“Excellence in CX” Awards 2024 – That’s a Wrap!

Written by

“Excellence in CX” Awards 2024 – That’s a Wrap!


 

Congratulations to our 2024 Winners

2024 is the third year of Deep-Insight “Excellence in CX” Awards.

These awards focus on companies that we have worked with in 2024 that have embraced our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) framework and methodology to make meaningful change for both their customers and their employees.

That makes us very proud!

Before we talk about the winners, let’s answer the following question:

 

What do we mean by ‘Excellence in CX’?

Deep-Insight is a small team of Customer Experience (CX) consultants who work extremely closely with our customers. The single question which drives us in each engagement is “will this programme inspire transformation in our client organisations?”.

Transformation does not need to be, and usually isn’t, a huge significant event in itself. When done well, transformation is a series of small, well thought through changes and improvements. Transformation is only worth it if it leads to growth, and it always does when it is inspired by the customer.

Also, we are not interested in vanity projects! We are focused on our core mission of Inspiring Transformation i.e. effective, growth-oriented use of Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX). This is what excellence in customer experience looks like and it is the foundation on which our customers build their CX and EX programmes.

*        *        *        *        *

AND THE 2024 WINNERS ARE…

 

Six Degrees has been a client of ours since 2020 and it has been a privilege to work with the team for the past four years on their journey to greater customer centricity.

Fiona Lynch has been the Deep-Insight CX consultant working most closely with Chris Blofield, Conley Newall and the Six Degrees team to improve their Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) scores this year.

Fiona has been hugely impressed by the strategic response from the leadership team, starting with their commitment to ‘Customer First’, a core value to place the client at the heart of organisation. Fiona adds:

“The response from Six Degrees right across the organisation to last year’s CRQ assessment was incredibly well executed and their jump in scores really reflects their efforts. We’re delighted for them.”

Six Degrees appointed Vince DeLuca as Chief Executive Officer in 2024 as it sought to distinguish itself as the UK’s leading provider of secure, integrated cloud services. Vince commented on this year’s award:

“We’re incredibly proud to be recognised for our commitment to our core value of ‘Customer First.’ At Six Degrees, actively listening to and acting on our customers’ insights is fundamental to driving meaningful change and delivering exceptional outcomes.

This recognition reflects the dedication and hard work of our entire team over the past year. With the continued support of Deep-Insight, we are excited to carry this momentum forward into the year ahead.”

Read more about Six Degrees’ win here…

*        *        *        *        *

Everybody in Ireland knows open eir.  You’ve seen their distinctive green and white “Connecting Ireland with superfast fibre broadband” vans on the streets, installing fibre lines into business premises and into homes across the country.

You’ve probably also seen vans from Circet (pronounced “sur-say”) who are open eir’s key partner on the ground. We have to mention them in this award as they are an integral part of the open eir teams who operate at the coalface and meet customers on a daily basis.

2024 was our second year working with open eir. What impressed me the most about their approach to implementing a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) programme was the extent to which they embraced the whole CRQ approach – taking the feedback at face value, closing the loop with the customers, putting in detailed (in fact, very detailed!) responses to all of the feedback, and kicking off a transformation programme that they are committed to for the long haul. They know it’s not a 12-month initiative. It’s a journey.

Una Stafford, Managing Director Networks, and Maeve O’Malley, Managing Director, Wholesale, have been leading the charge on open eir’s CX transformation journey over the past two years. 

Both Una and Maeve are industry veterans who understand the challenges of a cultural transformation in large complex telecommunications environments. However, their real skill has been to convince hundreds of people in both open eir and Circet to embrace Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) as a way of life.

Read more about open eir’s win here…

*        *        *        *        *

Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods conducted its first Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment in 2022, impressing us with their smooth adoption of the CRQ process, as if it had been a long-standing practice. What stood out most was their commitment from the outset. They dived into the process with enthusiasm and maintained a strong momentum throughout all the phases of the CRQ process.

In 2022, strong client relationships were identified as a key strength. Determined to build on this foundation, Vreugdenhil developed an internal training programme for all colleagues who have contact with customers, to enhance their client communication skills. They employed a variety of creative formats like interactive training sessions customised for different departments. These ‘customer contact training’ sessions emphasized proactive client engagement and addressed the nuances of dealing with different customer types.

Leonie Soetendaal is a Commercial Project Manager who has been working at Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods for nearly 10 years.

