Jim Tincher on Doing B2B CX Better

(upbeat music) Welcome to CX Decoded. This podcast is brought to you by CMSWire. CMSWire is the world's leading community of customer experience practitioners, reaching over 5 million digital professionals. Hello all, we're back with another edition of CX Decoded. Season three here, Dominic Castro, Managing Editor of CMSWire, here with my co-host, Jennifer Torres, she is a CMSWire reporter, crushing it on the CX scene. Jen, what's going on? - Hey, Dom, great to be here. - Happy to have you on again. Jen, round two for you, did great in round one. So, looking forward to this conversation. Let's get to the details on our guest. All right, our guest today is going to be author, Jim Tintry's customer experience, thought leader and author. He's got a lot of big customer experience ideas, so we're just going to empty the tank here. He's got to lay this book out, do be to be better. He's here to share a few thoughts with us today. Jim, how's it going? - Excellent, we're going to be above freezing today, Minneapolis, so that's a good day. - Oh, you got us beat here. I'm in sunny, southern New Hampshire. And we're not too bad today. Today we can breathe and the ears are okay. So, we're good, Jim. - All right. - Well, Jim, we like to start out by getting to know our guests a little bit more. So, can you tell us why you gravitated to the field of CX? And then could you share one fun fact about you that's not related to work? - Sure, it's actually kind of hard to answer of how I got into this, 'cause I remember my first job out of college. I was in tentative support. About a year in, I was going to visit my girlfriend, now wife, now far from your dime over in Connecticut. I said, well, I'm there, I went to my boss, I'd like to visit a customer while I'm there. And he looked at me and he said, well, why? (laughing) And, no, I couldn't answer the question. I'm like, I don't know why. I just, isn't that what you do? Is you go talk to a customer? He goes to where else? They already paid us. We don't need to talk to them anymore. - Right, right. And so, he eventually did arrange it, and I went out and visited one, but it was just, to me, the way you work. From there, I worked at a small business. And of course, in small business, you have to be customer focused. From there, best by, again, really customer focused. But sometimes you learn your passions. When you go to a place that does not share them. At that point in my career, I just naively thought everybody is customer focused. And then I went to work for a big insurance company. And learned there were other models where literally nobody in marketing or product development had ever met a client. And that was okay, but it wasn't okay with me. And that's really where I got the bug is trying to help that organization think more from the customer perspective. And that's saved with me since. Something fun about me, I'm not interested about work, is that I am known in my neighborhood as Mr. Barbeque. (laughs) We put on the grant every year, about a hundred people come over there. We do typically about 30 pounds of brisket, 20 pounds of pork shoulder, a bunch of racks of ribs. So that's the other thing I'm known for. - Are you also a side guy, too? Do you prepare the sides or someone else do that? - The neighbors all bring sides, although occasionally I'll make these killer baked beans that have no health whatsoever in them, but they're really delicious. - Yeah, Jim, I did like hamburgers and hot dogs with Fourth of July. And that was my first time as a homeowner doing that. And I retired after that. I'm happy to be a guest rather than a host for the rest of my life, 'cause it's a little bit of work. - Well, but with brisket, the nice thing is, you have hours and hours where you just wait and drink a beer. - Right. That's actually a good process. Jim, let's get into this. I'm gonna start with a question based off something you said in your little intro here. I think it's fascinating. And we're here in this more and more gen and I, the more people we talk to in CX circles. You said, you're gonna talk to a customer and your colleague said, why? I want you to answer that. Why should we talk more to customers after the fact? You know, they're already in the system. They're already paid their bills for the month or the year, whatever, for subscription. One-time product. So many people say we need to talk to customers more. You need to get in front of them. One-on-one to actually understand what's going on and not just sit back and let it ride. So why talk? Why talk more to customers? - Well, that's exactly the question I got back and I said we need to spend more time talking to customers. Feedback came, well, why? We're customers. And so we know what customers want. At the time I was leading, I started as product manager for health savings accounts and eventually created a CX role to help the organization really adopt a customer view. And the answer came back that to, yes, we are customers. We're the world's most eyeball customers ever. I don't know if any of you have health savings accounts? - Yes. - So, Dom, we thought about health savings accounts eight to 10 hours a day. I'm sure you do the same, right? - Oh, yeah, it's a top of mind for me. As soon as I wake up, hey, how much is in there? - Well, that's the thing is that it sets up a disconnect because our research shows that customers didn't think about HSAs for eight to 10 hours a year. And we were building the products we wanted to buy. As a result, we led the nation in sales, we also led the nation