Inspiring book: Menestys syntyy asiakaskokemuksesta, B2B-johtajan opas

A good customer experience is possible to build without magic tricks and huge mechanisms. The goal is to create enthusiasm to take action for improvement, begins Menestys syntyy asiakaskokemuksesta, B2B-johtajan opas (Success is born from the Customer Experience, The B2B Executive’s Guide). Enthusiasm for better customer experience shines throughout the book by Liisa Holma, Kirsti Laasio, Minna Ruusuvuori, Salla Seppä and Riikka Tanner, and also catches the readers. 

I got the book by a lucky coincidence from Minna Ruusuvuori who is an inspiring podcaster and sales executive. The book was first published two years ago and it’s still very much worth grabbing. There is also a b2basiakaskokemus.fi site and podcasts to support. I love listening to audiobooks, but with this book with many visualizations and models created by the authors, the printed version is quite handy to have.

“The book was made with the desire to help others, and to make the know-how available to others”, say the authors. It starts with the notion that all business is experience business. It’s about understanding customers, customer feelings and the importance of the memory trace. Human experience cannot be predicted, it is always influenced by individual preferences and context. Customer experience is also not the sole right of the consumer business, even though it has originally become known there. It’s about people in both cases, even though the B2B side has its unique flavour. 

For me, the emphasis on B2B customer experience is what makes the book interesting, since I’m currently working with both B2C and B2B sides in the telecom industry, and have a long history of B2C customer experience development in media. “B2B customer experience management is a comprehensive, constantly evolving activity”, explains the authors. It has to be based on the company’s strategy, solid support from top management and sufficient resources. Customer experience is at the centre of the business. “A good customer experience is not fiddling with satisfaction surveys, but the hard core of the business, which can be seen both above and below the line. It is a source of profitability and growth.”

The book offers an infinite loop of the customer experience which describes the continuation of the experiences that follow each other before and during the purchase event. On the B2B side, a good customer experience is characterized by the supplier’s commitment to the customer and the ability to respond to their needs, proactivity, ease and seamlessness of cooperation, and delivery and development capabilities.

The book describes how often start-ups can focus on solving customer problems and enhancing customer experience, although many huge companies like Amazon are also known for their customer-centricity. The real challenge comes when the customer’s needs change, say the authors.

An eye-opener for me, to the importance of acting upon changing customer needs was when, before the corona pandemic, I got to visit about 40 Chinese start-up and scale-up companies varying from media, music, and social media, to real estate business and AI innovations. In these companies, it was clear that the product or service idea could not be the only supporting factor, because those ideas were copied so quickly that the company had to iterate the idea after every half a year. The relationship with the customer could still last longer. This was shown in various ways in the actions of the companies, for example, in the centrality of courier services and seamless experiences, in customer-centric rules like that the customer should not be disturbed with more than one push notification per day, and in seamless connection with online services and face-to-face experiences in the shops with using face recognition and other means.

This is exactly what the authors write: “Almost any business model can be copied these days, and that’s why differentiation factors are more and more often found in experiences than in product features. Customer experience is therefore primarily a competitive advantage because intangible capital is much more difficult to copy.”

Competitive advantage comes with capabilities, such as the usage of customer data. Service providers that have a comprehensive view of their customer’s behaviour have a strong edge over the competition. In the B2B environment, customer experience is a more complex entity than in the consumer business. Products or services are consumed by several different people in different roles and at different organizational levels. The buyer of the product may not be its end user at all. Long sales cycles, participation of several people in decision-making, tenders, and the fact that stakes are higher. Customer relationships are also often long. Taking care of existing customers and creating a good experience is much cheaper than acquiring new customers, say the authors.

In successful companies, the distinguishing factor in the customer experience is the desire and effort of the top management to listen to the customers better and more deeply. Real-time communication with customers is needed in all parts of the organization. The book states, that measuring customer experience on a general level is a way to verify progress, but actual understanding and new ideas are born closer to the customer.

The authors present a concept of two- and three-dimensional customer understanding. Two-dimensional customer understanding is one that is created without meeting the customer, e.g. based on surveys or data. Three-dimensional customer understanding, on the other hand, is the aim to work as close as possible to the customer, for example, in product development. I find this division perceptive. I’ve led data, customer understanding and software development teams for a very long time and I’ve built many kinds of intersections with quantitative and qualitative data, and with the development, so I fully agree with the importance of a deeper customer understanding that the authors talk about.

The book aims to be comprehensive, giving separate chapters for strategy, brand, technology etc. and using experts from these areas. The downside of this is that quotations from the interviewees are short. As a reader, I prefer a way where there are fewer interviewees and they are given more space to share their views.

The book explains also the importance of emotions and how emotions are managed in different phases of the customer experience. According to the authors, good tools for emotional engagement are, for example, ensuring the halo effect, the peak-end rule and creating particularly meaningful experiences. Nordic Business Forum is well-known for the last example and it’s nice to read about the elements of NBF’s customer experience throughout the book, undoubtedly created by the author Salla Seppä. 

The possibilities of technology in improving the customer experience are very inspiring. “Dare to fall in love with technology”, the authors recommend, and I for sure have. But as the authors say: “The truth is that in many companies, the entire technology environment should be modernized in order to offer customers consistent experiences”. In my experience from different companies, top management steering for the bigger change can also be too soft leading to the phenomenon of pushing with a string, where no actual changes occur.

In the chapter on measurement, basic key figures and the importance of analysis are reviewed. The emphasis is on measuring the customer experience in real time so that an action can be made immediately. It’s too late to make a survey after half a year, authors say. According to them, in successful companies, the leaders don’t emphasise measurement, because measurement only verifies things that are already known. In these companies, actions are guided by genuine dialogue and understanding of the customers.

One highlight of the book is Sievo’s customer experience development path as a case example at the end of the book. Sievo’s story encapsulates the company’s choices and prioritization, which customers are targeted (e.g. a turnover of over a million), how to be as close as possible to customers in order to increase understanding, and how this expertise can be scaled both with the help of new features of the product itself and through more traditional training. The ways of communication and joint learning are also changing on the B2B side, and although Sievo does not yet communicate with all customers via a common Slack channel or similar, according to my own experience, it’s already becoming more and more common.

The book ends with a brilliant summary: “Customer experience is a mixture of human sciences and hard data. The data helps us identify the moments when the experience should be scripted.” And because it’s all about the actions, the authors offer a quick guide at the end of the book on how to get started.

The importance of customer experience has provoked also other books and online services recently, the latest being Asiakaskokemuksen optimoinnin opas (A guide to optimizing the Customer Experience) published last month by Media-alan tutkimussäätiö (Media Industry Research Foundation). This guide is worthwhile mentioning because it touches also on current data and AI topics like Large Language Models and customer identification developments. I find it to be useful in other domains than media as well. One of the authors Sami Kallinen is writing about their experiments with the guide in Ask a Friend, if you want to check that also.

Thank you for reading. Please, send me a message on Linkedin or here if you want to ponder these topics!