My two girls are close in age to one another, and they often get invited to the same birthday parties. But, there are those occasions where one gets invited and the other doesn’t, and what follows is usually something along the lines of:
Daughter: “I want to go to the party, too.”
Me: “I know you do, but you weren’t invited to this party. You’ll get invited to other parties, though.”
Daughter: “But I really want to go to this one.”
Me: “I understand, but we can’t just show up at the door and expect them to let us in with open arms.”
And strangely enough I’ve found myself having a similar conversation with a number of business-to-business (B2B) companies in recent months. More and more B2B service organizations are trying to discover how to better partner with their colleagues (especially in Sales) and are finding that they haven’t been invited to the party. How come?
From CCC’s point of view, there are a couple of reasons for the lack of invites:
1) Business partners aren’t sure what service can do to assist their needs;
2) Business partners aren’t confident that service will be able to provide high-quality assistance; As one of my colleagues recently blogged regarding VOC, “… while over 96% of customer service’s internal partners say that customer service VOC is important, over 76% of them are not satisfied with the current quality of that VOC.”
And to overcome these challenges, service has to change the way they approach their business partners—instead of telling partners what service can do to assist, ask partners where they could use some assistance. In other words, stop approaching business partners with a proposed solution and instead approach them with an offer to assist.
Sounds like a simple & subtle shift in approach, and it is, but it’s also highly effective. A quick example that supports this notion of a subtle shift in approach:
A worldwide electronics company’s service organization found itself with loads of VOC to share, yet no one was interested in actually using the VOC. So, they shifted their approach and began asking their partners what questions they had that could be answered by customer voice. And with this subtle adjustment in approach the service organization a created strong partnership that generated product improvements, decreased costs, and increased revenue, too.
Win-win results not from a seismic, but subtle, shift. Wouldn’t it be nice to make great gains from little changes?
What successes have you had partnering with others in your organization (sales, marketing, operations, etc.)? And did you position service uniquely to get “invited to the party”?
CCC Member Resources:
1) Quick Hit Customer Learning – This solution shows how one organization was able to re-position VOC to be of importance to their business partners – and drive action by those business partners, too.
2) Discover “Rules of the Road” for identifying what insights your business partners may want in this blog post.
3) Using Business Partner Needs to Narrow VOC Scope – This topic center provides great insight into better partnership with your business peers.
Related posts:
Commenting Guidelines
We hope conversations will be energetic, constructive, and provocative. All posts will be reviewed by our editors and may be edited for clarity, length, and relevance.
We ask that you adhere to the following guidelines.
1. No selling of products or services.
2. No ad hominem attacks. These are conversations in which we debate ideas. Criticize ideas, not the people behind them.