in churn. Not just in sheer numbers, but in percentage of customers, nine percent of customers every year canceled their accounts. We're number one, we rock in losing customers. And that's how I started to get people to listen more as by tying into the business problem. - Jim, in your book, do be to be better. You say most CX problems can't show impact, but most isn't all. So can you tell us about what you can say about the programs that do work? And a bit about the people you label as change makers and hopefuls? - You bet. We identified four actions that really separate them because over 200 hours of interviews, surveys of hundreds more, and most programs are hopefuls. They're doing good work, but they don't know if it matters. And so let's start with the first one, which is to actually show how you're improving financial outcomes for the organization. And that's where it begins. For example, showing how you're improving net revenue retention, showing proactively how you are creating a better outcome for the company. And the number one scariest part about that is to start with a conversation with finance. - Ooh, scary. - How do you do that? - Most don't know the answer. So I remember one person interviewed. The first three questions we'd ask is, if I were to ask you, whether a customer experience is getting better or worse, how do you answer it? If I were to ask your CEO, how would he or she answer that? And for both of them, the answer is usually surveys. And then I would ask, how would your favorite finance person answer that question? As you had guessed, I got cricket silence. And one person finally said, "Well, Jim, you're assuming I know somebody from finance." (laughs) Oh, yeah, you got me on that assumption. That was a pure assumption that you had met somebody from finance in your organization. But it turned out to be a bad assumption for many. Most customer experience organizations are essentially saying of their own silos, looking at their data, surveys, and defining success by those surveys getting better, they don't talk money. And Jim, speaking of silos, I mean, that's one of our editorial calendar themes this month, January 2023, customer experience leadership, fixing the persistent silo problem. So tell us about how some of those silos happen in customer experience and what CX leaders can do to break through them. Well, one of the ironies is a lot of our role in CX is to break down the silos of the rest of the organization. But so many customer experience programs set up their own silos by talking in their own language and measuring success in their own way. There is no other department inside organization whose primary metrics are survey based. Everybody else talks in language of data and specifically financial data. And we talk in surveys. Now when I give a keynote, one of the questions I ask people is to submit a CEO and say you have two project opportunities in front of you. The first one will improve your net promoter score by 20 points. That's pretty good. The second one will guarantee a million dollars in cost savings. Well, who's going to get the money? Every time the million dollars of cost savings get the money, but let's say instead you came in there and said, I have got a project that, through a better customer experience, will result in $3 million of retention savings and $2 million in cross-sell opportunities. And I've had finance validate that. Well, now you're in a much better position to get the money because you're talking in the language of the business. You're not assuming higher net promoter scores going to copy something. It doesn't always. But you're actually tying in to behaviors. In fact, by head, just one sentence to wrap up the whole book. It would be that hopeful programs, which are most of them, talk about sentiment. Changemakers, they analyze and change behaviors. And it's all about the behaviors. If you want to have more impact, you want to break down the silos, talk about behaviors, because that's what matters. You mentioned surveys, Jim. I think they're a necessary part. They're helpful. They get a lot of vendors out there who are doing great things with survey management and gleaning that data. I mean, we have our own surveys that we put out. State Digital Customer Experience Report. We certainly use them. That's a previous podcast here. What can CX leaders do better with these though? I mean, because I think there are some surveys that just don't get at the heart of what the customer is truly thinking, like, for instance, a call center agent. Did your agent solve this problem? And if the answers know, that's great in everything. Yeah, they didn't solve the problem. But they could have been a great ambassador for the brand, even if they didn't solve the actual problem. The phone isn't fixed. But I think these agents should be rewarded better and measured better. So what I'm getting at is, what's a good survey? What are some of the flaws in surveys that CX leaders use as crutches too much? Well, the first question is, does your survey actually measure anything that matters? If one of the misconceptions it seems to be that in customer experience, our goal is the customers to move their mouse a little bit to the right. That's not our goal, but that's what we're measuring. But instead, it's to look at what are we trying to understand, behaviors, and how do your surveys predict those behaviors? And the second finding I had, the first action, of course, was tying it to finances. The second one was measuring an emotional north star. Because emotions are incredibly powerful. Emotions