Together with Commercial Director Gerben van Schaik, and colleagues Jeroen de Kunder and Erik Bulthuis, Leonie has been the driving force behind Vreugdenhil’s CX journey since 2022.

Leonie commented on this year’s award:

“At Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods, we believe in the power of connection and lasting relationships. This award is a wonderful recognition of our commitment to open and meaningful communication with our customers. Together with our partners, we make a difference!”

Read more about Vreugdenhil’s win here…

*        *        *        *        *

We have been privileged at Deep-Insight to work with BT Ireland since 2008 when they first started on their journey towards becoming one of Ireland’s most customer-centric companies. 

It has been a long and successful Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) journey for them. Initially, the BT Ireland leadership team worked hard on identifying and addressing its clients’ major service issues. Then they progressed to the more enjoyable part of the journey – collaborating with clients on new innovative technology-based programmes.

In recent years, the BT Ireland leadership team  took a more commercial focus to CRQ. They used detailed customer insight, along with externally validated propensity to buy, to identify clients where they could develop further solutions to their business problems.

BT Ireland discovered that the excellent relationships they had built over years was critical to driving revenue growth with clients that continued to be delighted by their offerings. Not an easy task in an industry where, every year, customers expect better telecommunications solutions for less cost.

The BT Ireland leadership team were helped by an army of service managers, account directors and engineers. They were also guided by a CX team led by Barry O’Shea, Mary McDonagh and Deirdre Tyrrell whose great CX efforts have been recognised globally in recent years. Shay Walsh, Managing Director, BT Ireland (left) commented on the Deep-Insight award:

“We are absolutely thrilled to be recognised in the category of ‘Using CRQ for Growth’. Working with the team in Deep-Insight we challenged ourselves collectively to convert our top quartile CRQ scores to income growth. This brought a focus on widening our contacts base within our client base and creating a watch list of customers who needed more focus from our customer-facing teams. The additional insight and broader awareness informed how better to serve our customers and ultimately how we achieve the dividend of growth from CRQ.”

Read more about BT Ireland’s win here…

open eir wins the “Embracing CRQ” Award for 2024

Written by

open eir wins the “Embracing CRQ” Award for 2024

Everybody in Ireland knows open eir.  You’ve seen their distinctive green and white “Connecting Ireland with superfast fibre broadband” vans on the streets, installing fibre lines into business premises and into homes across the country.

You’ve probably also seen vans from Circet (pronounced “sur-say”) who are open eir’s key partner on the ground. We have to mention them in this award as they are an integral part of the open eir teams who operate at the coalface and meet customers on a daily basis.

2024 was our second year working with open eir. What impressed me the most about their approach to implementing a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) programme was the extent to which they embraced the whole CRQ approach – taking the feedback at face value, closing the loop with the customers, putting in detailed (in fact, very detailed!) responses to all of the feedback, and kicking off a transformation programme that they are committed to for the long haul. They know it’s not a 12-month initiative. It’s a journey.

Some of the specific actions that open eir took in 2024 included:

  • Improvements to the appointments process, and planned upgrades to their Unified Gateway (UG) system;
  • Implementation of new quality processes in partnership with Circet;
  • New CX roles created; 
  • Reviewing processes and systems to understand where automation could be implemented to free up time to devote to client-facing activities.

Our Deep-Insight CX Consultant managing the open eir relationship is Kate Casey. She knows the team intimately and had this to say: 

“Following last year’s results, the entire open eir team – from the leadership team down to Customer Service Managers (CSMs) and networks engineers – jumped in and took decisive action. No messing around with these guys! They have managed to figure out how to embed customer centricity into every aspect of their daily operations. Their commitment to embracing change and prioritising customer-focused principles has been exceptional.

What was fantastic was seeing such impressive improvements in their CRQ scores this year. That’s proof of just how deeply these values have become embedded into open eir. This award is a recognition of their hard work and commitment to making a meaningful difference for their customers.”

I fully agree with Kate. On a personal note, it has been both a pleasure and an honour working with the open eir team over the past couple of years. I’m absolutely delighted to see them win the “Embracing CRQ” award this year. It was thoroughly deserved.

John O’Connor

Una Stafford, Managing Director Networks, and Maeve O’Malley, Managing Director, Wholesale, have been leading the charge on open eir’s CX transformation journey over the past two years. 

Both Una and Maeve are industry veterans who understand the challenges of a cultural transformation in large complex telecommunications environments. However, their real skill has been to convince hundreds of people in both open eir and Circet to embrace Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) as a way of life.

