Customer Engagement
Insights and Best Practice

Learn how Key Account Managers are making positive impacts, solving real problems for their customers, and building best practices inside their organizations.

The Best Offense is a Good Defense: Why Key Account Management is Your Best Strategy Right Now

Let’s face it: Now is a hard time to win new business. Across…

July 6, 2020/by Alex Raymond

Why Customer Engagement is Everything Right Now

Customer engagement is always important, which is why we write…

June 29, 2020/by Alex Raymond

How Key Account Management Software Can Make You a More Effective Client Services Director

By the time you’re the Director of Client Services for an organization,…

June 22, 2020/by Kelly Sharp

Key Account Management and Account Based Engagement: A Seamless Customer Journey

Customers are demanding more and more personalization. This is…

June 15, 2020/by Alex Raymond

Your Key Account Management Tech Stack (and Tech Hacks)

There are 3 pillars to building a truly customer-centric Key…

June 8, 2020/by Ben Blasko

Key Account Management for Cross-Functional Teams: Building Engagement with Internal Teams

Key Account Managers are the quarterback of their team—and…

June 1, 2020/by Kelly Sharp

What Your Clients Really Want – and How Key Account Management Delivers

In 2018, CSO Insights, the research division of the Miller Heiman…

May 25, 2020/by Alex Raymond

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Defining the New Normal: Updating your Voice of Customer in the Time of COVID

August 10, 2020/in Key Account Management /by Kelly Sharp

The COVID crisis has forced many organizations to operate reactionally since early this year. And while the crisis is by no means over, it has become the new normal in some ways. Which means it’s time to pause, take a breath, and make the transition from reactive to proactive thinking.

Last week, we talked about updated SWOT analyses for you and your customers—understanding how COVID has presented external opportunities and threats, and using those as a lens to examine strengths and weaknesses within yours and your customers’ organizations.

This week, we’re tackling Voice of Customer in the time of COVID—specifically, how to check in with your clients to make sure you understand how the crisis is impacting them, and what you can do to help them weather the storm. (Because remember, if they do, you do, too.)

Voice of Customer Refresher

Voice of Customer (VOC) is a term that describes your customer’s feedback about their experiences with and expectations for your products or services. It focuses on customer needs, expectations, understandings, and product improvement.

At the end of the day, it’s a fancy way of saying you need to check in with your customers to make sure the relationship is meeting their needs and expectations. The very act of asking can promote customer engagement— and listening and following through/delivering on the needs you uncover is where you really seal the deal.

Voice of Customer interviews can be conducted in one of 2 main ways: A survey or a face-to-face interview. Each has their place. A well-designed survey can take 5-10 minutes of a customer’s day and answer a lot of quick questions. Surveys can be a good way to collect similar information from several customers, generating quantitative trends across a whole portfolio of business. They can even be a good way to prepare for an interview, getting some logistical questions out of the way so you have the information you need to dive deep into more qualitative, nuanced questions.

Face-to-face interviews—whether as focus groups or 1:1 meetings—are the best way to answer questions that aren’t easily answered in multiple choice or yes/no formats. They bring a personal touch and demonstrate a high level of commitment on your part. They also present the chance to read between the lines—to see where a client hesitates or lights up, nods their head or loses interest. And in the time of COVID, we think interviews are the way to go. Zoom fatigue aside, people are missing social connections, and this is a great way to get face time the best way we can right now.

COVID: VOC Questions

1) How are you doing?

We hope this is obvious, but it’s important to start by understanding the way the pandemic itself has affected your customers on a personal level. Some people are fine—their jobs are secure, their families are safe. Some people are facing real economic or personal uncertainty; others are parenting 2 small children without childcare while still trying to keep up with work. Still others have been ill themselves, or have, worst case, lost family members. It’s been a hard year for everyone and it’s important to understand the mental space your customers are in before you dive straight into business talk.

Understanding how COVID affects your clients personally is important because (a) your customers are human beings, not just walking revenue potential, and (b) you don’t want to barrel in like a bull in a china shop, acting tone deaf and trying to push, say, additional business risk on a person who doesn’t even feel like they can safely go to the grocery store. Pause and listen, read the room, and proceed from there.

2) What are the key business challenges you’re facing?

In addition to personal impact, it’s key to assess the economic impact on your customers—and of course, their customers. If your customer works in the travel and hospitality industry, you have hopefully already had several conversations about how to pivot in this crisis.

Even for industries where the impact is positive—for example, if your customers work in telecommunications—the crisis will necessarily have changed the challenges they face. Maybe in lieu of revenue dips, they’re facing the need to expand capacity quickly. Maybe they need to ensure PPE for public-facing teams. Whatever their struggles, you’ll understand them better if you ask proactively.

3) What potential changes are you considering to your business model or strategic plan?

