open eir wins “Best CRQ Newcomer 2023” Award

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open eir wins “Best CRQ Newcomer 2023” Award

The ballots are counted and the results have been confirmed!

open eir has been awarded Best CRQ Newcomer in the Deep-Insight Excellence in CX Awards for 2023. We are thrilled for them.

If you live in Ireland, you’ll know open eir. It’s the wholesale arm of Ireland’s largest telecommunications company. At some point you will have seen their vans on the streets, and their technicians out and about, installing fibre lines and connections into business premises and homes across Ireland. 

This is a truly deserved award as it’s hard to believe that open eir’s very first Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment was launched to its customers as recently as October 2023.

open eir wins Best CRQ Newcomer 2023 award

The Deep-Insight team was led by Alexandra Calugarici and Kate Casey. Here’s Alex’s perspective:

“We started working with Orlagh Nevin and the senior leadership team at open eir in mid-2023, and were immediately impressed by the way everybody showed engagement with the process and were keen to make the project a success. 

Kate’s perspective is similar:

“open eir embraced the Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) process from the very beginning. They approached it with an open mind and showed a real bias to action when the results came back. They started making decisions quickly from the feedback and insights they received about their products, services and people.”

Maeve O’Malley recently took on the role as Managing Director at open eir Wholesale and in recent weeks has been leading the charge with open eir’s response to its clients and partners.

Maeve has over 24 years of experience in the telecommunications industry and joined eir in 2013. According to Maeve:

“open eir is delighted to be working with Deep-Insight and are already finding huge value in the insights and input from the team as we continue our journey of transforming our customers’ and partners’ experience with us.”

For me, the key word in Maeve’s comment is ‘journey’ as it acknowledges that transformation doesn’t happen overnight. open eir has some fantastic strengths in terms of its products and its people, and under Maeve’s leadership has already started on that journey.

Congratulations again to everyone at open eir and a special shout out to Orlagh Nevin and John Gregg who were our team’s day-to-day contacts over the past few months at the start of this CRQ journey. We’re looking forward to working with them over the next few years as they and the open eir transform the company into a truly customer-centric organisation.

About open eir

open eir is a division of eir and is the largest wholesale operator in Ireland, providing products and services across a range of regulated and unregulated markets.

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

“Excellence in CX” Awards 2023

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“Excellence in CX” Awards 2023

We have the privilege of partnering with some of the most amazing organisations in the world who are working hard to ensure that their customers’ (and employees’) voice drives strategy across all areas of their business.

We are excited to share some of the great CX work that we see daily while working with them.

At Deep-Insight we are not interested in vanity projects. 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 and is what we are focusing on for these awards.


4 Award Categories in 2023

Last year we had four categories and made four awards. 

This year we also have four categories but the awards are a little different. We are keeping the ‘Best CRQ Newcomer’ award but adding some different categories including one that will reward one of our clients for its focus on Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ) which is arguably as important as CRQ.

Best CRQ Newcomer

 

We award this prize to a company that has never deployed Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) before but embraces the CRQ approach for the first time with gusto, takes the client feedback seriously, and truly commits to improvement. 

Best CRQ Engagement

 

Engagement is all about convincing customers to give their feedback and working with you to help you make significant improvements. The winner is the company that does the best job at eliciting feedback from customers.

Best CRQ Score

 

We know that Customer Experience is not all about the score, but we feel it is still worth recognising the company that recorded the best Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) score in 2023. Remember that customer centricity isn’t easy!

Best Focus on ERQ

 

Doing the right thing for customers means doing the right thing for your employees. We award this prize to the company that shows the greatest interest in Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ), the sister methodology to CRQ.

Next week we will announce the winners.

Let the Games Begin!


A Reminder of the 2022 Winners

Six Degrees has won best leadership response to CRQ

Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods was awarded ‘Best Newcomer to CRQ’. This is a truly deserved award as Vreugdenhil embraced the CRQ process like they had been at this for years, and kept their momentum up all through the live survey and afterwards.

Six Degrees won the ‘Best Leadership Response to CRQ’ award. Everything in Customer Experience starts with leadership commitment and drive, and Six Degrees have this in spades.

invenioLSI was awarded ‘Best CRQ focus amid change’. This is a truly deserved award for an organisation that has seen exceptional growth and transformation over the previous 24 months.