In accepting the award, Maeve O’Malley has this to say:

“Working with Deep-Insight has given us the quantitative data we need to understand the areas we need to work on, to improve our operators’ experience with open eir. The findings from last year created the foundation for our 2024 plan and this year’s assessment is now helping us understand what’s working and where we still have gaps.

“The data has also helped galvanise our teams with a shared understanding of the transformation required.  The insight from the team has added huge value, not only in helping us understand the challenge ahead but also supporting us in developing and prioritising our plans.”

*       *       *       *        *

About open eir

At open eir, we’re building Ireland’s fastest-growing full fibre network. Our network reaches far and wide, transforming the way individuals, businesses, and communities experience the digital world. With over 1.3 million homes and businesses across 26 counties now able to access faster speeds through any one of our 29 trusted retail service providers, we are the architects of a brighter, more connected future for Ireland.

Find out more about open eir at www.openeir.ie.

About Deep-Insight

Deep-Insight is a leading European B2B Customer Experience (CX) company founded in 2000 by a small team of ‘magicians’ with one goal: researching a way to read customers’ minds. Today, Deep-Insight supports customers all over the world with the skills, tools and methodologies to establish and operate world-class Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) programmes.

For more information, go to deep-insight.com or email us at sales@deep-insight.com.

 

 

“Excellence in CX” Awards 2024

Written by

“Excellence in CX” Awards 2024

It’s that time of the year again!

At Deep-Insight, we have the privilege of partnering with some amazing organisations who work hard to ensure that their customers – and employees – have their voices heard loudly.

Good companies use the Voice of the Customer to drive strategy across all areas of their business. We are proud to work with customers who align with our mission to ‘Inspire Transformation’ based on open and honest feedback from customers. That is what our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) framework and methodology is designed for.

With these awards, we want to showcase some of the great CX work that we have seen in 2024.


4 Award Categories in 2024

Each year, we ask our Deep-Insight CX consultants to reflect on the ordinary and extraordinary things that their clients have done over the previous 12 months. We ask them to nominate any client that has taken a different or unique approach, or that has simply done the basics customer experience tasks really, really well.

We then have a series of discussions to decide what awards should be given, and which clients should be nominated for those awards.

This year, we have decided to make four awards in the following categories:

 Using CRQ for Growth

 

The layers of CX maturity are many and varied. As with any methodology, the value from CRQ is only as effective as the teams who use it. The most mature organisations not only use CRQ to inform strategic decisions. They also use it as an integral sales tool to validate, support and drive revenue growth.

Best CRQ Response

 

When customers share their views with you, they expect you to respond. The surprising this is that the leadership teams in many companies struggle to respond effectively. A good response requires decisive action and an ‘execution’ mindset to follow through with decisive strategic decisions.

Embracing CRQ

 

Many people view customer experience as a set of tasks: customer journeys, mapping, surveys. Steps in an overall programme. Few companies embrace it as a way of life. It’s not easy, and requires leadership. Companies that  embrace CX invariably receive strong recognition – and more business – from their customers.

Best CRQ Comms

 

Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) is not just about sending out surveys. It requires active involvement from customers, and it needs all employees in a company to embrace it wholeheartedly.  Communications – both internal and external – are key to a successful CX programme.

In the second week of December, we will announce the winners, just in time for Christmas.

We can’t wait!


A Reminder of Last Year's Winners

open eir wins Best CRQ Newcomer 2023 award

open eir was awarded Best CRQ Newcomer in the Deep-Insight Excellence in CX Awards for 2023. 

Insight won the award for Best CRQ Engagement last year. They contacted 203 key decision makers, influencers and operational contacts across their strategic clients in Europe. 100 of the 203 responded – a whopping 49% engagement rate. 

DWF, a long-standing customer of ours, has been awarded Best CRQ Score with a a CRQ score of 6.0 (as well as a Net Promoter Score of +62).

Pelican Self Storage was awarded the Best Focus on ERQ prize for its ongoing commitment to Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ), the sister methodology to CRQ.

 

Avoiding the CX Rat Trap

Written by

Avoiding the CX Rat Trap

Goodhart's Law


A story of rats, cobras and economists

This is a story about rats, cobras and economists (and no, they’re not the same thing!) but it’s primarily a blog about a British economist called Charles Goodhart and his take on target setting, key performance indicators (KPIs) and the law of unintended consequences.

