For too long now, B2B companies have lagged behind their B2C counterparts when it comes to customer experience. This is often due to the siloed nature of B2B organisations, which prevents a holistic view of a customer between functions or departments. Even if particular areas of a business try to provide a better service, a fragmented structure can only deliver a fragmented experience.

Your B2B customers have become used to an excellent experience from brands they interact with as consumers. This customer-centricity of B2C organisations not only ensures that they are serving the customer well at point of sale, but building rich after-sales services and extended experiences around their brands to create deeper relationships and, ultimately, repeat revenue.

How healthy are your customer relationships?

You can only deliver a better customer experience if you’re able to measure it. Traditionally, Net Promoter Score (NPS)—first introduced in 2003—has been the standard way for many brands to assess how loyal their customer base is. It asks a simple question: “How likely is it that you would recommend our organisation to a friend or colleague?” But this is no longer sufficient in an age where the customer’s experience of your brand is much more complex than a score out of 10.

NPS only analyses a customer’s last interaction with a brand, rather than digging deeper into the entire lifecycle. Moreover, models such as NPS don’t use enough information to build a clear picture of the health of a customer relationship. Today, organisations are sitting on a wealth of customer data—big data—but they aren’t exploiting it.

The Customer Health Index

We developed a new framework: the Customer Health Index (CHI). It is intended to provide a more granular, real-time view than has previously been possible through frameworks such as the NPS, and can be used by any organisation.

• The customer journey is broken down and mapped into 10 stages
• Each stage has three relevant raw KPIs to the customer (so a total of 30 customer-centric data points)
• These three raw KPIs are normalised to a range of 0 to 100
• Each stage then displays one normalised score (an aggregate average of the normalised KPIs)
• Each stage is weighted – some are stronger than others: e.g. implementation and support, over awareness and consideration
• The final CHI score is a value between 0 to 100, derived from the average of the weighted stage scores
• The higher the score, the healthier the customer relationship

Essentially, each customer has a score based upon 30 separate KPIs, which have in turn been derived from even more granular data points. Data can be aggregated and normalised across core platforms in real time, including but not limited to CRM, ERP, support, marketing automation and digital channels.

The changing role of the CMO

The CHI is just one of the tools that make up the arsenal of a successful customer engagement programme. As a measurement tool, it sits alongside two other pillars: customer engagement and data collection via customer surveys.

This continuous cycle provides robust data to improve the customer experience across any organisation. And it’s the CMO who should take action if you gather negative feedback or data—from any customer and at any stage.

A shift to customer-centricity cannot happen overnight and is only possible if an organisation’s top-level executives buy into it. This is an opportunity for the CMO to become a customer champion, bringing the customer’s needs, desires and pain points to life. They also need to be a storyteller, giving customer insights to the boardroom and workforce in creative and unexpected ways.

 

By Martin Häring, chief marketing officer at Misys

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