BT Ireland won ‘Trailblazer in CRQ’ for its courage in leading the way in customer experience. They disrupted an already successful Customer Relationship Quality programme in order to re-focus the entire business on the basics – the value of growing customer relationships.

The Lionesses have a Net Promoter Score of -82

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The Lionesses have a Net Promoter Score of -82

Lionesses

Back to one of my pet topics: What is a ‘Good’ Net Promoter Score? 

More specifically, what’s a good Net Promoter Score score for a football team? OK, I know NPS wasn’t designed as a footballing metric but bear with me as I try to illustrate a point about how Net Promoter Score works and how NPS scores are significantly lower than most people think.

Let’s have a look at two fabulous teams that battled it out in the 2023 Women’s World Cup Final in Sydney last Sunday: England and Spain.


How did the Lionesses score in NPS terms?

I first looked at NPS for football teams in 2020. That year Liverpool won the Premiership for the first and only time and did so with a Net Promoter Score of -45, based on the player ratings of the Liverpool team.

Based on their performance in the Women’s World Cup Final last weekend, England’s Lionesses have a Net Promoter Score of -82. If you include the three English substitutes, their NPS drops to -86.

That’s not my view. It’s based on the player ratings for the starting 11, as compiled by The Guardian’s Louise Taylor in the aftermath of their 1-0 defeat to Spain. And Louise Taylor is not being particularly harsh. Most English – or European – sports commentators adopt a similar approach to scoring. 

It’s not that England were poor last Sunday. They played well in the Final and had a great tournament. They were unfortunate to be matched against a Spanish team that was simply brilliant. Spain controlled the game superbly from beginning to end. Their passing was sublime. Olga Carmona’s goal was inch perfect. It had to be to beat Mary Earps.

By the way, Mary Queen of Stops was only rated 8, despite a penalty save late in the game. That’s a ‘Passive’ in Net Promoter terminology.

A quick recap on the scoring system: 9s and 10s are Promoters. 7s and 8s are Passives. 6 and below are Detractors. The Net Promoter Score itself is the percentage of of Promoters MINUS the percentage of Detractors.

Have a look at Louise Taylor’s player scores for the starting 11 below. 0% Promoters; 18% Passives (that’s two players: Earps and Hemp); 82% Detractors. That’s how the -82% NPS result is calculated. 0 – 82 = -82.

So did the Lionesses deserve a NPS of -82? Of course not. But at least the victorious Spanish team scored well in the NPS stakes. Or did they?

ENGLAND PLAYER RATINGS

Mary Earps. Mary Queen of Stops made vital saves from Paralluelo at the near post and Caldentey before denying Hermoso from the penalty spot. Had no hope of saving Carmona’s goal. Sometimes furious with her defence. 8

Jess Carter. Her great late block from Hermoso epitomised a fine tournament contribution. Coped well with second-half switch from right-sided central defender in a back three to left back and generally held her own. 6

Millie Bright. England’s captain advanced from central defence to join the attack in the closing stages. Sometimes struggled to cope with Paralluelo’s pace and movement but her decent positional play almost certainly kept the score down. 6

Alex Greenwood. Required a Terry Butcher-style head bandage after being caught by Paralleulo’s knee late in the second half. Showed flashes of her classy distribution but, for once, it was not enough from the elegant defender. 6

Lucy Bronze. Targeted by Spain and at fault in the preamble to Carmona’s opener, losing concentration and possession after taking one touch too many. A big mistake and too reckless at times. 4
Georgia Stanway. Did not see as much of the ball as she would have wanted and proved wasteful in possession but worked hard to help protect her defence. 5

Keira Walsh. Not at her best in the final – or the tournament – and still looks slightly uncomfortable in a midfield five. Struggled to retain possession. Conceded a handball penalty awarded after a lengthy VAR review. 4

Rachel Daly. Like Bronze, targeted by Spain and often pinned back by advances from Batlle, Bonmati and Redondo. Replaced by Chloe Kelly as England switched to a back four at half-time. 5

