Marc Annè -- Orange Business Services

Orange Business Services offered an excellent B2B case study to balance out the day. OBS is one of the world's largest B2B telecom companies with a network covering 220 countries and territories, and customer service centers in 166 countries. If you are from Europe, you probably know of Orange as either a consumer or a business telecom provider.

When Marc started to describe the complexity and size of their business, it was obvious that they had really started cracking the code on using customer feedback in a B2B setting. He described the difficulties they had 6 years ago when they started their customer experience journey...and how this has changed into a more streamlined focus through their "Outstanding Customer Experience" program. It has 4 big focus areas:

1. Transforming the company around customer "pain points" as well as pushing the envelope on "differentiation factors."
2. A centralized and coordinated client approach, with priorities set quarterly across the organization.
3. Pragmatic prioritization, based on understanding key levers.
4. And linking to operational KPIs that underlie the outcomes they want to achieve.

Next, Marc described how they have integrated NPS within their complex B2B environment. They approach Net Promoter as a discipline, and do consider the importance of promoters and detractors in strategic account planning. But in addition to the likelihood of recommendation, they also track 3 other important relationship factors within their customer loyalty index (CLI), including repurchase intention, whether the customer would choose them again, and overall satisfaction.

What they have found in using the CLI for many years (actually, OBS was working with Satmetrix using the CLI before Net Promoter existed!), is that 40-45% of the index is influenced by issues related to brand image. But the rest of the index is basically controlled by the direct interactions they have with their clients. And they have made great strides in this area, as represented by their leading position in recent third-party benchmarks published for telecom companies in Europe.

So what happens deep within the company to get account teams to engage with customers and make sure that they are closing the loop effectively? It all starts and ends with direct customer conversations. They communicate directly to the client the role of the feedback survey in their business process. Then they solicit the feedback electronically, review it internally, make individual account plans and take these into 1:1 client meetings to discuss how they can move the relationship forward. And it's a true dialogue...often, these follow up meetings result in new ideas and revisions to account plans to ensure that the feedback was heard correctly and to spur account level action plans.

Next Marc shared a great with us. Great for us...but obviously not something that was fun internally! They had a major customer, and they thought that everything was looking good. But suddenly, they lost this major account to a competitor. What was up? It turned out that the account teams had not included all of the potential decision makers in the feedback process. So when the buying decision moved to a new group, they were taken by surprise. This issue is HUGE in the B2B setting. And it's all about relationships and data quality. Did you ever wonder what is going on with non-responders? Well, guess what... it's not just the non-responders that can get you. It might be people that aren't even on your contact list! This highlighted for them the importance of having account teams get back to basics, and map out everything they know about the client organization and potential people they should be in contact with, not just via the survey, but in the day-to-day interactions with the client.

Thanks, Marc, for reminding us that a customer feedback survey is just one way that we need to communicate with our customers. It's a tool that you can use to improve, but don't think for a second that it can replace doing the basics right when it comes to account management!

Finally, Marc shared with us some NPS statistics from their business since January of this year, comparing NPS with their sales pipeline. What we saw was that NPS was tracking very closely with pipeline health. It reminded me of many conversations I have had with sales leaders over the years. They have often said, "John, if there are problems in the account and they are not happy, then they aren't going to let me come in and sell something new until we address whatever the issues are first."

I don't want to put words into Marc's mouth, but I certainly saw something along these lines when I looked at the monthly NPS data, and how that tracks to their changes in pipeline... And he points out that if you are in a business (like they are) where customers often are operating under multi-year contracts, then the linkage from NPS to results may show up much more quickly in new pipeline opportunities (since these are customers who are making an incremental purchase decision), versus overall revenue data, which has a multi-year renewal cycle attached to it.

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