that Ciena purposefully designs its customer experience with measurable outcomes.
Revised Metrics Shine a Light on What Matters Most to Customers
In order to help the organization make better decisions across the company, Ciena revamped its VoC program to provide deeper insights and utilize more relevant measures of success. During its first year, Ciena used:
In-depth qualitative research to identify misconceptions and assumptions. Early on, Ciena sought to gain deeper customer insights to understand why its customer satisfaction scores were positive, yet had stagnated. To better understand what its customers actually wanted, the organization launched a qualitative research study that touched every customer segment, covering a variety of the stakeholder roles that interact with Ciena. The company interviewed individuals both to uncover any unwarranted business assumptions that Ciena had been making and to define a common language with customers around customer experience. The research also included identifying which metrics its customers used to measure the success of the relationship. This research yielded specific recommendations for improvements, a clearer understanding of customers’ overall expectations of Ciena as a network specialist, and directions on how to create a scorecard to compare operation CX metrics against customers’ measures of success.
A blend of quantitative and qualitative research for a more complete view. The qualitative research the company gathered also motivated Ciena to modify its existing VoC measurements and to create its own Customer Experience Index (CXi). This index measures three elements of the Ciena experience: meets needs, easy to do business with, and creates value. The index is measured through an online survey. However, Ciena has found that executives are less likely to complete these online surveys, so their responses are often supplemented with executive interviews. Transactional surveys augment the CXi by looking at very specific interactions to identify both strengths and weaknesses. Ongoing qualitative VoC feedback captured through Ciena’s technology forum and partner advisory board is also used to supplement the story drawn from its quantitative measures. During the technology forum, technical stakeholders from Ciena’s customers come to see what the company is currently working on or what it will be releasing in the next few years. During these sessions, the CX team engages the attendees in free-‐form discussions about the Ciena customer experience. The partner advisory board is made up of executives from across its partner population who talk about where they see the industry going and the implications for Ciena and their shared customers.
A scorecard for balancing internal and customer success measures. Ciena faced some challenges as it transitioned its focus from customer satisfaction to customer experience, particularly with identifying the right metrics to drive the right actions. It developed the Inside
Out/Outside In Scorecard to balance operational metrics with customer-‐defined success measures (see Figure 8). This scorecard tracks internal performance indicators, which are identified by each functional group and cover areas like sales engagement, quality, delivery, training, support, and service. Ciena uses pulse surveys to capture customer perception measures about the same set of areas measured internally, and then it displays these measures alongside the internal metrics on the scorecard. Performance of each measure is compared to a target and scored red/yellow/green to identify any gaps between internal and external perceptions. The value of the scorecard comes from the conversations it creates, so after the scorecard gets updated each month, members of the CX team review the results with their regions, starting with the company’s senior leaders. Ciena has also begun incorporating the scorecard or other VoC results into other employee communications when relevant.
Communication and Training Builds Collective Awareness
Ciena also recognized the importance of nurturing its culture throughout its transformation to ensure that its employees understood how they could contribute to delivering the company’s CX vision. Its efforts include:
A multi-channel communication plan that keeps employees in the loop. Ciena’s CX team also plays a key role in engaging employees in the company’s ongoing CX transformation. The team uses a multi-‐channel approach to capture the hearts and minds of employees across the company. Executive sponsors regularly report on progress against key initiatives through written, in-‐person, and video messages. Ciena also uses its intranet and employee social network to creating engaging, interactive campaigns to share information above and beyond company newsletters.
High-impact training that combines best practice sharing and action planning. During its first year of CX transformation, over 500 of Ciena’s employees participated in training courses targeted at customer-‐facing employees in sales, services, support, and product. During these workshops, employees learned about Ciena’s CX vision, got an update on the company’s progress on key initiatives, and heard the latest round of customer insights. To ensure that employees left training with a solid understanding of Ciena’s CX vision and the know-‐how to individually deliver on that vision, the workshop also included action planning and best practice sharing. During these sessions, employees shared the work they were currently doing that aligned with the vision, and they also committed to additional actions. Another 500 employees are on track to complete the program in 2014.
Crowe Horwath LLP, one of the largest public accounting and consulting firms in the U.S., delivers audit, tax, risk, performance, and advisory services from 28 offices across the county. Crowe’s client experience journey began more than five years ago. The firm’s client experience strategy is dedicated to uncovering better ways to deliver an experience that both aligns with clients’ needs and expectations and that continuously improves on that experience over time. We spoke with Ann Lathrop, the Chief Marketing Officer, and Michelle Morris, the Associate Director of Client Experience, who shared how Crowe’s strategy directs the way employees think about and engage with clients on a daily basis.
During our discussion, we learned that Crowe’s CX efforts include:
To unite all employees working across the firm’s five business units, Crowe built its CX efforts on centrally developed objectives and guidance with input from senior leadership. The practices we found include:
A shared goal and primary CX metric create a common focus. Crowe’s goal to be an industry leader in client experience is one of five components of the firm’s strategic plan. The firm measures this goal using its primary CX metric, the client engagement index, based on four questions designed to understand clients’ perceptions about their relationship with and loyalty to Crowe. The client engagement index is reported alongside other financial and operational metrics on both firm-‐wide and business unit scorecards, which influence annual team and individual performance goal-‐setting.
Efforts built around client-defined engagement drivers. Through its voice of the customer (VoC) program, Crowe identified specific engagement drivers that have the strongest correlation to client loyalty. Further analysis of these drivers revealed four that play the biggest role in moving clients up to the “fully engaged” level. These drivers have been translated into a checklist of actions that guide Crowe employees’ day-‐to-‐day interactions. Crowe measures the engagement drivers on an ongoing basis through its engagement survey process.