predict behaviors. And one of the findings I had that surprised me was this notion of measuring emotions. Roxie Strohmanger, she is with UKG, a software company. She measures confidence. She actually measures eight emotions. And she can show how increased confidence improves retention, improves upsell, and decreases cost to serve. Nancy Flowers from Hagerty, she will get a confidence as a Roxie. And theirs is happiness. And they found for them, nepromotor score does predict retention and crosssell, but happiness predicts nepromotor score. And so looking at surveys, it's identifying what emotions matter near experience through quantitative research and then updating your surveys to measure emotions. It's far more powerful than nepromotor score, customer satisfaction, customer ease. Emotions are a key for effective surveys. Confidence. That intrigues me. How do you actually-- what literally do you do if you're a customer experience person to measure confidence? Like, what do you ask? How confident are you or how do you actually get that done? Well, the step before what you're asking is first to identify through data what emotions matter. And so you look at what is a loyal customer, who's a less loyal customer, who's a customer has less cost to serve, versus more cost to serve, and then you ask them a battery of emotion questions to determine what emotions matter. In this case, confidence. Once you have that, it is just which emotions do you feel while working with our company? And so what we usually do is a pick list of six or eight. That's what Roxie at UKG does. We stole it from her, she knows it. It's OK. But that's the approach we use. And we work with a different software company. And we can say that when customers are confident, behaviors are different than when they're frustrated. Not sounds obvious, right? Clearly, you behave differently as a frustrated customer that is a confident customer. But nobody measures it. And that's a big mission of ours is to actually measure emotion. So in this case, tell me what experience pick list of six or eight, you feel working with CMSWire. Now, I'm sure they're all positive, but you want to measure that. So you can say-- and so let's say instead we're a traditional customer experience leader, and you go to your product manager. You could say, "Nepromotus score for customers via product are 23, versus 57 for the rest of the organization." That's interesting, not much more. But what if you could say, well, overall, 50% of our customers are confident, only 20% of your customers are? Worse, 25% of our overall customers are frustrated, but 73% of your customers are frustrated. Which report would you rather give? And which would you rather receive? I'd much rather talk about emotions because they're tied to behaviors. They sure are. Good indicator of what's coming next from that customer, for sure. But yeah, almost everybody I know of a customer experience talks about the importance of emotions. And we get that as court of what we do. Yet, I only know of six organizations in the country that measure emotions. So it's a huge opportunity. Yeah, where people, we like things, we hate things, we get upset, get angry, and we show that on calls. But right, if you're not measuring that, right? Literally measuring it. You just have someone yelling at a call center agent. And what does that tell you? When it comes up, the performance for you like that, that customer sounded angry. Like, what's that going to do? A literal measurement sounds like a better approach. We had at our conference, Ricardo Porta from Dow, was reporting on how they measure experience. And he had a question from a challenging stakeholder, which is, what's the role of inventory in my business? And what does customer experience have to say about it? And it bleeds a little bit into our third action, which is bring in the behavioral operational and financial data into analysis. And he laid out his approach to answer that question, which involved a combination of operational data when they call in, what is the availability to promise? It's a SAP metric. How that led to a change in confidence while ordering a survey metric based on emotions, which then impact future ordering behavior, a behavioral data, and therefore future EBIT, a financial piece of data. And I'll use all of them combined to answer that question, which is that a decrease in inventory today over a certain threshold will actually impact multiple future quarters of EBIT. Incredible analysis that most of the customer experience are even thinking through, combining the financial outcome, action number one, the emotional North Star, action number two, and what we call the customer ecosystem data, behavioral descriptive financial and operational data, which is action number three in the book. Kim, you have a visual in your book that you refer to as the CX Loyalty Flywheel. Can you tell us a bit about this? And we were speaking about emotions. Can you tell us how emotions accelerate it? Sure. The Flywheel itself is pretty straightforward. It is that when step one, when we invest in a customer experience improvement, step two, that customer experience improves, follows. Step three, customers become more emotionally engaged, so that step four, they buy more, stay longer, interacting less expense wage reserve, and step five, the company gets stronger. So that there's more money to go to step one again and repeat the whole thing. OK. Now, when I will share that at conference, the overwhelming reaction is, duh. We all believe that we wouldn't be in customer