CX & Customer Success resources

 
Bruce Temkin of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) – the global, non-profit association dedicated to the advancement of customer experience management practices – announced today the winners of the Vendor Excellence awards.   I’m proud that our team at Waypoint Group has received world-class recognition!  It really is an honor for us to be ranked up there with those world-class companies.
We’ve been selected because Waypoint Group is the Customer Experience company that is..
1. 100% dedicated to innovative and proven best-practices. We don’t sell technology.  We provide knowledge transfer services that help companies move-the-needle, not just watch scores.

• Ask, “Is a vendor of both technology and consultative services providing me with unbiased, proven best practices?  Or, is the vendor guiding me into sub-optimal solutions because they derive revenue from software?”  Would they tell you?  Vendors that provide both consultative services and technology inevitably need to steer you into their own technologies.  This is their business model.
• Proven best-practices must lead technology.  That is, technology is used to help customer experience programs scale through automation.  Putting technology before effective program design leads to flat scores and being misled by averages:  are each of your important customers staying with you longer and buying more than they did last year?  Is your company’s rate of profitable growth accelerating?  How many of your sales people are exceeding targets?
• Not only do we understand technology – our team members each have over 10 years of software and automation background prior to focusing on consultative services – we determinedly stay abreast of technology vendor-capabilities to help our clients select the ideal software providers.

 
2. Focused on Business-to-Business (B2B) markets.  The needs of B2B companies are significantly different from those of consumer brands, largely because the definition of “customer” is markedly different:

• B2B has a significantly different purchase model.  While the consumer world is generally marked by a single decision maker, companies generally make purchases through a network of influencers, with more people involved in the buying decisions and with different agendas to understand.   Are you getting feedback from the right people and truly know the health of each account?
• While “Customer Success” in the consumer world is often nothing more than a product purchase, it is a longer and more complex equation in B2B.  “Success” is marked by significant complexity in process, people, and systems that all interact to create the Customer Experience.  How do your customers measure your success?
• B2B is often really B2B2B.  Most B2B companies utilize channel partners.  This presents much more complexity around the core question:  Who is the customer? Your B2B program must recognize the importance of both the end-customer and also the channel partners that influence purchase decisions as a critical ingredient to deliver an experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations.

 
In short, we grow our business by helping our clients improve, and then gain the word-of-mouth benefits.  We’ll never “lock in” clients with proprietary tools and technologies that force clients to stay.
Entering our 5^th year as a company, we’ve not only demonstrated our “staying power,” but also our commitment to our principles and business model.  We’re fortunate that we aren’t bound by legacy practices that haven’t kept up with the times.  We are always learning and able to evolve (again, a much easier thing to do when the when not bound by slower-moving technology).
 
Special thanks for the recognition and continuing to make the CXPA effective go to Bruce Temkin (noted above!), Mila D’Antonio (Editor-in-Chief for 1to1 Media), Aimee Lucas (CX Analyst at Temkin Group), Diane Simmons (Vice President, Customer Experience for Fidelity), Kate Woodcock (Director, Customer Experience & Advocacy Programs of VMware).  Of course, many thanks as well to the team at Waypoint Group for helping our clients accelerate their success.
We’ll continue to challenge the status quo.  More detail on the awards can be found at
http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/congratulations-to-the-2013-customer-experience-vendor-excellence-award-winners/