Interested in a Free Book for your Late Summer Holistays?
Of course you are! Everybody likes a freebie. A free draw.
Sitting on the beach; chilling out; reading a book. But which one? Or which beach? Given all that’s happening in the world at the moment, few of us are traveling long distances to get away this year. Holistays and staycations are big in 2020.
We can’t solve the issue of having to stay at home but we can provide you with a little light reading material for the back garden, couch or bathtub – you choose.
How to Enter Our Summer Giveaway
From Jun to October, we’re giving away a free Kindle edition of Customer At The Heart to a few lucky winners each week.
OK, it’s not quite Sally Rooney’s Normal People or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera but it should be of interest to any CEO, Sales Director or Chief Customer Officer in a B2B company who is interested in increasing revenues and reducing customer churn.
If you’re interested if throwing your name in the hat for a free electronic copy, all you need to go to our Contact Us page and tell us that you’d like to enter. Easier still, just send us an email with the phrase Customer At The Heart in the subject of your message.
It’s as simple as that. Enter every week if you like! We’ll announce the winner every weekend and send out a Kindle voucher to the lucky winner.
By the way, we take data privacy seriously – we’ll only use email addresses to send a copy of the book to the winner each week and we’ll delete all email addresses at the end of each weekly draw.
Stay safe.
John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight
Footnote
Have you ever wondered when the words ‘staycation’ and ‘holistays’ came into common usage?
staycationnoun
/ˌsteɪˈkeɪʃn/
a holiday that you spend at or near your home
“Turn off your phone and computer—you’re on staycation, remember?”
“UK holidaymakers opt for a staycation in Britain.”
I used to think they were both very recent inventions. I certainly never heard of the terms before the last global recession a decade ago. Well, it turns out that both words were in fairly common usage from 2003. There’s even some research from Merriam-Webster that suggests the word ‘staycation’ originated as far back as 1944.
The other thing I didn’t realise is that the words have slightly different meanings in Europe and the USA. Americans tend to use the term for activities that can be carried out within driving distance of their home where overnight accommodation is not required. Europeans – or British people at least – use the phrase to describe a holiday that is spent in one’s home country rather than abroad.
There’s an old saying that “the cobbler’s children are the worst shod”. In the past that definitely applied to Deep-Insight. We advise clients like Atos, BT and Serco to build customer centricity through:
– Annual strategic assessment of all clients
– Clear plan for choosing the right contacts and getting them to commit to giving feedback via an online survey
– Comprehensive review of the feedback to agree strategic initiatives for the next 12 months
– ‘Close The Loop’ meetings with each client to agree actions to improve the relationship
In Deep-Insight’s early days, we even struggled with the first point. We thought the survey couldn’t be completely independent and honest as it was not being administered by a third party. We got over that objection pretty quickly. It’s true that our scores are a little inflated because the survey is not anonymous, but that’s not the point. The numbers aren’t the most important thing. Any customer feedback is invaluable. We have now been running CRQ assessments with our own clients on an annual basis for several years. Last year, we got our best ever scores.
The only problem is that in 2019 we probably didn’t include as wide a selection of contacts as we should and we could have worked harder at getting a higher completion rate. Last year, our completion rate was 49%. That’s not bad but this year we agreed we wouldn’t be happy unless we hit 60%.
So how did we do? Were we still the cobbler’s children?
Deep-Insight’s 2020 CRQ results
We were definitely more determined this year in getting commitments from you to give us 10 minutes of your time for feedback.
It worked – we achieved a 66% completion rate so my first message is to say ‘Thank You’ for such a wonderful response. Our results were very good too: a CRQ score of 5.7 and a Net Promoter score of +44%. Not as high as last year, but I’m still really pleased by those scores.
Retaining our Unique Status
We also retained our ‘Unique’ status which means that we are in the top 10% of our own database of scores. Uniqueness requires a combination of a winning ‘Solution’ and a wonderful ‘Experience’ for the client.