Top-down executive commitment leads the way. The CEO, business unit managing partners, and a cross-‐functional steering committee, which is made up of partners and senior leaders from client-‐facing and internal departments, all play a role in communicating the CX strategy, modeling desired behaviors, and engaging employees in changing mindsets and behaviors to support the firm’s goals. The steering committee has been in place for three years, and it works with a centralized client experience team on VoC efforts and action planning. The committee meets six times a year to share their progress and challenges with each other, and members serve as conduits of information between the group and their respective business units.
VoC Program Delivers Insights for Account-‐Level and Firm-‐Wide Actions
Crowe’s customer insights program doesn’t emphasize a CX score. Instead, it focuses on the actions needed to improve the client experience, from individual account up to the business unit level. The company uses insights for:
Providing systematic account level feedback. Crowe’s engagement survey process places the power of triggering feedback requests and reviewing results in the hands of the client service team. Upon completion of an engagement, one or more client representative will receive an email invitation to complete a survey. When a client completes the survey, the partner managing the engagement receives an email highlighting the feedback and suggesting next steps. These emails are also used to share results with the rest of the client service team and are referenced during subsequent planning sessions for future work with the client. Every partner also has access to a personalized dashboard where they can review individual client responses and see how their clients’ performance compares to business unit and firm-‐wide averages.
Regularly reporting results across the organization. In addition to delivering individual survey results directly to client partners via a portal, the client experience team also prepares aggregate reporting of firm-‐wide and unit-‐specific results. The client experience team delivers these reports to the CEO, business unit and industry vertical managing partners, and the client experience steering committee. Crowe’s CEO incorporates these results into his regular email and video messages to the firm. Managing partners continue this top-‐down communication within their specific units, focusing in particular on what the results mean in terms of employees’ day-‐to-‐day actions. The client experience team also occasionally prepares reports on an ad hoc basis to meet the needs of other internal group meetings or employee learning activities.
Creating workshops that engage employees in action planning. As Crowe’s VoC efforts matured, the client experience team introduced client feedback learning workshops in order to answer the question posed by many business units: “Now that you’ve told me the numbers, what do we need to do differently?” The learning workshops last from one to four hours and may be held in-‐person or virtually using videoconferencing. They bring together employees from the same business unit from across the firm’s offices to review client feedback and define action plans. During the workshop, survey results are shared and discussed collectively before participants break up for small group work. Along with overall results, the small groups review a sampling of individual surveys, dissect them to understand underlying issues, and then bring recommendations for next actions back to the larger workshop group. The objective of the workshop is to encourage employees to focus on how they can add value to the client experience in a way that is naturally part of their daily role and not additive to their work. These workshops have shifted the overall mindset within the firm. Employees no longer think that client experience is simply about “doing the survey to get a score;” instead, they now realize that it’s about meeting each client’s unique needs and expectations by personally doing something different or better to improve the client experience.
Journey mapping of the client experience. Crowe has recently begun to use customer journey mapping to identify its clients’ needs and expectations, moments of truth, areas where the firm is strong, and critical action items to strengthen the client experience. Journey maps are mostly created in facilitated sessions that bring together many different internal audiences, including partners and employees involved in the targeted journey, marketing, and other firm-‐wide functions. The company also interviews current and former clients as part of the learning and validation process. By mapping both internal and client perspectives about which moments of truth are the most important and how well Crowe delivers them, the team is able to see any disconnects between these two viewpoints and then communicate these disconnects to the wider employee audience. Based on findings from the map, the client experience team works with the business unit to identify critical action items and uses Six Sigma concepts—like the A3 problem solving process—to determine root causes and potential solutions.
Multi-‐faceted Engagement Approach Connects Employees to CX
From communication tactics to recognition programs, Crowe’s CX team has worked closely with their colleagues in People Services to proactively engage employees in delivering on the firm’s CX strategy. Engagement efforts are built around:
Communication plans that integrate CX into every day work. To reinforce the client experience strategy, Crowe created an ongoing communication plan to share reminders and
updates about the firm’s values, engagement drivers, goals, and progress. The communication plan uses engaging graphics and structure to convey Crowe’s client experience strategy through firm-‐wide newsletters, CEO video messages, business unit articles, leadership messages, and intranet content. The communication plan also incorporates client experience content into key learning activities for employees, like into the new hire orientation and the promotion academy for newly promoted employees.
Ambassadors who drive sharing and development. Crowe has a group of over 75 Ambassadors who play an important role in spreading CX across the firm. Crowe chooses Ambassadors from the senior staff level up to the senior manager level who have been recognized for client experience excellence by the firm leaders or clients (see Figure 9). Ambassadors support the company’s CX strategy in ways that appropriately align with their individual goals and interests. Crowe Ambassadors can help develop CX initiatives, write articles or participate in communication videos, or evangelize CX through storytelling and delivering local “lunch and learn” sessions to their peers. Ambassadors are also used to pilot new programs before Crowe rolls them out to the rest of the firm.
Playbooks used to tailoring employee actions. Crowe designed playbooks to operationalize its client experience and help employees match their actions to the unique needs of individual engagements. Created by employee workgroups and customized for each business unit, playbooks play a central role in aligning the engagement team’s commitments with the client’s expectations. The playbook provides specific examples of how employees at every level can demonstrate Crowe’s engagement drivers. Employees use playbooks during the planning of each client engagement to identify specific actions that they can perform throughout the course of the work. Team members self-‐report and monitor each other to ensure they meet all of their client commitments.