Ella Toone. Preferred to Lauren James in the starting XI but her poor positioning and slow reaction exacerbated Bronze’s error before Carmona’s opener. Replaced by Beth England in the 86th minute. 4

Alessia Russo. Worked as hard as ever but largely isolated as Spain dominated possession and was replaced by Lauren James at half-time. 5

Lauren Hemp. Reborn in a central attacking role, Hemp scared Spain, hitting the bar with an accomplished first-half shot. Should have scored after connection with a Kelly cross. Harshly booked. 7

Substitutes
Lauren James. Back for the second half after a two-match suspension but initially struggled to get on the ball before later growing into the game. 6
Chloe Kelly. Ran at Spain with menace and crossed brilliantly for Hemp but failed to supply sufficient killer final balls. 6
Bethany England. 6


The Spanish performance: NPS = +9 (or maybe -7)

As I said, the Spanish team performance in last Sunday’s Final was magnificent. So what was their Net Promoter Score? Surely it was +50 or higher?

Actually, Spain’s NPS was a paltry +9. If you include the three Spanish subs, its NPS was -7. Yes, that’s right – a negative NPS for the 2023 World Cup Winners.

How can that be?

The answer is pretty simple. Net Promoter is an American scoring system that rates advocacy on a 0 to 10 scale and only recognises scores of 9 or 10 as excellent. Americans tend to score more positively than Europeans. Northern Europeans are particularly tough in the way they score. 9s and 10s are generally reserved for extra-special performances.

It’s a culture thing.

Look at the player scores below. Only 2 Promoters in the Spanish side: the goal scorer Olga Carmona and midfielder Aitana Bonmati. That’s 18% of the starting 11. Subtract 9% for the one Detractor (Jennifer Hermoso, and no, she didn’t have a bad game). NPS = 18 – 9 = +9.

If the three substitutes are included, that an additional 7 (Passive) and two 6s (Detractors). Now the NPS score becomes 14% (2 Promoters out of 14 players) minus 21% (3 Detractors out of 14). 14 – 21 = -7.

SPAIN: PLAYER RATINGS

Cata Coll. Spain’s inexperienced goalkeeper saved smartly from Lauren Hemp early on and Lauren James late on. Well protected by her defence and not really threatened by England but did not put a foot wrong in only her fourth senior appearance. 7

Ona Batlle. Stretched England when advancing from right back and combined well with Aitana Bonmatí. Gave Rachel Daly quite a workout and defended extremely well too. 8

irene Paredes. Sent a first-half chance flying wide and repeatedly second-guessed England’s attacking intentions superbly. 8

Laia Codina. Defended well before limping off injured to be replaced by Ivana Andrés in the 73rd minute but, unsportingly, got Lauren Hemp booked. 7

Olga Carmona. Her third goal for Spain was a piece of left-footed technical perfection directed low into the bottom corner. It deserved to win a World Cup. Defended well, too. 9

Aitana Bonmatí. Brilliant and utterly irrepressible. Showed off a wonderful change of pace as she regularly fazed England. Fractionally off-target with fine second-half shot. Too hot for the Lionesses to handle. 9

Teresa Abelleira. Helped Spain hog possession and ensured that England’s increasingly midfield were left chasing shadows. 7

Jennifer Hermoso. Had a second-half penalty save but that was about the only moment nerves got the better of the midfielder. 6

Alba Redondo. An important outlet for Spain down the right. Her low crosses created some good chances but faded slightly in the second half and was replaced by Oihane Hernández after 59 minutes. 7

Mariona Caldentey. Saw a shot brilliantly saved by Mary Earps after nutmegging Lucy Bronze early in the second half. Replaced by two time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas after 89 minutes. 8

Salma Paralluelo. The 19-year-old Barcelona winger has been a star of the tournament and her quick, clever feet stretched England. Should have scored. Reminded England she was once a star 400m runner. Hit a post. Booked and very lucky not to receive a second yellow late on. 7

Substitutes
Oihane Hernández. The right-back arrived on the wing to help maintain Spain’s lead. 7
Ivana Andrés. 6
Alexia Putellas. 6


The average B2B Net Promoter Score in Europe is not much above zero

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote another blog called Things that never happened: a NPS of +91. Same topic; same message.