Areas for Improvement
Even though our clients see us as Unique, there are still areas we need to improve upon. Our core product offering is seen as really good but, in some places, we’re not seen as innovative enough and there are a few areas where we could invest more in our technology.
Closing The Loop
At this point, we have been in touch with most of our clients and scheduled a ‘Close The Loop’ meeting to discuss their feedback on us, and to agree some actions. One of the areas we will be seeking further feedback on is where we focus our development efforts in terms of ‘Innovation’ and ‘Technology’. Here are the three areas that we are trying to prioritise:
1. Further development of Deep-Dive. Deep-Dive is our online analytical portal. It has become an invaluable tool for us to extract insights for our clients but it’s not as intuitive as it could be.
2. Integration with Salesforce. Many, if not most, of our clients use Salesforce as their corporate CRM tool. Some of our clients import the CRQ and NPS results (as well as verbatim comments) from our assessment into Salesforce so that account managers and service teams can see instantly what the most recent feedback was.
3. More Benchmarking & Industry Comparisons. We have 20 years’ worth of benchmarking data and although we’re not big believers in industry averages, many of our clients would like to know if they’re in a particular quartile or decile for their industry.
Cobbler’s Children
We’ve tried hard this year so hopefully we’re no longer the cobbler’s children. Thank you again for your time and input into this year’s CRQ customer assessment. I really do appreciate it and we will make changes based on your feedback – particularly around where we should focus our efforts in the next 12 months.
Some time ago, we posted a blog called Help! What do I do with my Stalkers and Opponents? It was about the actions that account teams need to take with clients where there are very poor relationships. This blog is about the accounts with the best, strongest and deepest relationships. We call these clients Ambassadors.
Let’s start with a quick recap of the five B2B client categories that we use at Deep-Insight:
Customer Relationship Quality – the Strongest Relationships
The most loyal clients are Ambassadors. They are your most valuable customers. Ambassadors have a unique relationship with you and will recommend you to others. They are also prepared to pay a premium for your products or services. Price is not an important consideration for them because of the quality of the relationship. Typically, a third of most company’s B2B clients are Ambassadors.
The next segment of clients are known as Rationals. They rate you positively but do not see anything unique in the relationship. Rationals will assess alternative sources of supply and the relationship can become unstable if good alternative offers exist. Typically, half of your B2B accounts fit into this category. Generally they are good clients albeit not as loyal as Ambassadors.
The Weakest Relationships
But wait! That doesn’t add up to 100%. What’s the story with the others? Well, the answer is that in all B2B client portfolios, there are accounts and individuals that don’t love you. We typically find that 10-20% of accounts have poorer relationships with you and fit into one of the following three categories: Ambivalents often have a “love/hate” relationship with you. In some instances, they love the way you solve their problems but hate the way you treat them. More often, you are killing them with kindness but failing to solve their business issues.
Stalkers are often only interested in price. Sometimes they can be large corporate accounts looking for discounts. Other times, they are smaller accounts with high service requirements and view your offering as poor value for money.
Opponents have the poorest relationships with you. They are deeply dissatisfied and often highly frustrated by what they see as consistently poor service.
Are ‘Ambassadors’ the same thing as ‘Promoters’?
If you use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a performance metric, you’ll recognise the terms Promoters, Passives and Detractors.
Promoters are people who score you 9/10 or 10/10 when asked the question “Would you recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague?” Passives score you 7 or 8. Detractors score you anywhere between 0 and 6.
Ambassadors are similar but here are the two crucial differences: First, an Ambassador is a company rather than an individual. Second, to become an Ambassador you have to get a good Net Promoter Score AND a good Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) score. CRQ is our methodology for assessing the quality of B2B relationships and it is based on Trust and Commitment as well as some other factors, rather than Advocacy which is what the NPS metric is based on.