Client and peer recognition programs to reinforce the importance of every role. Crowe’s engagement survey gives clients the opportunity to recognize—by name—any employee who went above and beyond during the course of their work together. Annually, 64% of clients who return surveys recognize employees for everything from consistency in doing the little things right to super-‐hero actions that saved the day. These Recognize Alerts are used to individually recognize and reward employees for their efforts, as well as to identify potential Ambassadors. Crowe’s system allows any person recognized through the survey to send the client’s response to others and include his or her comments and recognition of other employees whose behind-‐the-‐scenes efforts contributed to the positive experience the client had.
Fiserv: High Tech and High Touch Improves Customer and Associate Experiences
Founded in 1984, Fiserv’s financial and ecommerce technologies operate behind the scenes at banks, credit unions, credit card issuers, billers, brokers, and investment firms worldwide. Its 14,500 customers deploy Fiserv’s offerings to meet business needs that range from attracting customers and growing deposits to fulfilling regulatory requirements and managing risk and fraud. Kevin Zyskowski, Fiserv’s Director of Customer Experience and Customer Solutions, spoke with us about the organization’s two and a half year customer experience journey, which has focused on developing a roadmap outlining improvements to customer experience and associate engagement for Fiserv’s multiple customer solutions contact centers.
During our discussion, we learned that Fiserv’s key CX efforts include:
Employee coaching and involvement are key engagement levers
Analytics and interaction reviews elevate customer connectedness
CX Vision Creates Sense of Purpose and Pride
Clarity was very important to Fiserv when it rolled out its CX vision and mission to all employees, and ensuring that employees understand how they fit into the strategy continues to be a priority today. To drive the changes it wanted to achieve, the company relied on:
A vision translated into individual behaviors. In the fall of 2011, Fiserv embarked on its customer experience transformation journey, and the CX organization began by defining a vision and mission to give direction to its efforts and to reinforce the purpose of the work that all associates do. It settled on a vision, “To delight our customers with every interaction,” which linked to a mission recognizing the importance of making the right environment, education, and tools available to associates. Fiserv translated the vision into interaction target guides for associates, which defined specific behaviors that reflect the vision along with Fiserv’s values and excellence principles (see Figure 10). Fiserv works to keep this clarity of purpose strong by employing “elevator speeches” that connect Fiserv’s vision and goals to what individuals specifically do on the job and how their work ties to strategic outcomes for the organization. Fiserv also embeds these values into new hire onboarding processes, associate training, and performance management systems.
Transparent communications. Fiserv’s vision, values, and excellence principles are part of a tiered, role-‐based communication plan. This plan works to bring transparency to the organization’s goals and results (see Figure 11). In addition to messages flowing throughout the organization, visible reminders are also present at Fiserv’s different sites. Sites post the vision and core values in public areas and have a commitment wall where associates and leaders write statements personalizing their role in delighting customers with every interaction. At every location, Fiserv posts an A3 Board (borrowed from Lean process improvement methodology) that displays monthly updates on the company’s financial and operational performance—results that were previously only shared with Directors and VPs.
Multi-year roadmap and CX building blocks. To guide its ongoing work, Fiserv’s internal CX team defined a multi-‐year roadmap aimed at aligning leadership and operational functions. The multi-‐year roadmap progresses through five phases: Basic alignment, Discover current experience delivery, Define and design CX expectations, Operationalize redefined experiences, and Continuous improvement (see Figure 12). To enable the delivery of end-‐to-‐end customer experiences, the CX team organizes its work around a set of CX building blocks that shape its on-‐going efforts and governance model. The four building blocks are employee engagement, analysis and insights, operation design and execution, and customer-centric culture.
Employee Coaching and Involvement Are Key Engagement Levers
Fiserv understands that CX success hinges upon employee success, which requires the organization to create the right environment, education, tools, and motivation. Therefore, its efforts include:
Knowledge sharing and innovation fueled by associates’ contributions. Associates’ expertise is a key asset for Fiserv. The company has integrated its knowledge-‐sharing community into its contact centers’ systems to help employees easily contribute. Fiserv encourages individuals to “Find it! Fix it! Flag it! Add it!” following the standards defined for associates, leaders, and subject matter experts. Fiserv’s i-Innovate program uses an internal social networking platform to capture new ideas and insights from associates to improve the customer experience, associate experience, and operations. Since its launch, over 1,400 ideas have been submitted, and community members can use the program to share feedback through both the comments and by voting ideas up or down. Ideas are then reviewed and prioritized based on a defined framework that incorporates associate and management feedback. To date, 70 ideas have been implemented or are under development.
Individual performance dashboards to keep the right behaviors front and center. Every Monday, Fiserv associates receive personalized performance updates through myPerformance, the company’s online performance management tool. The tool reports on a balanced set of metrics that cover both customer experience (including satisfaction with associate, customer effort, and first-‐call resolution) and customer effectiveness (including quality, efficiency, and availability). Most contact center associates receive 80 to 100 VoC touchpoints per year, and those results are captured and shared on their individual myPerformance scorecards. The myPerformance dashboard provides performance details and historical trends and also enables associates to proactively ask coaches for help in problem areas. Each quarter, Top Performers—the top 10%—and Key Contributors—next 30%—are recognized with special pins and compensation bonuses. Fiserv encourages employees to wear their pins to give leaders a visible means to identify and personally congratulate each one on their accomplishment.
