Mike Boyle:
Well, I’m about to throw the understatement of the year at you right now. We here in September, of 2021, are still feeling the effects of this whole COVID-19 thing. It’s had an impact on everything, including B2B customer experiences. Talk to me about that impact and how sellers have had to adjust during this COVID-19 period.
Megan Burns:
I think it would be shorter if we talked about how they haven’t had to adjust. Now if I think back to, so in March, April, of 2020, when this all first hit, we were all deer in the headlights. And so I was thinking, what can I do? And I just started to gather a group of B2B customer experience leaders to all be a deer in the headlights together. And back then we were talking about things like, should we still be serving our customers? Should we be asking them something different? Is that emotionally insensitive at the time? Have you seen your survey responses go down? So it was a very tactical thing.
The supply chain issues, I think have been the biggest, and not all companies are B2B, but I think it impacts B2B more, or not all B2B companies are supply chain, the supply chain issues, I work with a lot of technology companies who were like, when we took these orders, we could fill them. And then three of the countries we had parts coming from closed. So it wasn’t necessarily that they were intentionally creating a bad experience, it was, okay, this is so fluid and dynamic. What’s frustrating to us as much as it is to our customers, how do we manage and create the best experience we possibly can?
Mike Boyle:
So, I’m a seller, I’m out there, I’m thinking and I’m going, ah, I really need to up my game here with customer experience, with B2B customer experience. Talk to me about the advantages that that person is going to see when he or she comes up with a well-thought-out, well-planned, well-executed B2B customer experience?
Megan Burns:
There’s two sides of the B2B customer experience quality continuum that I think are worth talking about. B2B is complicated. And very often we run into a situation where scale as a company gets bigger, that creates problems that empathy can’t solve. So some of the customer experience issues are just about facilitating communication around a really complicated organization and experience. Those tend to eliminate pain, eliminate badness, and there’s a positive impact to that, customers are less frustrated, they’re happier, but it’s almost like the absence of a pebble in your shoe, it’s not, you don’t get brownie points necessarily for being less annoying. But what that does is it frees you up to use resources that instead of handling all of these things that could’ve been prevented, if you had been coordinating a little better, it allows you to pay attention to emotional needs, social needs, needs people haven’t necessarily expressed.
I’ll give you an example. I was interviewing some executives right now at a tech company and I’m asking them, well, what have you learned about customers that surprised you? And one of the common refrains I keep hearing is how much communication matters. They said, it’s not that they expect things will never go wrong. They know things will go wrong. It’s really important to them how we communicate and how we keep them abreast of what’s going on as they believe we’ll fix the things. But that communication matters much more, they would rather have good communication and have it fixed in a little bit longer time than have no communication and have it fixed in a shorter time. So the ability to step back and think about things like communication, things like building trust, those emotional and social components, helping facilitate relationships within the client organization, those are the things that you can free up. And that emotional relationship is what takes the business interactions really from the context of you’re a supplier and it’s a transaction to a you’re a partner and it’s a relationship.
Mike Boyle:
Some of those executives that you were just speaking about have to think about this as well, and that’s the employee experience. Can you talk a little bit about how the employee experience impacts the customer experience?
Megan Burns:
Oh, that has been huge. And when we talk about the changes brought on by COVID, many of the companies I work with provide the technology that enables remote work among other things. And so they have had to pivot really quickly as their clients pivoted while they were also pivoting themselves to have all this remote work. So just the technological complexity, I think everybody, including the people who did it, are a little bit shocked at what they were able to do and how quickly they were able to do it. And so I think that it’s created a certain confidence, but it’s also made people acutely aware of things that were always true about the employee experience and frustrations that were always there that have been magnified, or exacerbated.
One of the things we saw early on in the pandemic was everybody was sending out emails saying, the health and welfare of our customers and our employees is our top priority. Depending on people’s experience dealing with you before the pandemic, sometimes their reaction to that was, yeah, I believe that, sometimes it was like, really, are you kidding me? Because you haven’t acted like it for the last 15 years, but we’re also seeing now customers, individuals, making purchasing and relationship decisions based on things like how a company treats its employees.
Mike Boyle:
Megan, why do some companies make it so hard on themselves to create a positive customer experience?
Megan Burns:
Well, humans are very good at over-complicating things, myself included, but there’s a couple of different things that make it hard. One is the organic way that companies and organizations have evolved. We see these big giant companies now, but they started out smaller, and they added pieces and pieces onto them. So what happens is you have an experience that grew up like a bloom of weeds and it’s a tangled mess, whereas if you were designing it from the beginning, you would have put some more structure into it. So some of why it’s so hard is that we’ve, and this happens with IT too, we’ve reached a point where not being intentional creates problems. So we’re having to go back and relearn to be, oh, we were intuitively going out and we should do this and we should provide this service and deliver this kind of experience. And as it grew, it became a Frankenstein. And now we have to reset and say, all right, let’s think about this piecemeal thing that we built. Let’s think about it from a whole end to end perspective.