Goodhart is a man whose musings are worth reading if you’re struggling to make your customer experience (CX) programme work. All CX programmes involve the measurement of customer satisfaction (CSat), Net Promoter Score (NPS) or similar KPI. Companies will sometimes incentivise their employees to achieve a particular CX objective: “If we hit our NPS target of +50 this year, all sales staff get an additional bonus of £1,000.” This is not an uncommon practice. It’s also not a good one, as we are going to find out shortly.

Charles Goodhart is best known for Goodhart’s Law, which is neatly summarised in the Sketchplanations cartoon above. Setting targets can result in unintended consequences, particularly where incentives are involved.

Before we delve into Goodhart and his famous law, let’s start with a couple of stories about rats and cobras.

The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt

In 1902, the French ruled Indochina, a region in South East Asia comprised of modern-day Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The capital and administrative centre was Hanoi.

That year, the French administrators introduced a bounty on rats after it was discovered that rats played a significant role in transmitting the plague. The Third Plague Pandemic was a pretty serious issue in Asia at the time. It had spread from China in the late nineteenth century and by the time it was finally eradicated in the 1960s, more than 10 million people had died from the plague.

A bounty seemed to make sense. To claim it, the locals simply had to bring in a bag of rat tails. There was no need for piles of dead rats clogging up the corridors of power in Hanoi – tails would suffice. Within weeks, the bounty was working. Hundreds of rat tails poured in. Then thousands. It seemed too good to be true, and so it turned out to be.

It didn’t take long for French officials to figure out what was happening. The bounty had created an entirely new industry in Hanoi where rodent tails were brought into the capital from the countryside. Worse still, entrepreneurs in Hanoi started to breed rats in order to increase their bounty revenues. The number of rats in Hanoi was increasing, rather than decreasing.

Eventually, the bounty was discontinued. This story of administrative failure and unintended consequences is told in Michael Vann’s book The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt.


The Cobra Effect

It’s not just the French who were outwitted by their colonial subjects. A similar case happened under British rule in India, and documented in Horst Siebert’s book Der Kobra-Effekt.

At the same time that the French were grappling with a rat epidemic in Hanoi, the British were dealing with a cobra explosion in India. Cobras were viewed by the British administrators as deadly pests and a bounty was introduced in Delhi for every dead cobra handed in to the authorities. Many cobras were killed and handed in but, to the bemusement of the British rulers, the cobra population seemed to be on the rise.

It’s the same story of simple economics: the cost of breeding a cobra was significantly lower than the bounty, so entrepreneurs started to breed cobras. When the bounty was stopped, the breeders released the remaining cobras into the wild, further exacerbating the situation.


Goodhart's Law

Charles Goodhart is a British economist. He was born in 1936 and spent nearly 20 years of his career at the Bank of England, working on and writing about public and financial policy. In 1975, he wrote a paper containing the line: “whenever a government seeks to rely on a previously observed statistical regularity for control purposes, that regularity will collapse.”

The comment was specifically about monetary policy but would later be generalised as a law about targets, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). In 1997, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern expressed Goodhart’s Law as follows when she was investigating grade inflation in university examinations:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The more a 2.1 examination performance becomes an expectation, the poorer it becomes as a discriminator of individual performances. Targets that seem measurable become enticing tools for improvement.

Marilyn Strathern’s interpretation that has become the most widely used today.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Charles Goodhart

The basic message from Goodhart’s Law is a simple one: beware the law of unintended consequences when you set targets for people to achieve.

This is equally true when companies set targets in the field of customer experience (CX). If senior leadership teams incentivise their sales people and account managers to hit Net Promoter Score (NPS) targets, they will be achieved come hell or high water. In a previous blog, I outlined how CX programmes are often ‘gamed’ to achieve ridiculously high NPS targets which bear no relationship to the company’s actual performance. Common actions taken to game the CX system include:

  • Selecting only those clients who are Ambassadors for you and your product or service, when you are looking for customer feedback
  • Within those clients, selecting only those individuals who you know will score you 9/10 or 10/10 (these are ‘Promoters’ in NPS terminology)
  • Making sure to deselect any client that is likely to give you a poor score, using excuses like: “Now is not the right time to ask their views” or “We’ll only antagonise them if we approach them now”
  • Refusing to send a survey to anybody who doesn’t know you really well, even if it’s a senior decision maker that you’d love to have a conversation with. Why? The chances of them scoring you 9 or 10 are slim
  • Not outsourcing the NPS survey process to a third party that can give the option of confidentiality to survey participants – confidential surveys are likely to elicit lower scores even if they provide a much more realistic and honest view of your product or service

In many cases, employees and leadership teams are unaware that they are gaming the system. They simply believe that they are doing the right thing for the company.