Incentives extended through team and peer-to-peer recognition programs. To reinforce the importance of consistent high-‐level service, Fiserv uses team and peer-‐to-‐peer recognition programs in addition to the rewards of the myPerformance system. The Honors Quarterly Team Performance Tournament pits supervisor teams against associate teams in a selection of performance metrics. The tournament is designed to award teams with the most positive improvement during that quarter. Wildcard slots keep even those in the middle and lower performance bands striving throughout semi-‐final and final rounds for a chance to be crowned the winner. The Living Proof recognition program is an online peer-‐to-‐peer initiative that allows associates to publicly thank their coworkers for daily actions that demonstrate Fiserv’s values and positively impact customers or the business.
A structured coaching process to propel associate development. Coaching plays a central role in Fiserv’s associate engagement efforts. Through a combination of scheduled and ad-‐hoc sessions, coaches work with associates to drive performance, manage on-‐the-‐job situations, and research and understand development opportunities at the local level. To prioritize the coaches’ activities, Fiserv determines the type of coaching and minimum number of coaching interactions that each associate needs based on recent performance. Coaches become certified by completing coursework and by being observed by both their direct and indirect leadership. All coaches are certified within six months of taking on the role, and they can go on to earn senior and master certification levels by demonstrating a mastery of both performance and behavior coaching.
Analytics and Interaction Reviews Elevate Customer Connectedness
Over the past two years, Fiserv has expanded its VoC program to make its analyses and insights more readily available to employees to help them proactively avoid and resolve customer issues. The firm’s work in this area includes:
Client calibration sessions to keep expectations aligned. Fiserv provides “private-‐labeled” contact center support to the end customers of the banks that use its system. To stay on top of any potentially changing customer expectations for this service offering, Fiserv regularly holds client calibration sessions. In these sessions, Fiserv’s CX team and operational leaders join the bank’s key stakeholders to review a selection of contact center call recordings of its customers. After the participants listen to the recording, the bank’s team offers Fiserv their observations, and then Fiserv provides them with its own critique of how the call went, which includes explanations of how the Fiserv team judges the call and what coaching Fiserv would have provided for the associate. Not only do these sessions ensure that the bank and Fiserv are in alignment, but they also effectively demonstrate Fiserv’s approach to coaching the behavior of contact center associates. These calls have proven to be especially valuable to banks and Fiserv during the onboarding period as both sides are getting used to working with each other.
A Customer-Centric Score to counteract company-centric perspectives. To elevate employees’ awareness of the customer’s point of view, Fiserv leaders go through a qualitative exercise with managers and supervisors to calibrate the company’s internal measurements with VoC surveys. The Customer-Centric Score is part of a manager’s or supervisor’s quality reviews; he or she answers the same questions that customers are asked through the VoC process in the areas of satisfaction, effort, and issue resolution. This approach forces managers and supervisors to set aside their knowledge of Fiserv’s processes and procedures and think about the interaction from the customer’s standpoint. The customer-‐centric score is reported on the contact center’s scorecard alongside customer and operational efficiency metrics.
Speech analytics for critical insights to fuel CX improvements. Fiserv records 100% of the voice interactions between customers and its contact center. It analyzes these recordings to pick out escalations and then identifies the phrases and other elements that either intensify or effectively resolve the situation. Fiserv shares these findings with the training department to develop best practices and with contact center supervisors, who use them in team huddles and coaching sessions on how to de-‐escalate interactions. One of Fiserv’s more innovative analyses identified mutual silence as an opportunity to improve customer experience and efficiency. Following this analysis, the company identified the root causes of mutual silence and defined a pilot strategy to address the two procedures mainly driving the silence. This resulted in specific interaction guidelines and teaching moments for associates to fill mutual silence with customer-‐centric information. Supervisors have been trained to query any calls with high mutual silence and on how to identify coachable behaviors to drive continued improvement in this area.
Genworth Financial: CX Efforts Touch All Parts of the Organization
Genworth Financial’s U.S. Mortgage Insurance (MI) division supports homeownership by offering mortgage insurance to lenders. Lender loan officers and other mortgage professionals use Genworth MI products and support services such as underwriting, industry training, and value-‐added resources that help Realtors and homebuyers in the mortgage process. Genworth formalized its customer experience program in late 2010 with the goal to “differentiate with service.” We spoke with Geriel Thornburg May,
Director of Customer Experience, and she described how the organization renewed efforts to swing its focus back to customers following the sweeping market changes the mortgage meltdown had on the industry.
During our discussion, we learned that Genworth’s CX efforts make an impact because:
CX team reaches across the organization
Employees contribute to understanding and improving experiences
Sales and CX work together to reach customers
CX Team Reaches Across the Organization
Genworth’s CX team works directly with employees and groups, as well as through teams of senior sponsors and cross-‐functional CX leads, to direct the efforts of the organization towards its CX objectives. The company’s CX organization is based on:
A cross-functional structure that supports a centralized CX team. When Genworth initially created its CX team and the Director of CX role, it acknowledged the importance of refocusing on its customers in a significant way. Although it’s housed in the Commercial organization, the team leads operational execution to improve customer experience wherever it is most needed. To accomplish this, the CX team works with a senior sponsor team, which includes the CEO, CIO, CCO, and COO along with other senior leaders representing Risk, Compliance, Sales, and Operations departments. Genworth identified a group of CX team leads from across many internal departments—such as Marketing, Communications, Underwriting, IT, Lender Servicing, etc.—who are responsible for spreading the reach of internal communications and execution across the organization. On specific projects, the company taps employees from every functional area of the business to participate on the project teams.
A CX program agenda and review cycle to govern individual projects. To guide its efforts, the CX team laid out a CX program agenda, which focuses on three key areas: Know Our Customers, Build Customer Experience Capability, and Improve Customer Touchpoints. Genworth’s CX team puts its efforts into customer research and measurement, project management and execution, and customer and employee communication. Every CX project has a senior sponsor who selects a team lead, helps write the charter, and mentors the team lead throughout project execution. During the course of the year, the CX team holds program reviews with the senior sponsor team to learn about updates on their projects, and collectively they also discuss their progress towards top-‐line strategies such as “ease of doing business.” The CX team regularly updates senior sponsors on the company’s Net Promoter Score® and other research studies it’s conducted, and then they work together to identify actionable insights, prioritize which ones to act upon, and obtain the resources and funding to support those plans.
Shared VoC results that drive action. Genworth employs a variety of research methodologies to gather customer insights, including interviews and surveys that measure Net Promoter Score®. In addition to reporting them regularly to senior sponsors and CX project team leads, Genworth distributes and discusses customer insights gleaned from its research across the firm in a variety of ways. For example, research road shows are held during all-‐hands meetings with individual groups. During these sessions, a member of the CX team will share the results of their VoC efforts and ensure that the audience understands the customer feedback. Within smaller leadership
teams, the CX team member instead takes on an advisory role and works with leaders to help them decide together which of the VoC findings are actionable, which are priorities, and what the best course of action would be. In addition to these meetings, survey results and direct customer quotations from VoC programs are included in CX project charters, program reviews, and regular internal communications.
Employees Contribute to Understanding and Improving Experiences
Through its employee engagement efforts, Genworth’s CX team gets employees actively involved in understanding customer feedback and solving customer issues. To engage employees, the firm taps into:
Journey maps to improve employees’ understanding of customers. While good process maps already existed across the organization early on in Genworth’s CX journey, they represented very little of the customer’s point of view. So the CX team conducted over fifty internal interviews with employees from across the organization to develop journey maps, which were then validated through another 40-‐plus leadership reviews. The internal interviews captured insights into key customer roles, which touch points aligned with which processes, and employees’ perspectives on how well Genworth performed against customers’ expectations (see Figure 13). The maps help keep the customer at the center of Genworth’s internal conversations, which ensures that all improvements are designed with the customer in mind. The company also uses the completed maps to guide the ongoing measurements of each priority touch point as well as to help new employees gain a better understanding of the customers Genworth serves during the onboarding process.
Service level agreements to evaluate Genworth’s CX performance. To address the questions raised by senior leadership about the role that service plays in Genworth’s value to customers, the CX team introduced its Service Level Assessment (SLA) tool. The tool provides a quarterly point-‐in-‐time, high-‐level snapshot that compares Genworth’s service performance to both customer expectations and to competitors’ performances (see Figure 14). Across the company, a core set of employees use the SLA to assess the performance of their specific areas using Genworth’s VoC and operational measures. They combine this analysis with research and trending on competitors’ service levels—ranging from external customer service rankings to the presence of certain offerings (e.g., mobile application). The SLA helps Genworth identify threshold elements vs. differentiators, pinpoint areas to measure further, inform project prioritization, and identify awareness gaps to be addressed by marketing, communications, and PR teams.
Employee-submitted ideas to spark innovation. Genworth’s Ideation process has been an important tool because it helps every employee become a customer advocate by enabling them to submit issues or ideas that are then translated into actions that better serve the customers’ needs. Cross-‐functional business leaders meet to review new ideas and advance any high-‐potential concepts through the four stages of the company’s New Product Innovation process: concept, business case, advance to launch, and post-‐launch. Customer insights are integrated throughout this process to provide validation and enhance the ideas being pursued. To capture customer input during its innovation design process, Genworth sometimes uses the final few minutes of customer training webinars to share a “sneak peek” of an online offering currently under development. During these quick co-‐design sessions, customers provide input on design decisions such as field and button labels and screen layout and navigation.
Genworth’s CX team recognizes the power of working with its sales team both to capture customer insights and to deliver messages that resonate with prospective and current customers. Here are the mechanisms that the company uses to deliver the CX message to customers:
Joint sales-CX customer visits. A core element of the CX Team’s efforts is building connections with the sales team to ensure that they can view customer feedback and understand CX strategies, which helps them effectively respond to opportunities and concerns. In addition to regularly reporting customer feedback and participating at regional sales meetings, everyone on the CX team is aligned with a sales person as part of the sales buddy program. On a quarterly basis, the CX team member joins their sales person on customer visits. Jointly, they create a visit agenda and identify objectives for what they would like to learn, which are then customized according to the customer and what would be most valuable to him or her. Following these rounds of visits, the CX team and sales force get together to share observations and insights on anything that offers clues into what the client expects from its customer experience, like lessons learned from customers or environmental observations (like office décor). To ensure that the lessons they learned don’t stop there, Genworth then brings the entire commercial organization together for a meeting to expose employees to key findings from these visits, bringing the customer alive for individuals who have less direct customer contact.
Customer communications that include experience differentiators. Genworth made a concerted effort to quantify the attributes that differentiate its customer experience from the competition and then communicate these attributes internally and externally in its Proof in the Numbers campaign. The company started the campaign by simply asking departments for any measures or metrics demonstrating that the company serves its customers better than the industry as a whole. For example, the industry overall values tenure and knowledge as two of the important company attributes, so the campaign touted the fact that Genworth has the most senior sales force in the market and that its underwriters’ average 16 years of experience in their roles. In its latest campaign, Simplify, Genworth shares with customers how it has simplified its guidelines, processes, and technology to make it easier for customers to do business with it.
