CX & Customer Success resources

From May 14^th – 17^th, Medallia set up shop in Long Beach, California to put on their annual conference, Experience. For four days, the biggest brands, the brightest minds, and Medallia partners and customers congregated to discuss best case practices and different strategies that enhance the customer experience for patrons and clients alike. As a majority of the content was geared towards the mostly B2C audience, there was still great value presented by multiple speakers and in breakout sessions about how to improve B2B CX and CS programs. Waypoint Group, as a recent partner addition to the Medallia Ecosystem to consult enterprise customers on how to engage and incorporate feedback into their customer experience processes, had the pleasure of attending this tremendous event and there were a few key learning points that resonated we felt were worth sharing.

1. How do companies become CX leaders?

The importance of providing a great experience for your customers is has become evident over the past few years. Companies have employed different strategies but the most successful ones have followed a 3-pronged approach that has proven to produce industry leaders for customer experience. Creating Listening Posts, crafting learning systems, and ensuring customer centric alignment is the basis for forming a strong customer experience program within your company.

• Listening posts are essential because it allows you to properly capture the sentiments of not only your customers, but your employees as well. It shows to them that you are hearing their concerns and you are taking the necessary steps to act on them.
• Learning Systems are the key in turning the human intelligence that you gather into company action. Leveraging technology makes learning more about your customers easier and more efficient, allowing your program to get the necessary information moving forward.
• Customer centric alignment is the fuel to create innovation. Being aligned with your customers needs and utilizing their feedback as the base for product development creates an environment of true innovation that will be pleasantly received by your customers and prospects.

2. What is trust?

To cap off the keynote speeches, Medallia enlisted noted author Rachel Botsman to discuss the topic of trust. On the surface, it seems like a straightforward concept, but so much factors into what trust entails. If you were asked if you trusted AirBnB more than Uber, what would your answer be? Most people would say yes, but what are you trusting them to do? This showcases that trust is contextual and this is just one of the things you must know when understanding trust. To really analyze how trustworthy your company is amongst customers, you must have an understanding of a few other things:

• Have a grasp of what trust state your customer falls under – Customers are either under two categories for currency, transactions or interactions. When your customers are exchanging money with you, there is only a simple transaction. However, when your customers trust you, an interaction happens. The goal is to convert all your customers from transactional currency to interactional currency.
• Are your customers ready to take a trust leap? – Taking a trust leap means to take a risk to do something new or different from the way we have always done it. Change is scary, especially for people set in their ways and used to a certain type of product. What must be done to gain the customers’ trust to embrace a new product and take a leap? You can give them a slightly different variation that will comfort them knowing that there isn’t a completely new product they are using.
• Traits of trustworthiness – Competence and reliability are the bare minimum for the barometer for trusting a company. To really understand if you’re a trustworthy goods and services provider, you must figure out if you have integrity and if you are benevolent. Competence and reliability are traits of your ability as a company. Integrity and benevolence are the most integral parts of your trustworthiness because they showcase to your customers your company’s character. Character is what separates companies who are perceived as trustworthy from those who are not.

 

All in all, the overarching key takeaway from the conference was the importance of understanding your customers’ needs and finding out those needs through engagement and feedback, which is something that we at Waypoint Group preach to our clients. Medallia did an amazing job of conveying this point across the conference and we are looking forward to working with them as a partner and seeing the results throughout the year.