Ciena Corporation may be a B2B company, but the importance it places on customer experience is massive.
Maureen Cook is a Senior Advisor and Customer Experience Specialist within Ciena’s Network Integration team where she is responsible for the integration of Ciena’s voice of the customer program.
During her session, “Making Transformation to Customer Experience Possible,” at last week’s Confirmit Community Conference held in Orlando, Florida, she told attendees about her company’s priority on the customer experience.
“It’s a top down attitude,” Cook said. “We work it around new employees and how we integrate this into hiring and onboarding practices. The past year we focused on engagement. We have a cross-functional team of Customer Experience champions and we have executive sponsorship. We have a strategic plan to incorporate customer experience aspects and make sure our employees are aware of the Voice of the Customer. We have a big focus on informing.”
In the end, Ciena came up with a unifying vision.
“We’re now at that point of seeing how we can measure the impact of this against the metrics that matter to our customers and not the ones that matter to us. Even though we’re in this B2B environment, there is still a lot that can be done to enhance and impact the customer experience.”
Ciena Corporation offers leading network infrastructure solutions, intelligent software and a comprehensive services practice leveraging its deep expertise in packet and optical networking.
Despite conducting customer satisfaction research since 2001, in recent years Ciena questioned the applicability of traditional measures and programs in high tech B2B industries. As a result, Ciena decided to intensify its focus on customer experience by design.
“In the beginning of 2013 we faced a number of challenges,” Cook explained. “Our relationship scores were excellent and we got very good feedback around that. Some other areas we put initiatives in place, but scores in those areas weren’t changing. We’re facing a changing market right now with all the cloud services and their impact on service providers. We wanted to understand what our customers are expecting from us. A year later, we have some real actionable insights that have given us strong momentum.”
Critical to that improvement, Cook said, was the creation of a customer experience specialist team comprised of five people located around the globe.
“We defined what is the customer vision for Ciena and put a framework and strategy around that, helping drive implementations throughout the company,” Cook said. “We made sure Voice of the Customer data is properly integrated. We also created a cross-functional team focused on implementation and improvement initiatives. Our executives got very excited about customer experience.”
Cook said the customer experience strategy is aligned with corporate goals, and information was presented to various people in ways they would understand it and be able to take action on it.
“One area we’re challenged now is how well we can measure the impact of that,” she said. “We’re still in the process of putting metrics in place. How do we embed customer experience into the DNA of our company?”
Cook cited as hugely important a qualitative study that focused on senior executives that challenged some of the company’s business assumptions.
“We wanted to understand how customers are measuring us,” she said. “We came up with four or five top-line areas and we want to figure out how we can continue to create value for our customers.”
Cook said Ciena looked at other metrics companies are using before adopting the Forrester Customer Experience Index.
Cook said Ciena felt good about the first two questions focusing on the ease of doing business with Ciena and did the company meet the client’s needs. The third question focused on enjoyability.
“That caused a little bit of angst among our execs,” Cook said.
“But we went back to our research and felt good about that,” she said. “What came back was creating value for their company and creating value for themselves, personal value as well as business value, was important. We looked at the emotional component of B2B purchases. What we found was the emotional component was actually higher in B2B because of the risk involved with a higher dollar value, making a recommendation to your company to implement something and if it doesn’t work, your company can suffer and your reputation can suffer in your career.”
Cook said Ciena wants to take a two-pronged approach to metrics:
Outside in: How are our customers actually measuring us?
Inside out: What do we measure internally that relates to our customers and measures our performance on various touch points.
“If we’re not measuring ourselves the way our customers are, we’re never going to be aligned,” Cook said.
Cook also said Ciena is focusing on communications.
“We want to make sure our employees are getting continuous information from Voice of the Customer data and the actions we’re putting in place,” she said. “The company really does find that this focus and change have contributed to the success we’ve had regaining market share growth, revenue growth, and winning industry awards as well.”