Oracle: Listening, Responding, and Collaborating to Drive Customer-‐Centricity
Oracle has more than 400,000 customers in 145 countries around the world who use its hardware, software, and cloud solutions. The breadth of its offerings meet a variety of customer needs, including supply chain management, business analytics, risk compliance, and customer relationship management. We spoke with Jeb Dasteel, SVP and Chief Customer Officer, and his team to learn more about the company’s approach to listening, responding, and collaborating in order to drive customer-‐centricity and continuous improvements across the organization.
During our discussion, we learned that Oracle’s CX efforts are fueled by:
Oracle captures a holistic view of its customer experience through a combination of data sources, but with a growing emphasis on approaches that enable on-‐going engagement with customers. Beyond typical survey mechanisms, Oracle relies on:
• Executive-to-executive communications. In addition to the more typical listening efforts, like relationship surveys, transactional surveys, and social media monitoring, Oracle also uses a number of unique, interactive listening posts to reach its customers. One of these programs is the Executive Sponsorship Program, which connects senior Oracle executives with customers in its key account segment to provide continuity and higher-‐level engagement. In this program, Oracle executives maintain a regular dialogue with the customers in order to gain a holistic perspective on the customer relationship. These executive sponsors also work with assigned account teams, exchanging knowledge and advice with them to adjust the customer’s three-‐year account plan to keep it aligned with the customer’s objectives and expectations (see Figure 15). Oracle includes all key accounts in its Account Strategy Planning process, which is built around a three-‐year account plan that is jointly created with the customer and is measured by customer measures of success, mutual financial measures, and satisfaction-‐related targets from Oracle’s global relationship and special key accounts surveys. The key accounts surveys reach hundreds of individual contacts within the customer organization, ranging from decision makers, key influencers, technologists, and business process owners.
• Customer advisory panels. Oracle uses a combination of customer advisory boards, customer councils, and customer advisory panels to gather deeper feedback than other listening posts provide. Through its Customer Advisory Panels, Oracle quickly receives direct feedback from targeted contacts within the relevant customer segments. Oracle recruits panel members from a variety of channels, including independent user groups, oracle.com, surveys, and company events. Panelists opt-‐in and the company uses their demographic criteria—along with their interests and engagement levels with Oracle—to decide which members to invite to participate in surveys. These surveys match panelists with their preferred topics, which can range from products and services to relationship and business practices (see Figure 16). The line of business sponsor for each panel reports back to the panel members with both a summary of results and an explanation of how the panel’s input has shaped product direction, future strategy, or other aspects of the product lifecycle. Members can also connect with fellow panelists and access an online library of panel results.
• Independent user groups. Oracle doesn’t just leverages its own structured VoC channels to gain insights, it also uses a network of over 900 independent user groups made up of 550,000 members, which are convened around products, industries, and countries/regions. User groups allow members to network and share best practices with other Oracle customers who are focused on the same subject matter area, who are on the same level, and who share common business challenges. A team of dedicated user group relationship managers from around the world works with the leaders of these independent groups to bridge the gap and make connections between the user groups and Oracle. It integrates user group key themes and insights alongside feedback from Oracle’s company-‐driven listening posts within existing feedback reporting. The company has also worked on joint research projects with user groups, collecting targeted feedback from members and sharing results with user group leaders. These same leaders then provide input back to Oracle on the action plans and strategies resulting from the joint projects.
Tiered Approach Drives Action on Customer and Company Issues
Oracle makes it a priority to use customer feedback to consistently identify and address individual customer issues or systemic problems that impact the customer experience across the organization. To help drive action, the company uses:
• A Top Ten program to focus on the most impactful opportunities. Oracle uses both quantitative and qualitative listening posts to derive a list of the Top Ten company-‐wide issues that have the largest impact on its customers and its business. Oracle adopted this Top Ten program in order to reduce the extensive feedback it receives into key themes for the organization to understand and focus on, and the program places particular emphasis on root cause analysis and action planning. For each of the Top Ten themes, the company assesses its root causes and business impacts, identifies improvement actions, and assigns ownership. Oracle identifies measures to monitor any improvement actions taken and to guide refinements, and it communicates progress updates both internally and externally. Regional members of the Customer Program Management team also use the Top Ten themes to drive discussions around how these themes relate to each specific part of the business and what leading indicators can be monitored to spot potential issues early, especially in key accounts.
• Customer Program Managers to increase consistency. To extend the reach of Oracle’s centralized customer experience team, the company established Customer Program Managers (CPMs) in each of the major global regions/business units. Each core team reports to their respective region and is made up of a regional leader and four to seven CPMs who execute the corporate strategy using a common set of processes, tools, guidance, and training tactics provided by Oracle’s central CX team. CPMs spend about 70% of their time on executing actions driven by the Top Ten themes and customer feedback results. They spend the remaining 30% of their time either actively engaged with customers on feedback programs, working to understand needs and expectations, or assisting in issue resolution. CPMs use Oracle’s internal social network and monthly CPM team calls to get updates, discuss progress, and share challenges and lessons learned across regions. Regional leaders meet on a quarterly basis with the centralized CX team, and all CPMs participate in quarterly global customer program calls led by Oracle’s Chief Customer Officer.
• Alerts and integrated reporting to enable proactive follow-up. Oracle strives for absolute consistency in the processes, tools, and timing that employees from across the organization use to address customer-‐reported issues. Any customer problem identified through surveys, service and support escalations, or customer visits triggers an automatic alert to assigned employees, who then follow-‐up to resolve the issue. Automated workflow prompts assigned employees to follow-‐up on surveys and document root causes and corrective actions taken. In addition to the alerts, in their CRM system, Oracle account managers have a complete view of the customer feedback gathered from traditional relationship surveys, product panels, and transactional and other targeted surveys. They can also see account issues that have been previously identified, root causes and corrective actions, and what exactly specific customer contacts are saying anecdotally in the executive boards and councils that the customer participates in. Such visibility encourages proactive follow-‐ups and ensures that account teams incorporate feedback into strategic account planning.
Connecting Employees to Customer Feedback Builds Commitment
Oracle recognizes the importance of aligning employees with its CX goals. As it builds company-‐wide commitment, the company has found that:
• Distributed customer insights raise organizational CX awareness. Oracle uses a combination of top-‐down and bottom-‐up approaches to share customer insights across the organization. The semi-‐annual Customer Feedback and Response Bulletin is a key top-‐down component. It shows what customers are saying in quantitative surveys and supplements this feedback with anecdotal insights drawn from advisory boards, user groups, executive councils, and issue escalations. The bulletin also provides updates on Oracle’s the top ten customer experience themes, quantifies the impact of improvement initiatives, and includes the ability for business units to drill down into their specific areas of responsibility. Oracle additionally conducts a series of integrated readouts with over 100 executives and teams across the business to supplement the information found in the bulletin. These readouts review the feedback trends uncovered in through surveys, text analysis, and input from customer councils and other VoC channels. Readouts ultimately help executives establish goals and success metrics to ensure that feedback mechanisms stay aligned with organizational objectives.
• Customer and employee scorecards support quality service delivery. Oracle created performance scorecards that evaluate customer feedback about the company’s product quality, account management and support satisfaction, and employee feedback about internal processes, performance, workload, etc. Oracle uses these as a foundation for discussions with its customers – through channels like the customer advisory panels – about how to best deliver on customer expectations. For example, working with the scorecards side-‐by-‐side revealed a connection between feedback from account managers and areas that directly impact customer satisfaction, including coordination across lines of business and tools to enable account managers to engage in strategic planning with customers. The resulting improvements in customer satisfaction levels have led to the expansion of Oracle’s key accounts program, spreading best practices to the next tier of customers. The scorecards also uncovered linkages between sales team feedback and customer feedback about the contracting process. Because of these revelations, Oracle implemented several changes, such as the standardization and simplification of the contracting and negotiation processes, which ultimately led to consistent increases in customer satisfaction in this area
• Rewards and recognition programs reinforce target performance. Oracle uses variety of incentive programs to ensure that employees stay aligned with company objectives and focused on overall customer success. For example, the Presidents Cup Awards acknowledges the contributions of both account teams and individuals to improving customer satisfaction across the entire account relationship. Oracle’s Service Excellence Awards allows customers to nominate support and engineering teams for going “above and beyond,” while transactional surveys provide customers with the opportunity to nominate analysts and project managers for exceptional service delivery. Incentive programs are also in place to encourage key account directors to meet their three-‐year customer satisfaction targets and for support analysts and managers to maintain timely and accurate issue resolution.
Customer journey mapping increases visibility to customer’s experience. To shift employees’ perspectives, Oracle uses customer journey maps with sales teams and other employee groups to help them better understand interactions from the customers’ point of
view and to highlight the critical moments when Oracle teams engage with customers. Oracle also delivers journey mapping workshops and trainings free of charge to customers to help them better understand their customers’ experiences. Internally, Oracle teams use journey maps to examine interactions and processes identified in customer feedback to find areas with opportunities for innovation. A cross-‐functional team, for example, uses journey mapping to focus on high-‐impact journeys such as those of acquired customers. This team is made up of subject matter experts from the CPM community, account managers, and presales, sales and support teams. They examine the journey from the viewpoint of the many different roles inside a customer—from senior executive to a functional product user—and actually speak with customers to gather input into the mapping process.
CX Maturity Requires Mastering the Four CX Core Competencies
While any organization can improve parts of its operations, customer experience differentiation requires more than a veneer. For long-‐term success, B2B organizations, like those featured in this report, must master all four CX core competencies (see Figures 17, 18):5
Purposeful leadership. It is a company’s most senior leaders who must demonstrate—through words and actions—the importance of being customer-‐centric. Fiserv’s tiered communication plan, with a role for everyone from top executives to frontline supervisors, ensures that all of them take part in reinforcing the company’s commitment and help employees connect to the CX vision. Oracle’s executive sponsor program matches its senior executives with leaders on key accounts to create peer-‐to-‐peer sharing of information and feedback, which strengthens the relationship and demonstrates Oracle’s focus on the customer.
Compelling brand values. An organization successfully delivers on its brand promises only when the promises are meaningful to customers and embraced by all employees. Ciena used qualitative research to identify what matters most to customers and then made those insights the foundation of its CX improvement efforts. Genworth used customer and employee input to identify its experience differentiators and incorporated them into communications with customers and prospects.
Employee engagement. Engaged employees are valuable assets who try harder at work and are more committed to helping the company succeed. Crowe Horwath uses a group of CX Ambassadors made up of employees from across the firm to give input into CX initiatives, participate in communication efforts, and evangelize customer experience with their peers. Fiserv’s individual performance dashboards and structured approach to associate coaching enables employees to understand their strengths and proactively take action on their improvement areas.