Think of it this way. Suppose you ask 20 people in a Key Account what they think of their relationship with you and would they be prepared to recommend you and your product or service. If the client is an Ambassador, 12 of the 20 individuals might be Promoters, six might be Passives and two might be Detractors. The overall relationship is great but there are still a couple of individuals who will not recommend you.
What do I do with my Ambassadors
For starters, sales and account teams should remember the following three things when they have an Ambassador client:
1. Recognise their importance and don’t take them for granted
The very first thing is to recognise that Ambassadors are generally your most profitable clients, for a number of reasons:
– They are typically less price-sensitive because they see what you offer as being unique.
– Ambassadors are generally willing to pay a premium for such uniqueness.
– Sales costs are lower. Less effort is required to extend existing contracts or negotiate new ones.
– There is less firefighting. Putting out fires can be expensive. Even when things go wrong, it’s generally easier to resolve operational issues with Ambassadors.
Don’t rest on your laurels. Don’t treat Ambassadors as cash cows. Invest time into the relationship to keep it fresh and exciting. It’s easy to get diverted to more problematic accounts where the shouting is the loudest. In our previous blog we talked about poor client relationships that are unprofitable. Unless there is a clear path to recovery, it is often better to re-allocate those resources to Ambassador clients where there is greater potential.
2. Ask them to recommend you
Remember that a high proportion of individuals in an Ambassador client are Promoters so they have already told you that they will recommend you. So take them up on the offer. Ask them for referrals. Those referrals could be the MDs of other divisions in the same company. This is important – it’s easier to expand your footprint in an existing client than to gain ‘new logo’ clients. Referrals could also be senior executives in other companies. Ask for testimonials or for case studies.
Trustmary is a Finnish company that helps clients do exactly that, by using Net Promoter Score as the key metric for identifying Ambassadors for their clients. Once the Ambassadors have been identified, Trustmary acquires testimonials in written or video format from those individuals.
Don’t be afraid to ask Ambassadors to talk at your next industry event or to be a guest speaker at your next conference. They want to help you. So just do it.
3. Start innovating and co-creating
As the account manager for an Ambassador client, you are probably in the enviable position of being a Trusted Advisor. You have the ear of the key decision makers in that account and the opportunity to bring new ideas and propositions to the table. Use that opportunity. Think of possible joint developments that you can do in partnership with the client. As well as adding more value and revenues, your next product line or service could result from such innovation or co-creation.
How many Ambassadors do you have?
The starting point for these decisions is an accurate and objective view of which category each of your major accounts fits into. Once you know that, you can start asking the right questions and taking the appropriate action.
Contact us if you want to find out how many Ambassadors you have!
Interested in a Free Book for your Summer Holistays?
Of course you are!
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, the days are getting longer and temperatures are becoming respectable again. Conversations are drifting towards the topic of summer holidays. Sitting on the beach; chilling out; reading a book. But which one? Or which beach? Given all that’s happening in the world at the moment, very few of us will be traveling long distances to get away this year. Holistays and staycations are going to be big in 2020.
Unfortunately, we can’t solve the issue of having to stay at home this summer. However we can provide you with a little light reading material for the back garden, couch or bathtub – you choose.
How to Enter Our Summer Giveaway
For the next 13 weeks we’re going to give away a few free Kindle editions of Customer At The Heart to one lucky winner each week.
OK, it’s not quite Sally Rooney’s Normal People or even Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera but it should be of interest to any CEO, Sales Director or Chief Customer Officer in a B2B company who is interested in increasing revenues and reducing customer churn.
If you’re interested if throwing your name in the hat for a free electronic copy, all you need to go to our Contact Us page and tell us that you’d like to enter. Easier still, just send us an email with the phrase Customer At The Heart in the subject of your message.
It’s as simple as that. Enter every week if you like! We’ll announce the winner every Friday and send out a Kindle voucher to the lucky winner the same day.
By the way, we take data privacy seriously – we’ll only use email addresses to send a copy of the book to the winner each week and we’ll delete all email addresses at the end of each weekly draw.
Stay safe over the summer months. John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight
Footnote
Have you ever wondered when the words ‘staycation’ and ‘holistays’ came into common usage?
staycationnoun
/ˌsteɪˈkeɪʃn/
a holiday that you spend at or near your home
“Turn off your phone and computer—you’re on staycation, remember?”
“UK holidaymakers opt for a staycation in Britain.”
I used to think they were both very recent inventions. I certainly never heard of the terms before the last global recession a decade ago. Well, it turns out that both words were in fairly common usage from 2003. There’s even some research from Merriam-Webster that suggests the word ‘staycation’ originated as far back as 1944.
The other thing I didn’t realise is that the words have slightly different meanings in Europe and the USA. Americans tend to use the term for activities that can be carried out within driving distance of their home where overnight accommodation is not required. Europeans – or British people at least – use the phrase to describe a holiday that is spent in one’s home country rather than abroad.
I was invited by Rob Baldock, the MD of Clustre to give a short webinar a couple of weeks ago on Love in the Time of Corona.
Actually, it was really about how some of our clients are maintaining business relationships while they are locked down at home but still have access to a telephone or the internet.
So here’s a summary of the 5 actions for maintaining long-lasting business relationships in the “time of corona”.
John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight
********************
My Role as a Relationship Counsellor
Good morning. I’m John O’Connor, CEO of Deep-Insight. I sometimes refer to myself as a relationship counsellor. We set up and run Customer Experience programmes for large international B2B companies. Our clients are the likes of Atos, BT, Serco, Santander and so on. We also run Employee Engagement programmes and I’ll talk about one client in the course of the next 10 minutes but primarily it’s the MDs and Sales Directors of B2B companies that we deal with.
I call myself a relationship counsellor because our job is to help senior executives understand and enhance the relationships they have with major accounts. We do this by telling them:
Which of their accounts are in good shape and which are like to defect to the competition;
Which account managers are doing a good job at building long-term relationships within those accounts;
What is the one thing that they as senior executives need to address in 2020 because it’s an issue across all of the client base.
The theory is quite simple: people only buy from people that they trust. Long term commitment between two business partners is based on exactly that – a relationship built on Trust. Although B2B stands for business to business, I often say it’s really P2P (Person to Person). Organisations don’t buy from organisations. It’s people who buy from each other, even when they work in large organisations.
5 Actions You Need to Take
So keeping that in mind, how should we deal with our clients in the current environment? I’ve been reflecting on what some of our clients are doing with their customers and it seems to boil down to five things. These five actions are all based on building an emotional connection with clients and enhancing that client relationship:
1. Tell Customers how you are Contributing to Safety
2. Treat Customers with Care and Empathy
3. Communicate Constantly and Consistently
4. Treat Employees with Respect
5. There is no fifth action: Just make sure you do Actions 1 – 4
1. Contributing to Safety
This first point may not apply to every company but it probably does apply to most. Tell your customers what you are doing to contribute to their safety. After all, this whole COVID19 pandemic is primarily an issue of human safety. People out there are naturally concerned both from a personal and from a professional point of view.
Some of our clients deal with safety for a living. For example, one of our clients is a company called Survitec. It has over 3,000 employees manufacturing safety equipment for Defence and Marine clients. We’re working with the Marine division which manufactures everything from life jackets to the largest lifeboats you’ve ever seen. Their clients include cruise companies, oil & gas organisations, ship manufacturers, ship managers and so on.
Let’s take something like a lifeboat inspection. In the last few weeks, Survitec has literally re-written the manual for doing a lifeboat inspection. It had to, to make sure that it complied with WHO guidelines on things like workers practicing social distancing, the wearing of gloves and face masks, the basics of handwashing and use of hand sanitisers; on carrying out deep cleans after work has been completed. All shipments that are sent from Survitec’s warehouses are cleaned and wiped down before being dispatched.
But there’s not much point in rewriting the manual if you don’t also tell clients that you have done so. That’s what Survitec has been doing.