experience. We believe that when we invest in customer experience, it gets better. Customers become more emotionally engaged. The company gets stronger. What's the secret, though, is how it's measured. And so we found is that with the financial data, that shows that that establishes the flywheel, by showing how it all works. Step two, the emotions accelerate the flywheel, that they help customers to get more engaged faster, because you're measuring it, so that you're able to improve financial results faster, and so it accelerates that flywheel. By identifying, do customers actually become emotionally engaged with your organization? Now, the book is called Do Be To Be Better, and I primarily use Do Be To Be examples in the book, but it applies to any kind of business. Anytime you are working with customers, those customers have emotions. Yes, even business customers. And so by being able to track that and show those emotions, you can help your organization react faster. There's a lot of emotions and business customers. Let me tell you that. I mean, there's a lot at stake. I go by a Snickers bar, Jim, and give it to my wife. If she didn't like it, my job isn't on the line. Right. But if I'm buying a semiconductor, and that product didn't work, and I didn't do my research well enough, my job is on the line. So you bet there's emotions in Do Be To Be, for sure. Well, 100%. But most of us seem to think that when you go to work, you leave your emotions at the door. But no, they're right there. And you're exactly right, because in our consumer world, we rarely make decisions that impact the rest of our lives. But at work, we do. Yeah, I feel for our B2B sales team. You know, we're a B2B company, right? So you hear the stories all the time from sales folks in B2B. You don't have to just market, provide great customer experience to one person. This is like you have to win over multiple people inside a division of that company. Like that is work to me. That is a lot of massaging, a lot of data, and knowing who is going to pull the trigger on that sale. That is such a challenge these days to find the right person. I mean, you might have a yes from someone in that organization. And then two weeks later, it's a no, because someone else turned their head. You know, I feel for the sales people. Oh, yeah. Gardener just came out with some research that shows the combination that affects the B2B sales journey is a combination of confidence and trust. Now, you can argue with a trust is an emotion, but it's certainly an emotional outcome. But their research found that those are the two central emotions in the sales process. But again, very few organizations are measuring it. Dow does, UKG does, HagerD does, a handful of others, but not very many. Let's move on to something else you talk about a lot, Jim. And that's the customer ecosystem data. So customer ecosystem data, this sounds like a lot of buzzwords that I've heard in my eight years cover. And you like combined them all into one. Hey, let's do something, Jim says. And let's just throw customer in the ecosystem and data. I'm only playing with you. I'm sure it's interesting. What do you got? Well, we look at how most customer experience teams measure the journey. It's all through service or maybe speech or text analytics. But what blew me away when I was doing these interviews is the power of the business data, which I'm calling customer ecosystem data, by building into your analysis, the customer's, first of all, descriptive data. Is this a new or returning customer? Is it one of our biggest ones? Is it one that's only using this in one product, global, local, regional? All the descriptive data. Next is behavioral data, which is a form of the voice of the customer. Are they using our digital tools? Are they using our analog tools? Are they calling the sales rep and there's a problem? Are they following certain channels? Are they escalating the behavioral data? The operational data, uptime for our products, do we deliver products on time? And then lastly, the financial outcome of that. I was talking with a health insurance organization a while back and they said, we use Net Promoterscore. It's a great. Does it matter? So what do you mean? I mean, well, do members who give you a higher score? Do they stay longer? I don't know. Well, okay, but so why do you measure Net Promoterscore? Well, we bonus on it. Oh, so you have a metric. You don't know if it predicts anything of interest to your business, but you give bonuses based on the metric moving. I'm going to work for that company because I'm going to have my mother call and say, I certainly recommend Dominic's company. And boom, there you go, money in my wallet. Well, Dom, you don't have to try very hard because almost every company I know behaves in that way. How many companies have actually validated that customers with a higher Net Promoterscore behave differently? Well, Jim, you believe that understanding how your organization measures value and connecting your customer experience program to those outcomes is crucial. Can you explain this a bit more? Sure. And it's wrapping up those first three actions together. It's looking at-- so let's go back to the example of a health insurance organization. Health insurance doesn't have many opportunities to upsell you. It's pretty much retention and cost a server. There are two key variables. Most people in health insurance organization talk about a Net Promoterscore. And the executives are focused on completely different things. Now, yeah, they care if they're bonus on it. But they're carrying