Jeannie Walters: 0:00

Hi everyone, it's Jeannie Walters with Experience Investigators. I want to invite you to a very special webinar that we are hosting for your fourth quarter. This will be on November 4th, and it's called From Assessment to Action. This is about building your customer experience roadmap. Join us at the link on your screen, which is bit.ly/CXAction. See you there.

Jeannie Walters: 0:28

Personalization is an important part of the customer experience. But what if we get too personal? Great question today on the Experience Action Podcast.

Listener Question: 0:39

My name is Ron, and I have a question about the dynamics of B2B relationships. B2B personalization can be tricky. We want to show clients we know them, but we also need to keep it professional. How do we strike the right balance between making things feel personalized without overstepping?

Jeannie Walters: 0:56

This is such a great question. And I think there's a broader conversation here about what personalization can mean. Because one of the things I like to point out is that in B2B, in business to business, we are still dealing with humans. We are still building relationships, all the things that we need to do in the B2C world as well. Now, we might get excited as a customer when we get a special birthday coupon from our favorite frozen yogurt place, or maybe a free coffee, or something like that. There are all sorts of things that happen around birthdays, or maybe the anniversary of becoming a customer that can feel very personal on the B2C side. But on the B2B side, we have to think differently about personalization. So I like to think about this as really it's connecting with the people that are part of this organization in ways that are both relevant and respectful. Because of course, we don't want to overstep. Some of this, we have to read the room. We have to understand who is this person that we're interacting with and how personal do they like to be. Some people separate their personal and their professional lives, and that's the way they like it, and they are entitled to do so. So if somebody hasn't shared much personal information, then we want to make sure we don't overstep by doing something like going to their personal social media profiles and trying to glean information. That just doesn't feel right. But if they are a person, they also have goals within their professional life. So that's how we can really personalize the situation. We can comment on things like reports that their organization has been sending out or professional ideas that they've shared, maybe on a platform like LinkedIn. We have to figure out who are we dealing with and how can we respect the boundaries that they have put up. Now, the other part of this is if we are just saying, hey, uh notice that you went golfing this weekend, cool, that's not really telling them about the value that we could bring to a B2B relationship. So part of personalizing the relationship, whether it's before the sale or after they become a customer, is really understanding what are their professional goals. How can we help them achieve those? So that could be something like noticing when they are expanding their team or when they have special announcements. And by noticing, maybe that's commenting and encouraging and building that relationship, and then at the same time saying things like, you know what, we've we've actually worked with teams that have expanded. I have some ideas for you. And just offer value. Value when it's relevant and when it's respectful of their personal boundaries. That's what builds a really successful B2B relationship. Now, we also want to make sure that we are making the personalization focused on that professional context. So, for instance, it might be really valuable to know things like their birthday, like their anniversary. That might be very valuable. But it also might be more valuable to know things like, you know what, I know their busy season, I know when things are going to be coming up that will impact their work and what they're trying to achieve. So I'm going to be proactive about that communication. By recognizing where they are, by recognizing their goals, that's how we personalize in B2B. The other thing to remember is that when we have all sorts of automated communications, how can we warm those up? Sometimes what that means for groups like customer success teams is knowing, okay, everybody's about to get this legal notice and they're it feels cold because we're in a regulated industry and we have to get this out to them. What can we do to warm that up, to personalize it? Well, we could make a follow-up phone call. We could offer to walk through it with them to make sure they understand. We could translate it to layman's terms and say, you know what, this is what it's really telling you. I still encourage you to work with your lawyer on this, but here's my take. That's another way of providing personalized value in the moment. So just like any other customer journey, we want to think about where they are on the journey? Who are they, and how can we help them in the right moment with the right information, the right relevance, and the right level of respect. That's really the balance we have to achieve with personalization in B2B. Now, the last thing I want to say here is that we live in a world where we have to assume everybody sees all of our communications. Meaning, if you are emailing a client or a customer and you're having a little fun, maybe you are going a little off color, maybe you are getting a little too personal because this is somebody you know. If you are doing that in a professional context, ask yourself, would this be okay if their leadership saw this? Would this be okay if it was published all over the internet? If you say no to that question, then you need to rethink that communication. That's just the world we live in. And it's really important that when we speak to one another, when we email one another, when we comment on our social posts, we are doing that with a high regard for who we are posting on, who we are responding to. That is just critical no matter where you are on the customer journey. So, great question. B2B is so important. B2B is a huge part of really thinking about the customer experience. How can we help them with their jobs, with their professional ambitions, with their goals, with their business outcomes? All of that can be impacted by the customer experience efforts that you put in. Thank you so much for joining me for yet another episode of the Experience Action Podcast. You know I love hearing from you. Don't be shy. Ask your question at askjeannie.vip. See you next time. To learn more about our strategic approach to experience, check out free resources at experienceinvestigators.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, our year of CX program, and more. And please follow me, Jeannie Walters, on LinkedIn.