Avoiding the CX Rat Trap - 5 Rules

Rule No. 1: Do not incentivise employees to achieve CX targets. It’s that simple. If you do, you’ll end up with more rats and cobras than you can handle.

Rule No. 2: If your Senior Leadership Team or Board is bonused on achieving NPS results, stop this practice immediately! You would be amazed at the number of companies that engage in such bonus schemes.

Rule No. 3: Resist the temptation to publish your Net Promoter Score in your annual report. All you are doing is setting yourself up for inflated NPS results as nobody in the organisation will want to be associated with a ‘down year’. It’s human nature. By accident or design, employees and leaders will game the system to achieve higher scores next year.

Rule No. 4: Put a robust CX governance structure in place. Make sure ALL clients are surveyed. Sign off the contact lists. Resist the urge to exclude people whose views might be unfavourable – you want to know what they are thinking.

Rule No. 5: Finally, don’t approach CX with the mindset of a colonial administrator! Senior leadership teams have to view customer feedback as a gift. They have to encourage their colleagues to be open about getting feedback, whether good, bad or indifferent. Without honest feedback, change will never happen. Poor practices will continue and eventually clients will leave.

Finally, if you want to find out more about how to set up and run a customer experience (CX) programme effectively, contact us for a chat. We’d love to hear from you.

The B2B Blindspot: Why NPS Isn’t Enough

Written by

The B2B Blindspot: Why NPS Isn’t Enough


Why do so many B2B CX programmes fail?

Later this year, Bert Paesbrugghe will be hosting a LinkedIn webinar called The B2B Customer Success Blindspot: Why NPS Isn’t Enough. It sounds like it will be a good session and I have cheekily borrowed his title for this blog as it got me thinking about some of the reasons why B2B companies set up customer experience (CX) or Net Promoter Score (NPS) programmes in the first place.

More important, it’s worth reflecting on why these CX and NPS endeavours often fail to deliver on their initial promise. And that’s the sad truth – many of these programmes fail to improve the service delivered to customers. They don’t succeed for a variety of reasons. One of these is the belief that Net Promoter Score is a silver bullet for solving all manner of customer woes.

It’s not. That’s the blindspot. NPS is not enough for B2B companies.

B2B is different

The first thing to mention is that the Business-to-Business (B2B) world is VERY different to its Business-to-Consumer (B2C) counterpart.

The consumer world is all about the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Marketing guru Philip Kotler popularised the 4Ps back in the 1960s. They were a core part of his Marketing Management book that many of us still have on our shelves today.

My only real problem with the 4Ps model is that it’s essentially a B2C concept. It doesn’t cover the subtleties of the B2B world where very often a service provider is delivering a very complex service across multiple locations – often in different countries. This is a world away from selling and marketing consumer products such as Mars Bars or Mercedes cars.

The 4Ps also don’t take into account the need for key/ global account management or the associated challenges of building and maintaining relationships with multiple decision makers and influencers across large global organisations.


NPS is one-dimensional

Net Promoter Score has proven to be one of the most durable metrics in management, ever since its invention by academic and business consultant Fred Reichheld more that two decades ago. Reichheld’s basic premise was that you only need to ask one question in order to understand if a customer is going to stay loyal to you or not. The question is: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”

Fred, an excellent marketeer, promoted the benefits of his Net Promoter Score (NPS) concept in publications like the Harvard Business Review. He then proclaimed its merits in his 2006 book The Ultimate Question. Since then, NPS has became a hugely popular metric for customer loyalty and customer experience.

I’ve written about NPS before and, in general, I’m a fan of the metric for both its simplicity and its popularity. Sure, it’s not perfect, as Professor Nick Lee points out. But then again, is there a perfect KPI for anything? Let’s agree that Net Promoter Score has its place and is worth measuring even if it is a little one-dimensional. 

So NPS is good, but much more is required, particularly in the B2B world with all of its complexities, peculiarities and challenges.