B2B companies may claim very high Net Promoter Scores but the reality is quite different. An average NPS result for a Northern European B2B company is only +3. Close to half of companies will have negative scores.

Rarely will European B2B companies score greater than +50. That’s a truly exceptional performance.

Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet!

Things that never happened: a Net Promoter Score of 91

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Things that never happened: a Net Promoter Score of 91

Net Promoter Score

I came across two posts on LinkedIn recently where two separate business-to-business (B2B) companies – one professional services company and one IT services provider – announced the exact same Net Promoter Score results from their clients: +91. The spokesman for the profession services company was particularly chuffed: “We were delighted with the results of the survey resulting in an NPS of 91.” 

Now +91 is indeed an impressive result. If you understand the scoring mechanism behind NPS, you’ll know that a score of +91 requires almost every one of your customers to score you either 9 or 10 to the question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to  recommend [Company] to a friend or colleague?”

“We were delighted with the results of the survey resulting in an NPS of 91”

 

The calculation for Net Promoter Score is simple: just subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The resulting score will be somewhere in the range from -100 to +100.

Promoters score you 9 or 10. Detractors score you 6 or less. What about the 7s and 8s, I hear you say? Well, they’re called Passives and the sad thing is that they don’t get counted at all.

A NPS result of +91 equates to a combination of Promoters, Passives and Detractors that might look something like:

  • 91% Promoters, 9% Passives, and no Detractors (91 – 0 = 91)
  • 93% Promoters, 5% Passives, 2% Detractors (93 – 2 = 91)
  • 95% Promoters, 1% Passives, and 4% Detractors (95 – 4 = 91)

You get the picture. To achieve a Net Promoter Score of +91, almost everybody has to love you. Not just LIKE you, but LOVE you. And I mean REALLY, REALLY love you! 

+91 is an astonishingly good score in the B2B world.

A bit more context: In Northern Europe we generally think that a score of 8 out of 10 is pretty good. 9s and 10s are reserved for experiences that are truly special. I’ve written about this before. It’s conditioned into us in school and at university not to give 9s and 10s when we rate somebody or some service that we have received. Think about it. If you have a college education and graduated with a First Class Honours degree, you scored 70% (or maybe a little higher) in your final year exams. That’s 7 out of 10.

If you’re a Premier League footballer and score a couple of goals in a Cup Final, you might be lucky enough to get a player score of 8 from the sports writers commenting on the game. When Liverpool won the Premiership for the first and only time in 2020, they did so with a Net Promoter Score of MINUS 45.

We’re a difficult bunch in Europe. A dour lot. And the further north you go, the harsher we score. Other countries are different. In America (both north and south), you can get 10/10 if you do a good job or provide an excellent service. There are major attitudinal differences from country to country when if comes to scoring – you can read about it here.

An 'average' B2B Net Promoter Score is slightly above zero

So what happens in real life? How many B2B companies score +91 on the NPS metric?

At Deep-Insight, we have been running large NPS programmes for nearly two decades – mainly in Europe – and the reality is that there is a surprisingly wide spread of scores ranging from -50 to +50.

An ‘average’ Net Promoter Score is slightly above zero. Nobody scores worse than -75. And nobody scores better than +75.


CX Programmes: most responses are biased

So am I saying that the professional services and IT firms claiming Net Promoter Scores of +91 are lying?

Not necessarily. Theoretically, it is possible to get a NPS result of +100 from your customer experience (CX) programme but in nearly 20 years we have never seen this happen. In fact, we’ve never seen any B2B company get close to +75. 

In practical terms, the only way you can get a NPS result of +91 is as follows:

  • First, you really do have to be excellent at what you do – particularly when it comes to delivering excellent service every time
  • But that’s not enough. You also need to ‘frig the system’ by selecting a small number of clients who are Ambassadors for you and your service
  • You also need to select only those individuals in those client organisations who you believe will score you 9/10 or 10/10
  • You need to carefully deselect any client that is likely to give you a poor score – you can use the excuse: “Now is not the right time to ask them their views” or “We’ll only antagonise them if we approach them now”
  • Never send a survey to somebody who doesn’t know you really well, even if it’s a senior decision maker that you’d love to have a conversation with – as we’ve seen already, the chances of them giving you 9 or 10 are very slim indeed
  • Finally, don’t outsource the survey process to a third party who will give the option of confidentiality to the survey participants – confidential surveys are likely to elicit lower scores even if they provide a more realistic and honest view of your product or service

You might think I’m being cynical. Surely B2B companies don’t act in such a manner? Surely the leadership and CX teams will prevent this happening by putting an appropriate governance process in place?