Customer connectedness. To help employees understand and navigate the dynamic and complex environments of their customers, B2B organizations must infuse customer insights across the organization. Oracle uses customer advisory panels and independent user groups to bring in targeted insights that supplement feedback captured in traditional surveys and other listening posts. Ciena uses a company-‐wide scorecard that combines internal operational metrics with customer-‐defined performance metrics to identify experience gaps that need to be fixed.
5 See Temkin Group Insight Report “The Four Customer Experience Core Competencies” (January 2013)
To help your organization master the four core competencies, Temkin Group created an assessment (see Figure 19). You can use this tool in a number of ways:
Self-assessment. Complete the assessment yourself and identify the strengths and weaknesses of your organization’s approach to CX.
Group discussions. Have senior leaders or other key stakeholders complete the assessment and convene to discuss the results. Review the strengths and weaknesses identified as well as areas of agreement and disagreement in the results.
Benchmarking. Compare your CX maturity levels with large B2B organizations that have completed our assessment (see Figure 20).
Action planning. When creating or refreshing CX plans, use this assessment to identify specific actions to take at the corporate level or within specific business units.
Progress tracking. Gauge your organization’s CX maturity over time by completing the assessment on an annual basis.
Bring strong industry expertise to key accounts and facilitate cross-line of business collaboration
Working with clients, executive sponsors and Oracle client advisors, take the lead on writing and managing three-year account strategy plans
Executive Sponsors
Provide senior executive level engagement and continuity with clients in key account segment
Maintain regular dialogue with clients to gain a holistic understanding of the business and individual client’s needs
Share client findings and offer advice to key account directors to adjust account strategy plans
Oracle Client Advisors
Assist customers with strategic IT planning, industry and solution guidance, and roadmap planning
Support Account Managers
Provide guidance in operating, upgrading, and maintaining Oracle products and solutions
Customer Program
Managers
Work within each region to support local CX efforts with tools, processes, and training provided by centralized CX team (70% of time)
Actively engage with regional key accounts and other clients on feedback programs, issue resolution, and understanding needs and expectations to inform on-going CX efforts (30% of time)
Panel members opt-in and based on their demographic information, engagement, and interests, they are matched to
different feedback opportunities to choose from.
Once the panel has closed and the results analyzed and
presented internally, panel members receive a summary of the results and an explanation of how their input influenced decisions regarding product direction or future strategy.
Panel results are also available for all participants—including
Aimee is a Customer Experience Transformist & Vice President at Temkin Group. She has over 16 years of experience improving service delivery and transforming the customer experience through people development and process improvement initiatives. Her areas of expertise include market research, program management, marketing, instructional design, and training.
Prior to joining Temkin Group, Aimee implemented the client experience strategy and managed the voice of the customer (VoC) program at one of the top ten public accounting and consulting firms in the U.S. Her work included planning and managing strategic initiatives and collaborating with cross-‐functional teams to introduce “new-‐to-‐company” functions and improvements. Aimee also started the firm’s internal market research function, managed the design and implementation of its sales and relationship management process, and delivered instructional design and training services across the organization.
Aimee is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in marketing management. In her free time, she volunteers as a marathon coach for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program.
About Bruce Temkin
Bruce Temkin is a Customer Experience Transformist & Managing Partner of Temkin Group. He is also the co-‐founder and Chair of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (cxpa.org).
Bruce is widely viewed as a leading expert in how organizations build differentiation with customer experience. He has worked with hundreds of large organizations on the strategies, operational processes, organizational structures, leadership, and culture required to sustain superior customer relationships.
Bruce is the author of the popular blog Customer Experience Matters®, where he regularly posts insights on topics such as customer experience, branding, leadership, and employee engagement.
Prior to forming Temkin Group, Bruce served as Vice President & Principal Analyst with Forrester Research. During his 12 years with Forrester, he led the company's business-‐to-‐business, financial services, e-‐business, and customer experience practices. Bruce was Forrester’s most-‐read analyst for 13 consecutive quarters and remains one of the most respected analysts in the industry.
Prior to Forrester, Bruce co-‐founded and ran a couple of Internet start-‐ups. He also held management positions with GE, Stratus Computers, and Fidelity Investments.
Bruce has been widely quoted in the press, including media outlets such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Business Week. Bruce is a highly demanded public speaker who combines deep expertise with an engaging, entertaining style.
Bruce holds a master’s degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he concentrated in business strategy and operations. He also holds an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Union College.
CX drives loyalty. Our research and work with clients demonstrates that interactions with customers influence both how much business they’ll do with you in the future and how often they recommend you to others.
CX is a journey, not a project. Building the capabilities to consistently delight customersdoesn’t happen overnight. Companies need to plan for a multi-year change program.
Improvement requires systemic change. Companies can improve isolated customer interactions, but they can’t gain a competitive advantage until customer experience is embeddedinto their operational processes and culture.
We can help you make a difference. Transformation isn’t easy, but becoming more customer-centric is worth the effort. We help our clients accelerate their results and avoid many of the stumbling blocks along the way.
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Temkin Group combines thought leadership and benchmark data with a deep understanding ofthe dynamics of organizations, which enables us to accelerate customer experience results andhelp companies build the four competencies that are required to sustain long-term success.
HOW WE CAN HELP:
Temkin Group provides a number of different services including:
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CX CORE COMPETENCIES
Purposeful Leadership Do your leaders consistently
operate with a clear, well-articulated set of values?
Compelling Brand Values Are your brand attributes
driving decisions about how you treat customers
and other stakeholders?
Customer Connectedness
Is customer feedback and insight deeply integratedthroughout your internal