So that’s why one of the reasons I say I help good people deliver great experiences is I’ve worked with hundreds, thousands of people, and every single one of them wants to deliver a good customer experience. Nobody shows up to work in the morning saying, let’s think of some new ways I can annoy my customers. So they’re just as frustrated. And so looking at how we can take what was this “common sense principle,” it’s a lot like diet and exercise, a 150 years ago people didn’t really need to worry about eating organic, because that was all there was, you didn’t have to think about exercising and getting your workout in because life was a workout. Now we have to be much more thoughtful and intentional about those things. Customer experience is the same way.
Mike Boyle:
We’ve talked about employee experience and how it impacts customer experience. There’s another experience, emotional experience. I have two questions for you regarding that. Talk to me about the impact that emotion has on customers and, or, the employee experience?
Megan Burns:
So let’s just talk about the impact that emotion has on how humans experience the world, because that applies to whether it’s a business, a customer, or an employee. Emotion is a much bigger factor than most people realize. And there’s three ways that your emotions shape an experience that you’re having right now and the way you remember that experience. The first one is that emotion directs your attention. So if you’ve seen something before that scared you, and you think you see that out of the corner of your eye, or if you’re on high alert and irritated because you didn’t sleep very well the night before, things you’re going to notice and things that might bug you are going to be different. So our past experiences and the emotions we associate with them is part of what tells our brain, hey, here’s what to notice. And that becomes the focus of our experience.
So if somebody is really stressed out, I always tell my clients during COVID, if you were sending people a page long email during COVID make it five lines, because that’s all they’re going to see. Once we pay attention to that, because most of our processing happens unconsciously, emotion then influences how we interpret that. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? And that, again, it’s a gut reaction based on comparing it to things in our past and saying, okay, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Should I act on it? Can I leave it alone? And some things are really triggering negatively for some people and not for other people.
Megan Burns:
So your emotional history, an employee experience, if you’ve worked for a boss in the past that took advantage of you a lot, you’re more likely to interpret something your current boss does as being trying to take advantage of you, just because that’s the pattern that you’re used to, even though that might not be what that boss intended. And then emotion impacts how we remember, what we remember, and how we remember. The more emotionally intense something is, the more likely we are to remember it, because our brain’s going, we can’t remember everything. So let’s remember the stuff that was either really, really good, so we can look forward again, or really, really bad so we can avoid it again. And so there’s this constant cycle of emotion shaping what you experience, how it feels, how you remember that, and then how those memories shape the next experience.
Mike Boyle:
Well, there’s also an emotional impact when it comes to trust, brand and loyalty.
Megan Burns:
Yeah.
Mike Boyle:
Talk a little bit about that.
Megan Burns:
Those are all pieces of the same coin. So when you trust someone, that is an emotional response, it means you have confidence in their abilities, it means you feel comfortable and safe that they have your good intentions at heart. So those emotions that we’re having are always based on what we think is going to happen next. And if we’ve worked with someone a lot, and we have experience that says, this person has got my back, if there’s something I need to know, they’re going to let me know ahead of time. That is a less strong fear response because our past experience says I don’t have to worry as much, because that person is looking out for me. And we humans like not being stressed out and afraid. We like certainty. We like knowing that things are going to turn out okay. So loyalty becomes the pursuit of fewer negative feelings and more positive feelings based on past experiences where we think even if something goes wrong, if I’m with this company, it’s going to get resolved in the best possible way it can.
Mike Boyle:
I do have one more emotional question. What’s the secret to a more emotionally intelligent digital experience?
Megan Burns:
There’s a lot of secrets, but I think first and foremost the most important thing is to understand, which I didn’t for a long time, that the emotional experience we have of each other through screens and through audio is biologically different from the experience we have when we’re physically in person. And that has always been the case. With phones, we’re not great at identifying the emotions that someone is trying to convey over the phone, part of the reason for that is that the phone lines actually cut out the top end and bottom end of the modulation of our voice. I worked for AT&T for seven years and didn’t know that until a couple of years ago, but because of the limitations of wire transmission 150 years ago, they cut out some of the tone of the voice spectrum. So we are literally not hearing all the inflections in someone’s voice. And there are a lot of things about our gestures and signals we get from eyes, from physical body language, from the sense of space with each other, that are simply not there.
And so I think recognizing that the experience of reading something in an email is very different from the experience of hearing someone say it, that helps us think about it. So one of the exercises I did was research that showed that even happily married spouses and best friends of 20 plus years, guessed wrong most of the time the emotional tone their friend or partner was trying to convey in an email. And these are people who knew each other better than anybody. So there’s this exercise that I encourage people to do, which is take something you’re writing in an email and read it as if you were super happy. Read it as if you were really annoyed. Read it as if you were a little bit hesitant out loud, because you never know which one of those filters the other person will be reading it through in their minds. And so just having that awareness that that’s an extra step you have to take when you’re looking at digital experiences, I think that goes a long way.