Even if companies aren’t that cynical – and in our experience most are not – subtle biases always creep in to soften any hard messages, inflate the true Net Promoter Scores, and water down the recommended actions. Sometimes these biases are blatant. But they always exist.

What’s worse is that leadership teams often compound the problem by setting inappropriate targets (“We’re expecting a completion rate of 75%”) or by incentivising a completely biased result by paying bonuses if certain NPS targets are reached. We all know that if you give good sales managers a target and an incentive plan, they will do their best to achieve it.

Don’t fall into that trap with your CX programme. Work hard at getting what we refer to as ‘unvarnished truth’ about what your customers really think. 


Things that never happened: a NPS of +91

Back to our professional services and IT companies and their +91 NPS results. 

I don’t believe they deliberately set out to ‘frig the system’ in order to achieve a score of +91. I also suspect they genuinely do deliver a really good service. But even without knowing the full details behind the surveys, I know in my heart that they were administered to a small sample of hand-picked clients. The individuals administering the survey were probably not even aware that they were ‘frigging the system’. After all, they had to ask to account managers to nominate the people to be contacted as they don’t manage the client relationships themselves. They weren’t to know that the leadership teams had (unwittingly) conveyed to the account teams that a high NPS result would be good to promote their company on LinkedIn and other social media. They didn’t tell the CEO that she needed to put a robust governance process in place.

With a good governance process in place to elicit the ‘unvarnished truth’ from clients, European B2B companies will never achieve Net Promoter Scores of +91. That’s simply a fact. It never happened.

B2B leadership teams shouldn’t be targeting high NPS scores. Instead, they should be trying to identify key areas for improvement, and then implementing changes based on real unbiased feedback from clients. If they are successful, the NPS results will improve slowly and steadily over time.

So don’t just chase a NPS number. Listen to your customers instead. Act on their suggestions. Resolve their issues. The NPS result will take care of itself.

If you would like more information on how to run an effective CX programme that delivers real and long-lasting change, do get in touch with us. We’d love to help!

Is the Service Recovery Paradox true for B2B relationships?

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Is the Service Recovery Paradox true for B2B relationships?

The Service Recovery Paradox (SRP)

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog called The Service Recovery Paradox – Fact or Myth?  Today I’m looking more specifically at whether the Service Recovery Paradox is true for business-to-business (B2B) relationships.

But first, a quick recap on the basics of SRP. 

The Service Recovery Paradox is a concept that was first introduced by service management guru Christopher Hart in the Harvard Business Review way back in 1990. Here’s what he said more than 30 years ago:

“A good recovery following a service failure can turn angry, frustrated customers into loyal ones. It can, in fact, create more goodwill than if things had gone smoothly in the first place.”

Sounds great. But is it true? Or, as some other academics have asked more bluntly, is it a more of a smouldering myth than a justifiable theory?

Like most things in life, the answer is nuanced.

The evidence – and there really is little of it out there as I discussed in that blog – suggests that in most circumstances the Service Recovery Paradox is simply not true.

“A good recovery following a service failure can turn angry, frustrated customers into loyal ones. It can, in fact, create more goodwill than if things had gone smoothly in the first place.”

When a company does a really good job at fixing the service issue, Satisfaction can go back up to – and even beyond – pre-failure levels. But here’s the rub. Even though Satisfaction recovers, Loyalty does not. So, to summarise that earlier blog, the Service Recovery Paradox (SRP) is indeed a smouldering myth, at least in the consumer world.

The basic message in that blog was to get the basics right, rather than trying to recover a bad situation. Do things right, and do them right first time.  Reliable and consistent service delivery is the cornerstone of long-lasting client relationships. And it doesn’t cost anything to ensure consistency of service delivery because Quality is Free.

But what about the B2B world?


Is the Service Recovery Paradox true for B2B relationships?

