Today’s interview is with Jim Tincher, Founder and Mapper in Chief of journey mapping and customer experience consulting firm, Heart of the Customer (HoC) as well as an author. Jim joins me today to talk about his new book, Do B2B Better: Drive Growth Through Game-Changing Customer Experience, what gets in the way of organisations building a differentiated customer experience and what it takes to be a B2B change maker.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Treat your customers well and your employees better – Interview with Liza Smyth of Formstack – and is number 446 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at Zoho for sponsoring my podcast this month and particularly the team at Zoho Desk.

Zoho Desk is trusted by over 50,000 businesses around the world to elevate their customer service and the team over there recently asked me to write a whitepaper for them that explores How focusing on employee happiness and customer success can drive business results.

The whitepaper is called: The Killer Combination: Customer success, happiness and the right technology.

Do check it out by following this link or by clicking on the whitepaper image.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Jim:

• Jim just published a new book: B2B Better: Drive Growth Through Game-Changing Customer Experience.
• The book is based on 200 hours of interviews with customer experience leaders in B2B (business-to-business) and B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) companies
• Only one out of 8 or 10 programmes can actually prove they’re having any impact.
• Two days with Roxie Strohmenger at Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG) and two days with the team at Dow just shadowing them and following them interviewing their teams totally changed my perspective on what good customer experience looks like.
• The three things that get in the way of organisations building a differentiated customer experience are organisational complexities, not having enough or the right people, and a lack of leadership buy-in. All of which are inter-related.
• According to the International Centre for Trade and Sustain- able Development (ICSTD), the B2B marketplace is $7.72 trillion, as compared to $4.01 trillion for B2C.
• Change Makers leverage the CX Loyalty Flywheel i.e. they show how investments in CX measurably improve the experience (i.e. reducing calls or changing customers’ behaviours) which in turn creates more emotionally engaged customers, who then buy more and stay longer, and strengthen the company as a result.
• To do that they follow four different actions:
  • They point the Flywheel by determining here is how we make money from customer experience and they tie a commercial metric like customer lifetime value or net revenue retention.
  • They accelerate the Flywheel by Measuring and Designing for Emotion.
  • They evaluate the Flywheel with Customer Ecosystem Data and
  • They grease the Flywheel with Change Management
• When it comes to surveys and metrics, change makers begin by saying what are we trying to create is a behavioural outcome in customers who want to buy more from us and stay longer now. Then, they go and investigate what actually predicts that.
• I am neither a fan nor a hater of NPS. I am a fan of any measurement that predicts what you care about.
• There’s two dozen B2B case studies in the book.
• The problem is that we as a practice within customer experience often start and end our conversation with the customer. That matters and we need to represent our customers but those customers behaviours have consequences to the organisation. And if you can show those consequences, that’s how you get funding, that’s how you get more staff leadership buy in and how you work the organisation complexity by showing what the behaviours are today of your customers and how it could be better.
• If you have less funding right now use that time to understand the drivers of the company’s success based on customers behaviour.
• Spend your time getting to know the organisation, spend your time getting to know the people that serve your customers. Ask them for data and insight. Building those relationships, both internally as well as trying to foster better relationships with customers externally is the stuff of getting stuff done.
• If I were to look at how to spend your budget, I would take 1st $50 and I would spend it taking your favourite finance person out to lunch. That happens very rarely in real-life.
• When we were interviewing people, we asked three questions: If I were to ask you whether customer experience was getting better or worse for the organisation, how would you answer it? How would your CEO answer that question? How would your favourite finance person answer that question?
• The last question stumped nearly everyone of the people I interviewed.
• However, that’s the place I would start. I would start by asking: What are your top two or three revenue related metrics that you’re reporting on in finance? What are the top two or three cost drivers you’re concerned about now? Then I would go back and see what customer experience can tell us about those things and start there.
• Jim’s Punk CX words: Outcome based.
• Jim’s Punk XL brands: Dow, UKG and Hagerty.

About Jim

Jim Tincher sees the world in a different way: through the eyes of customers. He developed the passion for customer experience (CX) when leading programs at Best Buy and United Health Group, and was an early advocate for CX, becoming only the second Certified Customer Experience Professional in the world. This lifelong passion for CX, and a thirst for knowledge, led him to found his journey mapping and customer experience consulting firm, Heart of the Customer (HoC). In the years since, HoC’s dedicated team of CX professionals has helped companies of all sizes increase customer engagement.

As an experienced trainer and customer experience keynote speaker, Jim frequently hosts workshops and addresses organizations across a variety of business sectors. Jim is the author of Do B2B Better: Drive Growth Through Game-Changing Customer Experience and co-author of How Hard Is It to Be Your Customer?, and he also writes Heart of the Customer’s popular CX blog.

Check out the new book, say Hi to Jim on Twitter @jimtincher and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash