Latest / From Stalled to Scaling / Nobody Calls a Complaints Process Enjoyable
Transcript
- Jim Tincher, HoC: Dow's chief commercial officer once told me his goal was to make the complaints process enjoyable. I was sure I had misheard him, and then he showed me the data. I'm Jim Tincher, and this is From Stalled to Scaling Eight minute ideas for B2B leaders on growing through the customers you already have. Now, this comes out of the research behind my book, Do B2B Better. And one of the four actions of that book, this one is called Accelerate the Flywheel. And it's about measuring emotions and how that's important. Now I get a lot of pushback. When I tell a group of B2B leaders that emotions decide whether an account grows, somebody always pushes back with the same sentence. Jim, you misunderstood. We're in B2B. You're thinking about consumers. No, actually, I'm not. Let me put it the other way around. When I make a bad decision as a consumer, I get a bad meal or a non-optimal hotel room. When your customer makes a bad decision about a supplier, clearly hiring your competitors, it can cost them their job. Way more emotion rides on a purchase order than on a meal order. We've interviewed 818 B2B customers across seven industries. About why they give a supplier more work or less of it. The biggest reason they cut spending was not price and was not a competitor. It was friction the supplier built itself. Policy limitations come back 89% negative, and the most negative category in the research. Nobody cuts an order because the policy is inefficient. They cut it because of that policy, told them how much they matter to you. So we were mapping Dallas complaints process. And that's where the enjoyable comment came from. The reasoning holds up better than my reaction did. Every supplier in your category is working on becoming easy. And every one of them is focused on becoming effective. And many organizations will measure customer experience from the CXI, effective, easy, and emotion. Your customer assumes both of them. The enjoyable part is what decides where that customer goes the next time they have a real choice. And Dow had data behind it. Nobody describes a chemical company's complaints process, which by the way, try saying three times fast, chemical companies complaint process. Nobody describes that as being enjoyable, except Dow. Now that's exactly the words that Dan Futter, the chief commercial officer, used. When customers reported that they had an enjoyable experience with Dow, they ordered more frequently and at higher margin. Think about what that means for you and how you run an escalation. A complaint is a one moment where your customer is already paying full attention to how you operate. Most treat that as damage control. Let's get it over with right away. Now, ending it quickly is certainly important, no question about it. But you can end it quickly and have it become disastrous. Instead, Dow treated it as the place where the relationship gets decided, which is a completely different design brief for the same process. So what does this mean to you? Now, first of all, don't just take Dow's answer. For Dow, the emotion was enjoyability. But as I say in do be to be better, for UKG, it was confidence. By the way, Dow later on found that confidence drove different positive behaviors. Confidence matter for them too. For Haggerty, it was happiness. For unnamed software company, I didn't call it XYZ in the book, it was trust. Every one of those is found rather than chosen. So the answer is a research question sitting in your own accounts. And the reframe is what makes it operational. It's not asking how do I create confidence. It's asking what we would do differently for a customer to feel confident. Because that question is a work plan attached to it. And for example, tell them about a delay before they notice it. Give them one person who knows their account instead of whoever picks up the phone. Give them an answer that does not change depending on who they ask. None of that's soft. Those are training decisions and staffing decisions with dates on them. And that brings us to this episode's tinture truth, number 42. Nobody describes the chemical company's complaints process as enjoyable except Dow. That's exactly the words that Dan Futter, the chief commercial officer, used. And Dow proved it with data. Because when customers reported an enjoyable experience, they ordered with higher order velocity at higher margins. They tried new products. They're also more likely to try new to doing joint innovation, new to the world outcomes. So here's your assignment. It's one question of a meeting you're already having. Take the number you as a leader accountable for to your next commercial review and ask your team this: What would a customer have to feel for that number to move? Make them answer in one word: not a sentence, not a list. And if you get a bunch of different words back, hey, that's worth knowing too. Because that means nobody decided yet what are you building towards. Then the question becomes whether anything you're currently measuring would tell you if that were true, whether you're giving your customers the outcomes they need to grow with you. You can find the full research at heart of the customer.com. do be to be better has the work with Dow and Enjoyability, as well as Haggerty and with UKG, happiness and confidence. You can also find a Heart of the Customer, a research on what emotions drive the experience. So this episode and the rest of them are on your favorite podcast platform, on YouTube, and on LinkedIn. Write it or like it wherever you find it and send it to somebody in team who owns a piece of that number. And lastly, I want your feedback. What landed? What didn't? What should I take on next? And what was the word your team gave you? Email me at Jim. Yeah, heart of the customer.