All the case studies mentioned in that previous research were from the consumer world. Do the same conclusions hold true for B2B companies? Is the Service Recovery Paradox true for B2B relationships? I was curious to find out.

It turns out that there is even less written about B2B service failures than consumer service disasters. That said, three Swiss consultants – Denis Hübner, Stephan Wagner and Stefan Kurpjuweit – did examine B2B service failure and subsequent recovery in the logistics industry. They interviewed senior managers and front line workers in 25 different companies across three continents and came up with some interesting conclusions.


The Service Recovery Paradox in B2B Situations: A Smouldering Myth

In summary, they did find some evidence to support a positive aftermath after a service failure. However, they could only find evidence for the SRP in nine of the 25 cases that they investigated. That means that in nearly two thirds of cases, there was zero evidence of any recovery after a service failure.

And here’s a more interesting finding. In those nine cases, the discussion is around satisfaction. There is no mention of increased loyalty in any of the cases. Yes, in nine cases and under quite specific circumstances, satisfaction did recover to pre-failure levels. But there is no discussion about increased purchases or purchasing intentions. Nothing about deeper relationships or increased levels of trust.

In other words, loyalty appears to be remain compromised even when B2B service providers implement an excellent service recovery.

This suggests that the SRP truly is a “smouldering myth” in both the B2B world as well as the consumer world.

Now let’s look at some of the nuances in their research, because there are some good messages for B2B leaders to take on board.

“Overall, we observed the service recovery paradox (SRP) or service failures resulting in increased customer satisfaction in nine of the 25 cases”


B2B: Critical external failures are easier to recover from

The analysis of those nine cases where satisfaction improved after a successful service recovery led Hübner and his colleagues to a couple of key conclusions:

  • Service failures must exceed a “zone of indifference” before SRP is seen. The reason is simple. It often takes a truly critical service failure to draw sufficient attention – and a corresponding response – from senior management.
  • External failures are easier to recover from than internal failures. Customers are tolerant of events such as events that they perceive as force majeure. For example: a volcano eruption in Iceland or a nation-wide transportation strike. Customers are far less tolerant of perceived internal failures that the service provider should have been able to anticipate and plan for.

The corollary is also true. If the service failure is low-impact and part of an ongoing systemic problem, it’s almost impossible to recover from, because it rarely gets taken seriously by leadership teams.

B2B: An immediate response coupled with longer term action are ‘must haves’

Even when the service failure is seen to be in the “that was massive and nobody could have predicted it” category, a lot of hard work is required to rebuild satisfaction level afterwards. A few points are worth noting:

  • Compensation is of limited value. Much more important than compensating direct losses is the avoidance of expensive downstream consequences: delayed deliveries, lost production, and so on.
  • Apologies are also of limited value. For the same reason, formal apologies provide less value than a significant and fundamental change in behaviour in the aftermath of a service failure.
  • Response speed is critical. In fact, speed of response is possibly the B2B service provider’s only truly effective weapon. If it can be deployed, it can go a long way to defusing the situation.
  • Prevention is better than cure. In the longer term, even speed of response is of little value if the underlying issues are not resolved. The service provider must implement action plans that ensure the failure won’t re-occur. That means carrying out root cause analysis rather than simply treating the symptoms. ‘Action’ may mean significant investments in technology and re-engineering of processes. It is also likely to include “softer” interventions such as empowered operating-level employees, and improved communication.

B2B Bottom Line – Get it Right First Time

When you read Hübner’s article in detail, it’s hard to come to any other conclusion than the only successful way of ensuring loyal customers is to prevent service failures from happening in the first place. That’s the same conclusion as in my earlier blog.

Easier said than done.

That means going back to the old principles of Total Quality Management (TQM) and “getting it right first time”. Remember that it’s easier and cheaper to build quality in at the start than it is to firefight when things go wrong.

Apologies are not sufficient (but they do matter)

A final thought: even when B2B service providers do everything to prevent service failures, they still happen. When they do, act quickly and learn how to say sorry, even if an apology on its own has limited value. 

Contact us if you want to find out what your clients think of your service. And if you’re not sure how to say sorry, our friends in Corporate Visions may be able to help!