2. Treating Customers with Care and Empathy
Quite a few of our clients have customers that operate in industries that have been hard hit by COVID-19. I’ve already mentioned Survitec and the fact that it works with cruise companies. Now that’s a tough industry to be in at the moment.
We have another client called Timico which provides a range of IT services to UK clients. Many of these are operating in the restaurant and retail industry. These companies are hurting – both at a corporate level and at a personal level. A lot of what Timico has been doing in recent weeks is talking to their clients, understanding what their particular circumstances are and, in many cases, renegotiating deals and contracts based on the reality of what’s happening in their industry at the moment. For Timico it’s all about “providing confidence that they are doing everything they can to support their customers”.
I’m sure you have clients in a similar position. Be like Timico. Be empathetic. Go into listening mode.
3. Communicating Constantly and Consistently
Remember that communication is two-way. It’s about listening as much as it is telling. In fact, it should be a lot more listening that telling, in the current environment.
We have another client called Invenio that has about 1,000 staff deployed on large technical projects all across the globe – Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia, Africa. Last Friday, we completed a customer feedback programme for them and while there was some debate at the start of April about whether we should go ahead, the CEO Arun Bala decided – correctly – that now was absolutely the right time to find out what his clients were thinking. As of this morning, we’re going through all the feedback with the various Invenio account owners. The next step is for those account owners to go back to their clients, share and discuss the feedback, and come up with action plans to address any issues.
4. Treating Employees with Respect
You might say this is not related to customers but remember that your staff are the daily interface your company has with clients. Treat them in exactly the same way that you treat your customers. Put it another way: “How can you expect your staff to provide a great customer experience when they are not having a great employee experience?”
Now, more than ever, your customers will judge how you deal with them currently when they consider who they do business with in the future. You probably know there are lists circulating in the UK naming companies who have provided bad customer and/or employee experience!
We have a Danish client called Pelican that operates a series of self-storage facilities for small businesses and for consumers all across the Nordic region. Most of their sites only have two staff so good communication with employees is again a key requirement for Pelican’s management team. Two weeks ago, we completed an employee assessment for Burkhart Franz, the CEO of Pelican, and I’m going to read you two comments that came back from staff in that assessment:
“Since Pelican has taken quick actions during this corona crisis, my trust in our company has grown. My score is higher than before due to this fact.”
“It’s really nice in this hard Corona situation that I can trust my employer. At the moment I have no worries about losing my job or salary, like many of my friends and family. Thank you for that!”
Now even if Burkhart wasn’t in a position to make any financial commitment to his employees, he’s the sort of guy who will let employees know exactly where they stand and what is likely to happen. And they really appreciate it. Be like Burkhart. List to your employees. Do it now.
Summary
So here are my key messages again:
1. Tell Customers how you are Contributing to Safety
2. Treat Customers with Care and Empathy
3. Communicate Constantly and Consistently
4. Treat Employees with Respect
If you need a fifth message, it to spend a lot of time thinking about the other four, because these are actions that companies need to take now, not just because they’re the right thing to do, but because they make sense commercially as well.
I’ll finish off with a message from a recent conversation I had recently with Ed Stainton, who manages the major government accounts for BT including the relationships with various police forces across the country. Based on their most recent customer assessment, we know that Ed already has a fantastic set of relationships with his clients but he’s convinced that in the next Deep-Insight assessment, the scores will be even better. Ed is convinced that this is the case because his teams have been working 24 x 7 throughout March and April on a whole range of activities directly or indirectly related to COVID-19. Ed believes that enhanced contact is going to lead to better and deeper client relationships. I think he’s right.
Thank you for listening and remember: be like Survitec and Invenio! Be like Arun, Burkhart and Ed!
If you’re interested if throwing your name in the hat for a free electronic copy, all you need to go to our Contact Us page and tell us that you’d like to enter. Easier still, just send us an email with the phrase Customer At The Heart in the subject of your message. 