Mike Boyle:
Good advice. In doing my due diligence about you, Megan, I came across something you’ve talked about, it’s a phrase called busting the WOW myth, capital letters, W-O-W.
Megan Burns:
Yes.
Mike Boyle:
What is the WOW myth, and talk about busting that myth?
Megan Burns:
Sure. And this is where the ultra pragmatic engineer and ultra pragmatic new Englander comes out in me. The conventional wisdom, the popular thing to say in customer service first, and now in customer experience, has been that you want to delight every customer every time. That is not possible, nor is it necessary. And frankly, it can be really de-motivating to employees. I have a behind the scenes advantage that a lot of my friends and family have worked on the front lines of customer experience businesses, retail, sales, contact centers. So I hear, I’ll get a phone call that says someone like you told somebody in corporate that we should do this, and now I have to waste time doing this, this and this, even though it’s not going to change anything. So I’m really sensitive to the reality of what’s on the ground. And those strive for five all the time. You know you’re not going to hit it. So why bother?
It’s not necessarily the right way to think about it, but that’s the way people will think about it. So what I tell people to bust the WOW myth is, okay, well, we need a goal. We need a goal to replace that WOW everybody, every time. And what I tell people is that the goal should be to be consistently good and strategically amazing. Consistently good is really, really hard, but if you think about it, you don’t necessarily buy from Amazon because you think you’re going to get an exploding glitter package, or some other great surprise every time, you know it’s going to get there and it’s going to get there when they said it’s going to get there. And that consistency, especially in B2B, really, really matters.
Megan Burns:
People will often say, I don’t care if it takes a little longer, I just want to have predictable delivery dates so I can respond to them. So aiming for consistently good, and then thinking about when does the wow make the biggest difference? There are times when a random wow can be a great thing, and building those random wows in, that’s some positive reinforcement psychology, but there are also moments of truth, when you’re first coming on board as a customer, that can be a time to really go above and beyond.
If there is something that is inherently, emotionally charged for the customer, maybe it has nothing to do with you, but they’re changing jobs if you’re in financial services, or if someone is new to their job in B2B, and it’s the first time they’re doing a release with a tech company that maybe they didn’t choose as the supplier, there’s a lot riding on that for that person. So being strategic about when you are going to put those resources into intentionally designing a really incredible experience, it just ends up being a better and more practical goal to reach for, and I think more effective in terms of actually generating loyalty.
Mike Boyle:
Everybody’s got an assignment out there, get out there and bust the WOW myth, consistency, consistency, consistency. Last question I have for you, Megan. I picture people out there in the B2B world, they’re worrying about their customer experiences. And we’ve talked a little bit about customer experience, well, we’ve talked a lot about customer experience here. Can we leave them with any best practice tips about creating an awesome customer experience from your experience?
Megan Burns:
My biggest tip is always to come back to who this person is and what are they trying to do? I have a little phrase, or exercise that I do with clients sometimes when we’re talking about metrics, and saying, how do we measure from a more customer centric way? And I always tell them to take whatever your target goal is, or whatever your strategic priority is, and add the phrase, so customers can dot, dot, dot, and fill in the blank, because that forces you to take everything you do and say, we want to reduce operations costs by 7% in the next three quarters so customers can get more new products faster, because we can repurpose that. What is the customer oriented intention of all of these things that we instinctively know are good? It’s very easy to lose touch with that, but I think it leads us to better decisions. And I think quite frankly, it makes the work feel more meaningful for people when you remember that this is all in service of helping other humans do the things that they need to do to be successful.
Mike Boyle:
Well, Megan, I have two words for you. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. I think everyone’s walking away with some great food for thought here for creating world-class B2B customer experiences. We could technically go on for hours here. May I ask you to come back sometime and we’ll pick up again.
Megan Burns:
Absolutely. I would love to, I’ve been doing this for 15 years and I feel like we’re still just scratching the surface. So thank you so much for having me.
Mike Boyle:
Well, count on coming back for sure, Megan. And if you’d like to connect with Megan Burns, you just visit her website, again it’s www.Megan, and Megan is M-E-G-A-N, Megan-Burns, B-U-R-N-S.com. And if this is your first time listening to our podcast and you like what you heard, make sure you follow us on your favorite podcast channel to get all of the past and future episodes. We’re on all of the platforms. And if you happen to listen to us on Apple, would you consider giving Megan a five-star review for this episode? Megan worked hard for this. It helps us get the word out about the podcast when you do that for us. So thank you very much.
Mike Boyle:
And one more thing, if you are a podcaster and you’re looking for guests to speak on your podcast about all things, Salesforce, MuleSoft, technology in general, visit our contact us page. It’s at www.@advic, A-D-V-I-C.com, and we will put you in touch with an Ad Vic team member for your podcast’s next episode… I’m Mike Boyle from AdVic. Thank you for joining us for our Salesforce Simplified podcast. Our next episode is just around the corner.