The only way you can plan for your customers is to know what they’re planning themselves. If they already have a strong plan in place, you can proactively help execute. If they don’t know the path forward, your team can dive in, offering valuable outside perspective and ideas. Just make sure to ask, so you don’t come back to them with 3 great ideas they’ve already thought of themselves.

4) How can we help?

Again, Voice of Customer is primarily about understanding your customer’s goals and expectations, to make sure you’re proactively engaging customers and strengthening the relationship. Just like anything, the best way to find out what they need from you is to ask.

Conclusion

COVID is changing everything—but that doesn’t mean the same systematic approach to customer engagement won’t serve you now. In fact, the practice of active engagement is even more important—more than ever, you can’t assume you know what your customers need. If everything’s changing for them, it’s changing for you as the entity that serves them.

So take a breath, step into the new normal, and revisit your VOC. Whether you use a survey or an interview or a combination of both, they’ll appreciate your proactivity, and you’ll come out of it with clear strategic objectives for the year ahead. To see how Kapta can help you stay on top of your VOC work, in a crisis and beyond, schedule a personal demo today.

Key Account Managers: Updating your SWOT Analysis in the Time of COVID

August 3, 2020/in Key Account Management /by Alex Raymond

This week and next, we’re tackling the topic of defining the new normal for you and your customers in the time of COVID. This week, we’ll talk about the SWOT analysis as a tool for navigating the crisis with a big-picture mindset.

Companies who can respond effectively to the immediate crisis while simultaneously planning for the future will be the ones who land on their feet—and hit the ground running when it’s all said and done. A SWOT refresher can help you do both.

SWOT Refresher

A SWOT analysis examines Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses are internal; Opportunities and Threats are external.

SWOT analyses are best done as a workshop; they’re the kind of analysis where brainstorming as a group tends to prompt more and better thinking from everyone involved. SWOT works best with input from stakeholders across the organization: For example, representatives from HR may have valuable insights on strengths (strong talent pipeline) or weaknesses (high turnover); key account managers can speak to client engagement; R&D will know your internal pipeline; marketing may have a good handle on competitive threats.

Of course, COVID has, among other things, disrupted our ability to host interactive workshops with multiple key stakeholders. But Zoom has effective mechanisms in the meantime, including breakout rooms. When the time comes to host your SWOT workshop, consider dividing up the team and letting each breakout room complete their own SWOT analysis, then share back to the broader group. You can learn from both the common denominators—what everyone includes—as well as the outliers.

The ultimate goal of a SWOT analysis isn’t just to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, but also to develop an action plan that harnesses your strengths and opportunities to address key weaknesses and threats. You can’t correct everything, but you can get it all out on the table and decide as a team what you’re going to prioritize in the coming year.

COVID: Strengths and Weaknesses

One of the first things you’ll want to examine here is your customer engagement. If you’ve been diligently investing in key accounts this whole time, you should find that your existing customer base is solid and reliable—and that’s a huge strength in an economic downturn. However, if you’ve been more focused on landing new business vs growing existing accounts, you may find that (a) your pipeline has dwindled in the recession, and (b) your existing accounts are at risk of churn. That’s definitely a weakness, but the good news is, it’s not too late.

For companies who identify customer engagement as a weakness, the next move is to see how you can double down on existing accounts in the next few months. How can you reallocate resources? What tech makes sense in this context? (Hint: It’s not your CRM.) To learn more about how to prioritize customer engagement in a recession, check out this recent post.

Another important internal strength or weakness to consider is your own agility as a company. Are you able to respond rapidly to changes in your own or your customers’ needs? Smaller companies may find size is an asset in this environment, whereas larger companies may find it more difficult to be light on their feet.

COVID: Threats and Opportunities

COVID is clearly an external force. As such, it falls on organizations to consider the opportunities and threats it presents.

The threats are clear: Major disruptions in the economy. Reduced spending in both the consumer and B2B worlds. Not to mention potential health risks for your team, depending on the kind of work you do (for example, if you run a meat processing facility), and even potential burnout for employees who are parents of young children, working from home with limited child care.

But what are the opportunities? If business is slow, but you have enough savings or grant/loan funds to keep paying your staff, perhaps you can take this time for some concentrated technology upskilling. Assign different cohorts to different enterprise platforms, with the goal of adding to every person’s tech proficiency so you can work more efficiently down the road, or offer more sophisticated POVs to your customers. Or cast a wider net, using this time for professional development in general.

Another major opportunity is that COVID has forced many companies to shift to remote work—suddenly and completely. Many organizations are surprised by how well it works—and also by the specific questions and challenges that come up. The COVID crisis is a chance to refine your remote work policies and practices. Gather some key stakeholders from your organization to reflect on what’s worked well, and what you miss about the office, with the goal of creating a plan moving forward that makes the most of facetime and remote time. Among other things, you may find an opportunity to boost employee satisfaction and retention—while mitigating your carbon footprint—over the long haul.

