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Do B2B Better Excerpt #1: Roxie Strohmenger

Jim Tincher Jim Tincher 09/20/2022

Being a Change Maker requires a different way of thinking, so it’s helpful to have guides to show you the way. In my new book, Do B2B Better, which comes out next month on CX Day, I provide deep dives into numerous real-world customer experience programs and lots of practical tips. But I am particularly delighted to introduce you to four exemplary guides.

These Change Makers graciously gave their time to teach me what they do, sharing comprehensive approaches to CX across a variety of industries. They focus on creating business value…and they succeed. And their accomplishments don’t go unnoticed: While I was writing the book, all four were promoted!

So in anticipation of the October 4 book release and the daylong Do B2B Better 2022 Conference that Heart of the Customer is hosting October 18 in Minneapolis, I want to share excerpts from my book here this week and next. These passages explore how our guides deploy effective strategies to create measurable business impact.

We hope you’ll take advantage of the opportunity to hear directly from a couple of our featured Change Makers, and other successful CX leaders, at the Do B2B Better conference. To help make that happen, we’re offering a special discount on registration for blog readers. Sign up by October 1 using promo code CHANGEMAKER22 to get $50 off the conference fee! You’re not going to want to miss this exceptional experience full of actionable learnings, fun networking activities, and valuable takeaways. (Not to mention the boisterous kickoff we’ve got planned for you.) CCXPs will also get 5.25 CEUs toward certification. Hope to see you there!

Today’s Do B2B Better excerpt spotlights Roxana (Roxie) Strohmenger (who will be discussing how you can become an indispensable advisor to your business partners at our upcoming conference).

Meet Roxie

Roxie is the Vice President of Customer Experience Strategy for UKG, a provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions with more than 14,000 employees. Recently, Ultimate Software (Roxie’s original company) merged with Kronos to become UKG. Shortly after the merger, she was promoted to her current VP role.

Roxie came to UKG from Forrester in 2018. There, she had led a customer experience practice centered around the CX Index, which she cocreated. It helped organizations diagnose their CX quality and identify how to improve their outcomes. This visibility into what drove other programs’ success helped Roxie bring in new practices that matured UKG’s program.

Roxie’s very focused on using the data to diagnose the most efficient and effective way to target resources to improve the customer experience in a way that maximizes business impact. She was recognized with the CXPA’s CX Impact Award in 2020 and now sits on that organization’s board. She was also a finalist for the CX Leader of the Year in 2020.

UKG links everything together

As you may have gathered, Roxie is a data hound, so she ties her efforts to the business data in every way she can. She creates specific dashboards for each of her journeys, integrating descriptive and operational data—such as account type, market segment, and how long it takes to close a support issue—with customers’ survey scores for the support experience.

She started her program in 2019, which she calls, “The Year of Foundations.” That was when she brought in a new voice of the customer (VoC) platform and focused on integrating the information from the data warehouse that she needed, as well as the value chain metrics CLV and ARR.

The data were spread across multiple data lakes but weren’t linked, so she began by tying all the various sources of data into the VoC platform. That gave her a tool to use to do her full analysis. She even tied the data from focus groups and interviewed participants to create a broader profile of her customers.

A common approach in surveys is to do a driver analysis. In this type of research, you have a dependent variable, which is typically a top-level score such as NPS, then you look at which underlying questions most drive that top-level score. It’s a pretty common survey tactic, but Roxie does this same thing with data, showing which data most tie to the financial outcomes she’s interested in, such as CLV or cost to serve.

Diving into the details

“We get them to talk about emotion. You’re not predicting a ‘likely to recommend’ outcome, but rather, you’re predicting a business outcome…

I look at OSAT (overall satisfaction) and CSAT (customer satisfaction) for interactions with a team member, and those are great. But what really moves behavior is when you bring it down a notch to the quality dimension level and map that into behaviors.

Take, for example, the knowledgeable staff member, which was something we hadn’t looked at before our work with Heart of the Customer. I sat there and said, ‘All we have is commentary. We don’t have a number. We don’t know how bad or good or how okay it is.’ So, we added expectations as a metric to the transactional metric, and now we know if we didn’t meet the expectation level of the customer.

Now we look and we can see that knowledge is a critical driver.

Their manager can say, ‘Okay, now we need to make sure that we have you go through courses, additional retraining, recertification, whatever that is.’ Now let’s monitor. Now let’s have scorecards. And to be able to sort of say, like, ‘How are you doing at the overall level?’

We never had that before. So, as a result of our journey mapping, we now have a battery of questions like ‘Are they knowledgeable?, ‘Was it easy to track the situation?,’ ‘Was there clear communication?,’ ‘Did they display empathy?’

All of those factors that we know are a CX best practice, or through the benchmarking that we did, are drivers that differentiate us relative to our competitors because we quantified it. So, we can say this is what we need to focus on.

Before, a lot of the data wasn’t merged with behavioral data, outcome data, descriptive data. So, we didn’t have that. That was one of the things that, when I came on board, I was up front and adamant that not only do I need the ability to measure with perception metrics, the quality of the experience, but it was fundamental that we would have those perception metrics automatically tethered to a host of descriptive metrics.

This can be at the customer level or the account level. For us, employee size is a big deal, how long is their tenure, how long they’ve been live with our solution, all the descriptive metrics, as well as data about the event, the time to resolve a support case, or anything along those lines, but then the sexier metrics are tethered automatically to the outcomes.

So, this gets into financial.

This is annual recurring revenue and customer lifetime value. Did they renew or did they not renew? Did they increase their wallet share with us? We have everything automatically integrated so that every time we capture feedback, all of those variables are automatically tethered for us to be able to look at that and see what the relationship is.

So, you can run the regression models, you can sit there and say that there’s an increase in confidence or decrease in frustration. We feed about two hundred pieces of data into our VoC platform, from implementation data such as time to engage, which is how long it takes from contract to when they started implementation. Time to [go] live, which is how long it took from when they started to launch UKG Pro and run payrolls. TTR, time to resolve, number of cases that a person submitted within a set time period, number of escalations, all of those behavioral context variables.”

Connecting the dots

Bringing all this data together enables Roxie to understand how the data connects. She can see how prolonged support issues impact not only the cost-to-serve but also likelihood to purchase new products, a critical component to ARR. Then she can see common points of friction, such as how long an issue can go on before it impacts customers’ overall satisfaction.

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