Why NPS is not enough (in B2B)

Let’s go back to basics here. B2B IS different. So let’s recap on what some of those differences are:

  • Customer Base. Consumer brands like Mars Bars and Mercedes cars are sold to millions of individuals. Three million sold every single day, in the case of Mars Bars. In contrast, we work with B2B clients that generate annual revenues of more than €1bn from fewer than 100 clients.
  • Value. A Mars Bar costs around €1.60 at the time of writing (let me know if you can source them cheaper!) while an outsourced IT contract can be worth €100m. Admittedly, a Mars Bar can be consumed in less than five minutes while a €100m contract might take five years to consume. But you get the picture: value and Value For Money are very different in the B2B and B2C worlds.
  • Marketing Strategy. We talked earlier about Kotler’s 4Ps. While the consumer world is all about Product, the B2B world is more around Service and Relationships. Even in today’s AI-enabled world, those services are still delivered by people. Relationship-building is a critical component of the marketing mix the B2B world.
  • Sales Focus. In the consumer world, merchandising and point-of-sale advertising are key. In the B2B world, far more emphasis is placed on educating the customer about features, benefits, return on investment, and so on. This is still mainly done through personal contact and relationships.
  • What to Maximise? The consumer world is about the transaction – promoting those Mars Bar at the point of sale, for example. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is rarely if ever mentioned in the consumer world. CLV is arguably the most important thing to maximise in the B2B world as it typically takes 2-5 years to recover the initial sales cost of a major multi-year contract win.
  • Buying Process. In a supermarket, buying a Mars Bar is a split-second decision. Even for a Mercedes, the decision can be quick. Clinching that 5-year outsourcing deal can and does take years from beginning to end. It also involves multiple decision-makers and influencers.
  • Buying Decision. In the consumer world, decisions are often made on emotion – hence the importance of brand and image. In the B2B world, we like to think decisions are made on rational grounds, based on cleary-defined evaluation criteria.


What else is needed?

Let’s assume we have just sold a 5-year outsourcing deal to a client and we are now in the onboarding or delivery stage of that contract. Yes, it’s useful to know if our client would recommend us to a friend or colleague. That’s the Net Promoter question, but is it enough?

Not really. Ideally, we need to know much more. For example, do our clients trust us now that we have started working for them? Are they committed to us for the long term? Are they happy with the service that they are now receiving? 

These are just some of the questions that we need to ask our B2B clients in a systematic way. We need answers at an aggregate level but we also need feedback at an account level. Contract A may be going swimmingly. Contract B may already be on the rocks (to continue the theme) but we might not know that if we are only getting aggregated client feedback.


Eliminating the blindspot: Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ)

An alternative to asking the one-dimensional NPS question is to view the customer relationship more holistically. That’s where Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) fits in.

CRQ can be visualised as a pyramid comprised of three different levels.

  1. The first and most fundamental is the Relationship level. Do your clients trust you, are they committed to a long-term relationship with you, and are they satisfied with that relationship?
  2. The second is the Uniqueness level. Do your clients view the experience of working with you, and the solutions you offer, as truly differentiated and unique? Do they see us as good value for money?
  3. At the top of the pyramid is the Service level. Are you seen as reliable, responsive and caring? Get this wrong and you will never be seen as Unique and you will struggle to build a long-term relationship with that client.

Interestingly, CRQ and NPS scores are highly correlated. If you score well on all six elements of this Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) model, your clients will act as Ambassadors, generating a high NPS result for you. However, CRQ gives you so much more information to act upon, and that’s far more important.


The most important part: Action

The CRQ model above was specifically designed for the B2B world. That said, it really doesn’t matter what questions you ask your clients if you fail to do anything with their feedback.

The most important part of any NPS, CRQ, CX or client listening programme is the ‘Action’ piece. The reason that many  customer programmes fail to deliver is that they are run by the Marketing department (sorry guys and gals!) while the members of the company’s Senior Management Team have collectively washed their hands of any responsibility for acting on that client feedback.

In most B2B organisations, key client relationships are owned by Sales. In some cases where delivery is an ongoing function, it’s the Service or Operations functions that have most of the day-to-day client contact. It’s rarely, if ever, somebody from Marketing. The Sales Director (or Service/ Operations Director) needs to own the ‘Close The Loop’ element of the programme. It’s unfair to expect Marketing to take responsibility for it.

Put it another way: it’s madness to think that Marketing can effect change on its own. That’s a Leadership function. I’ve never seen a successful NPS ar CX programme that has not been driven from the top. So regardless of what you think of NPS as a B2B metric, don’t assume that NPS or any other set of survey questions is going to improve your top line or your profitability. It won’t, unless there’s follow-up action. That action needs to be managed systematically, and it needs to be driven by the  SMT or Executive Team.

Finally, do remember that it’s not about the score. It’s about using that valuable client feedback to take action and become more customer-centric. That’s how you generate more revenues and boost profits.