Updating SWOT for Your Customers

You should be updating your SWOT, and if you’re a B2B product or service provider, you should be reaching out to your key accounts to conduct a SWOT update with them, too. Here’s what we suggest: Run an internal SWOT update to spark ideas, talk through some global implications of the crisis, and get the gears turning so you’re warmed up and ready to add value in your customer-facing SWOT. You can also practice the Zoom nuances (breakout rooms, etc) so you’re able to conduct a more seamless online workshop when the time comes.

Your SWOT analysis has changed, and as a result, so have your strategic priorities. The same is true for your customers, and the more you know about their situation, the better you can proactively address their weaknesses and threats. This is one way to build your own customer engagement—which, remember, is a huge strength in an economic downturn.

For Kapta users, updating your customer SWOT will be seamless—just use the built-in SWOT tool. The output of your workshop will then remain visible to the entire team as they work through new action items for your clients.

Conclusion

COVID is changing everything—but that doesn’t mean the same systematic approach to problem-solving that’s always served you and your customers won’t also serve you now. So take a breath, step into the new normal, and revisit your own SWOT analysis—then reach out to your customers to do the same for them. They’ll appreciate your proactivity, and you’ll come out of it with clear strategic objectives for the year ahead. To see how Kapta can help you build a SWOT analysis for your customers, schedule a personal demo today.

Notes from the Other Side: 5 Ways to be a Great Client

July 27, 2020/in Customer Engagement /by Kelly Sharp

We talk a lot about putting customers first, and that’s because we truly believe in customer-centricity as the path forward for B2B (and B2C) organizations. True customer engagement—knowing your clients, understanding their needs, and placing those needs ahead of your own—is the means by which B2B companies move from vendor to strategic partner.

The benefits of this for the provider are certainly clear: More revenue. More organic growth. A profitable and resilient business model. But the idea is that the relationship is, indeed, mutually beneficial; in a high functioning customer-vendor relationship, both parties succeed.

On this blog and elsewhere you’ll find a wealth of information on how to be a good B2B provider—but it’s less often you see people exploring how to be a good B2B customer. And that’s actually really, incredibly important, because at the end of the day, it takes two to build the kind of relationship that elevates both organizations. (And we hate to break it to you, but you aren’t always right.)

So this week we pause to take a look from the other side: What does it take to be a great customer?

The big picture goal is to build a powerful team, and inspire the absolute best work possible from all your partners. And while those partners certainly have their fair share of work to do, clients must also do their part. Here are 5 ways to be a great client:

Share what you do know.
Know what you don’t know.
Be descriptive, not prescriptive.
Be curious.
Mind the social contract.

1) Share What You Do Know

Your partners can do better work when they know the full picture, period. They should be asking; you should be sharing.

Culturally, it’s about transparency and collaboration. Once your partner signs the NDA, expect them to dig in and ask questions about not only the specific task at hand, but also the overall picture of what your organization is trying to do. They can complete even the smallest task more effectively when they understand what it’s all leading up to.

Logistically, it’s about setting aside time for partner education. This will be a big lift in the onboarding period. Make sure you plan on a few in-depth sessions to answer questions, and set up SME downloads from people in different capacities and departments in your organization. If you plan for an intensive onboarding, you won’t feel the burden as much, and trust us: It’s worth it in the end.

Once onboarding is over, you’ll still want to keep your partners appraised of changes in your organization or landscape, including personnel changes, new product or service offerings, new competitive threats, changes in regulation, changes in internal strategy, and more. Expect your partner to be watching the landscape, too, but don’t engage in trick questions: If you know the answer, share it.

2) Know What You Don’t Know

As a writer, I’m often jealous of my art director and web designer friends. Everyone knows they don’t know how to code a website or build an app. But people are generally less aware of their limitations as writers. They think, “Here I am, writing right now. All I need is a keyboard and the word ‘utilize.’”

So let me just tell you the truth since this is a relatively anonymous space: You probably are a functional writer. And you’re probably not as good as a professional writer. (In fact, if you’ve used the word ‘utilize’ more than once already today, stop what you’re doing and go find a copywriter.) There are lots of things you aren’t for a living, and that’s okay—that’s why you hired people who are. No matter what service or product you’re buying from your partners, it’s good to remember the reason you hired a vendor in the first place is for their added expertise and/or capacity. So once they’re on board, let them do their job.

The major risk here isn’t that you’ll annoy a copywriter. (It’s actually kind of fun to annoy a copywriter.) The main risk is you’ll compromise the quality of the work and you’ll miss out on some of the major value-add of bringing on a 3rd party teammate in the first place.

