How to Reduce Risk in the Collaborative Customer Experience

Transcription

1 Q&A Stephanie Overby NO. 159 How to Reduce Risk in the Collaborative Customer Experience HOW TODAY S CUSTOMERS FEEL ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE WITH YOU IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT THEY BUY. THAT S WHY MAKING SURE PARTNERS DELIVER ON THEIR PIECE OF THE EXPERIENCE HAS BECOME CRITICAL AND RISKY. HERE S HOW TO MITIGATE THAT RISK. SAP Center for Business Insight Brief Q&A Case Study Inquiry E-Book Infographic 1

2 Companies have partnered with one another in areas such as the supply chain and sales and distribution for decades and for a variety of reasons, including cost savings, expertise, flexibility, and scalability. But companies can no longer afford to be one or several steps removed from their end customers. In today s marketplace, in which the customer experience is the competitive differentiator, customer trust is the primary currency, and brand is the ultimate value, companies cannot afford to simply cede the customer experience to partners. Why? Because when those partners don t deliver, the impact hurts the brand behind the experience, not the partner. To avoid the negative impact, companies must be careful about which partners they choose. Then they must monitor and influence the ways partners deal with customers and make sure the partners bring the right combination of qualities and brand standards to the customer experience. We assembled a panel of experts to discuss how to make a collaborative customer experience work well. Anthony Leaper is Senior Vice President and Sales General Manager, Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Jamie Anderson is Director of Global Solutions Marketing for Customer and E-Commerce Solutions at SAP. Lori Mitchell-Keller is Global Head of Retail at SAP. Kerry Bodine is a customer experience consultant and author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. Curtis Bingham is Executive Director of the Chief Customer Officer Council. 2 Q&A: How to Reduce Risk in the Collaborative Customer Experience 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. NO. 159

3 Companies have long partnered with others to manufacture and distribute their products. What s driving them to collaborate more on the front end of that customer experience? Kerry Bodine: As companies rethink their business models in the context of what their customers really want, many are realizing that they just cannot do everything themselves. Lori Mitchell-Keller: Amazon is a good example. It may not be in Amazon s best interest to build a whole bunch of physical stores to compete with brick-and-mortar retailers. So in order to provide an inperson experience, Amazon has to collaborate with other stores. Curtis Bingham: It s impossible in today s business culture to effectively control the customer experience from end to end. But every company needs to influence, if not control, the end-to-end customer experience. What can companies that partner on customer experience do to mitigate that risk? Mitchell-Keller: The last bastion of competitive differentiation for any retailer is their brand. What does their brand stand for, and how do customers feel about that brand? So they have to make sure that partners understand and can execute on the tenets of that particular brand. When you let go of owning the customer interaction from end to end and feed it to a third party, unless that partner has as much invested in delivering a good customer experience as you do, it s not going to happen. Bodine: Picking the right partner hinges on having a deep understanding of who your customers are, what they value, and what they need and want on both functional and emotional levels. You don t get that from a survey. It requires ethnographic research and going into customers homes or offices to see how they live or work. Only when you re armed with that understanding can you determine which partners will help you best deliver on what your customers need. How risky is it to collaborate with a third party on that last mile of the customer experience? Mitchell-Keller: Customer trust is the key currency today. When the trust begins to break down across the different interaction points, companies run the risk of moving backward in terms of market share instead of moving forward. Bingham: Partner relationships have always been a challenge for companies. But now that they are partnering on the front end, those issues are suddenly transparent to the customer. Customers don t care who owns what parts of the value chain. They have a deal with you, the retailer, and they hold you accountable. The customer s social and financial contract is with the company, not with whoever is standing there at the last mile. Companies also have to change the way they evaluate potential partners. In partner or vendor evaluations, there s usually a cost component. If company A can provide an additional service for less than company B, it s easy for executives to decide to work with company A. But if that company can t provide a great customer experience, or if it has a brand that does not align with yours, it doesn t make sense to pick company A as a partner. You have to make sure the corporate objectives are aligned. Bingham: You wouldn t hire an employee in your call center who doesn t represent your company well. So why would you partner with a company that doesn t share your values? In the world of the ever-connected customer base, you cannot afford to damage the end-customer relationship. You need to be very selective in choosing partners that are not only going to sell your product but that can also create a powerful customer experience in line with your objectives. Anthony Leaper: You have to incentivize the collaborative customer experience chain so that it cares about the role it plays in promoting your brand. Mitchell-Keller: Very tight contractual agreements that have a pay-forperformance element should work well. Everyone is motivated by what generates revenue for them. NO SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. Q&A: How to Reduce Risk in the Collaborative Customer Experience 3

4 Haven t brands relied on third parties to deliver their products to consumers in more traditional ways for some time? How is this different? Jamie Anderson: It s true that big brands, particularly in the consumer products space, have not really owned the customer relationship at all. They have relied almost solely on big-box retailers to deliver the products, which kept them one step removed from the customer. Over the past several years, however, that relationship has been fundamentally changed by social media. Customers today expect to engage directly with their favorite brands. How can companies make it clear what they expect from their partners in terms of the customer experience? Bingham: Partners are viewed by many companies as a necessary evil. The companies think, If we re big enough, we ll simply dictate the terms and performance measures. But there s no trust. There s no partner engagement. The partners will resent being dictated to and, in most cases, won t even let the company access their data. The key to a great customer experience in a partner environment is to focus on partner engagement. Companies need to change their attitude and behavior toward their partners so that they treat them as well as they treat their customers. It s the exact same principle. If there is no partner engagement, the company has limited ability to influence the customer experience at the far end. Are there lessons from supply chain partnerships that can be applied to customer service collaboration? Bingham: If you think back to the old supply chain days, the big companies simply dictated how and when and at what volume their partners were going to supply their widgets. But over time they realized the value of integrating and collaborating with suppliers. Companies need to think about doing the same thing with their demand chain as they have done with their supply chain. It s about inviting their partners to integrate to better serve the customers, and it s about creating incentives for doing so. How can companies best incentivize their partners to deliver a good customer experience? Bingham: Over the last several years, Cisco created a channel partner program, offering free training, tools, and support to its customer-facing partners. It s brilliant what Cisco is doing. It is essentially acting as a thirdparty consultant to its partners, saying, Look, we have developed all of these programs for serving our own customers. Would you like us to come in and teach you how we do it? Because those partners then start using Cisco s systems and metrics, Cisco can easily share and compare data and analysis. It can use that data to prove the efficacy and the financial rewards of the partnership. It has been able to prove that an improved focus on the customer is significantly beneficial to its partners. And in doing so, Cisco has created trust. And it can evaluate the performance of its partners on matters pertaining to the customer experience, not just on sales volumes. That s how a company creates a true partnership rather than just another sales channel. 4 Q&A: How to Reduce Risk in the Collaborative Customer Experience 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. NO. 159

5 Stephanie Overby is an independent writer and editor, focused on the intersection of business and technology. There s More. TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW COMPANIES ARE REDUCING THE RISK IN THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, READ THE IN-DEPTH REPORT THE COLLABORATIVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: WHY YOU CAN T GO IT ALONE ANYMORE. The SAP Center for Business Insight is a program that supports the discovery and development of new research-based thinking to address the challenges of business and technology executives. NO SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. Q&A: How to Reduce Risk in the Collaborative Customer Experience 5

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