more about retention. They carry about steerage, getting people to use, for example, less expensive pharmaceuticals. They care about getting people to stop using the emergency room, but instead use urgent care and move people from urgent care to primary care. If you're a customer experience leader at a health insurance organization, you need to talk about that. And how does your work help people to stop using the emergency room? How are you helping engage members so that they're willing to listen to your communications about using generic pharmaceuticals? If you're instead working for a manufacturer, your company cares about customers ordering within lead time, they care about order velocity, they care about how many different products they order, and they care about innovation. Can you show your work is leading to customers to do any of those things? Because that's how you get your executives to care. And that's the fourth of the four actions is using deliberate change management. Understanding what it is your internal stakeholders care about in talking about that and showing them how customer experience helps them be more successful. Yeah. So many good talking points in this gym, getting close to the end here. I want to do some wrap up with the motions. I think there were some great talking points about the emotions part of CX. So when you're looking at the big picture there, managing customer emotions and gleaning something from it, getting some actionable outcomes from a customer's emotions. What are the steps to get there? How can organizations use emotions to really drive better customer experience outcomes? That's the conclusion question number one. Go ahead. Great. First thing is, this is a little countertuitive, is first, determine through data, not surveys, who your best customers are, and who your opportunity customers are. Then ask them a survey question, asking a depth much of different emotions. We do qualitative research first, I understand what the emotions are, and then use the survey, ask them about these, and see what emotions are your best customers feeling versus the rest. What's different about them? Once you identify that, now start updating your dashboard, start updating your surveys to reflect these emotions, and go to your experience design group, and focus these emotions. If it's confidence, look at how do we activate confidence along the journey? If it's happiness, like for Hagerty, how do we create more happiness? And that's what the veg that comes to is designing for that experience. We're not designing for a net promoter score, 'cause I don't know how you designed for that. We're designing for a happiness or trust or confidence. - And conclusion question number two, what would you say customer experience leaders need to do more of less of? In the less of department, I'm sensing that customer surveys might be in the less of, are we over-surveying, you think? - I can't speak to them over-surveying. I don't know that we are. We're underutilizing the data into the survey. We are talking about surveys too much. Surveys have a definite role, but we need to use the data more. We need to be talking about what the organization cares about, which is operational and behavioral and financial data, and less about survey outcomes. The great customer experience programs from our research, surveys are simply another piece of data that fits with all the rest. They use to analyze what's really happening in the journey. So in the less of, stop talking about surveys. Go ahead and use them. More of start talking about what your executives care about, which is what's gonna get them promoted. And I guarantee they're not gonna get promoted because your survey scores went up. - Awesome. Well, there's a lot to digest here, a lot to unpack. I hope everyone got a few nuggets out of this. I sure did. Jan, did you get any nuggets out of this? - I definitely got nugget. - Oh good, that's good for us 'cause she's a reporter gym. She's gonna crank out the content. She gave her about five story ideas. This is all good. Jim, we do like to let our guests before they go, give a little plug for themselves, let folks know where they can follow you, get more information about your book and thought leadership. - All right, well, I'm big on LinkedIn where I spend most of my time. I think I have a Twitter account. I don't use it, but LinkedIn's a place to go to find me and heartothercustomer.com. You can get the book at dobdbbetter.com as links to different retailers. Again, it's not just for me to be. I did that because it's a less used market, but it's good for anybody. But it helps you understand how you can drive growth through game-changing customer experience. - Excellent, Jim Tinture. Thanks for joining us here on CX Decoded, sharing your wisdom on CX Thought Leadership. We thank you so much for coming. We hope you have a good rest of the year as we're recording this and a good start to 2023 when this publishes. Thank you so much. - Thanks, Jim. - Thank you, really appreciate it. (upbeat music) We encourage you to drop us a line at [email protected]. And if you have comments or suggestions for a future podcast, we'd love to hear from you. Additionally, if you like what you hear, please post a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you may be listening to this. And be sure to share CX Decoded with anyone that you think might benefit from these types of conversations. Finally, be sure to follow us on Twitter at CMSWire. Thank you again for joining us and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)