Consider this analogy: If you go to a nice restaurant, you should expect good food. You should expect to order what you want, make special requests, and get what you asked for. It should be better than you could have made it yourself, and you shouldn’t have to do dishes. But you shouldn’t expect to walk back into the kitchen with your server and tell the Sous Chef, “I actually cook a little at home, so I’ll do the sauce and you can take it from there”—and then expect them to produce a delicious plate of food.

Choose a nice restaurant. Keep your expectations high. And stay out of the kitchen.

3) Be Descriptive, Not Prescriptive

Piggybacking on the idea above, you don’t have to solve every problem for your partners—that’s why they’re there. But you do need to make it clear what problem you’re trying to solve, how it fits into the big picture, and what the parameters are so they can apply their thinking.

Description vs prescription is key in 2 ways: Project kickoff and periodic feedback. It helps to have a clear brief when you engage with your partners, outlining: The big picture goal, the immediate objective, mandatories (do’s and don’ts), timing, and budget. Aside from the parameters you know to be immovable, leave the brief open ended enough for people to think creatively about how to meet your needs. If you can resist the temptation to be prescriptive, you may be pleasantly surprised at what comes back. That said, if you know exactly what you want, obviously it’s okay to say so (again, no trick questions!), but know that the more prescriptive you are up front, the less you should reasonably expect to be surprised-in-a-good-way by what comes back.

Feedback is also a place to balance prescription and description. I often tell junior writers that if someone tells you it’s not working, they’re definitely right. When they tell you how to fix it, they might be wrong. In other words, you can and should say if you aren’t happy with the first round of a deliverable from any provider, whether it’s a product, a software configuration, a marketing campaign, or any other bespoke service. But try as much as possible to stick to why it’s not working, i.e why it’s not achieving the intended objective from the brief; avoid diving too far into how to fix it.

You should also ask yourself, when you see something unexpected: Is this actually not fulfilling the objective? Or is it just not what I expected to see? Again, this is all about leaving space for other people to bring their expertise to the table so you get the most from the partnership.

4) Be Curious

Remember, you’re entrenched in your job and your organization, and that’s how it should be. Part of the value of outsourcing work isn’t just capacity—it’s perspective. So if your 3rd party partners are telling you something you’re finding hard to hear, that’s exactly when you should listen most closely.

At the end of the day, partners who push back diplomatically and constructively are more valuable than those who just say yes to you all the time. You should never feel attacked. But if you feel uncomfortable, that’s probably a good thing.

And in general, if you find yourself struggling with any decision or action internally, ask yourself whether a 3rd party partner—especially one who understands your business deeply and works hard on your behalf—might have an opinion to share. Sometimes being just 2 steps removed makes all the difference in perspective.

5) Preserve the Social Contract

This is just a friendly reminder that your partners are people, too. Sure, the business contract makes you more important. But the social contract says you are both professionals working towards the same goal. Too often, clients forget that—and the relationship gets toxic.

Another way to think of it is that it seems on the surface from the way money flows that you are on DIFFERENT teams. And technically, that’s true. But in reality your partners are on your team, and you should strive to manage, lead, and inspire them just as you would an internal team. If you set it up as a rivalrous or resentful environment, you simply won’t get the best work possible. Not because your partners are being punitive, but because nobody works as well as they could if they’re not working in a supportive, mutually respectful environment.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the most successful B2B partnerships are those driven by true customer engagement. That means your 3rd party providers are taking the time and making the effort to understand what you need; they’re defining clear action plans to meet those needs; they’re checking in regularly to track metrics and refine their approach as needed. They are courteous, sincere, and professional. They do great work.

We encourage customers to maintain high expectations of their providers—and we also occasionally encourage them to step back and examine their own contribution to the relationship. Generally speaking, the more you make space for your partners to bring their expertise and thinking to the table, the better work you’ll get from them, and the more value you’ll get from the relationship.

If you’re a client service provider and this resonated with you, stay tuned for more content on how to educate your clients—how to help them help you. And to see how Kapta helps you hold up your end of the bargain, schedule a personal demo today.

Customer Engagement
Insights and Best Practice

Defining the New Normal: Updating your Voice of Customer in the Time of COVID

Key Account Managers: Updating your SWOT Analysis in the Time of COVID

Notes from the Other Side: 5 Ways to be a Great Client

How Key Account Management Supports an Execution Mindset

It’s a Small World After All: 7 Industries Where Key Account Management is King

The Best Offense is a Good Defense: Why Key Account Management is Your Best Strategy Right Now

Why Customer Engagement is Everything Right Now

How Key Account Management Software Can Make You a More Effective Client Services Director

Key Account Management and Account Based Engagement: A Seamless Customer Journey

Your Key Account Management Tech Stack (and Tech Hacks)

Key Account Management for Cross-Functional Teams: Building Engagement with Internal Teams

What Your Clients Really Want – and How Key Account Management Delivers