The DNA of Customer Experience
How to Develop and Operate a High-Performing B2B SaaS Customer Experience Organisation
Every organisation naturally operates in a different, oftentimes tacit mode that can include roles, responsibilities, teams, rituals, governance mechanisms, and more. Much of this operation tends to grow organically over time based on the organisation’s increasing and changing needs.
But we believe there’s a better way to direct and organise this growth. It provides our many new joiners with a clear understanding of what we strive for and how we work. It helps to effectively steer the organisation, holding us accountable via a clear set of outcome-driven metrics. It provides operational clarity and stability, while acknowledging the velocity of our business by allowing for quick adaptation. And it appoints clear owners for processes and KPIs.
In this article we’ll give you a deep understanding of our CX DNA — or, in other words, the narrative of why we exist, what we provide to our customers, how we work as a team, and how we measure success. Similar to DNA in an organism, we strive for everyone in this organisation to carry this fundamental and core information every day. And, with it, to work as one unit towards the same shared goals.
Why Customer Experience Exists
Customers
From the beginning, we’ve aimed to build a holistic People Operating System that allows HR professionals to automate manual tasks. With the extra time they gain by using Personio, they can focus on value-driving work such as onboarding, learning, and providing feedback. Our customers are small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) between 10 and 2,000 employees. They come from many different industries and countries across all of Europe, which means a lot of different regulatory and operational requirements towards HR. Also, there are several user personas that employ the software differently based on their respective roles such as HR Generalists, Talent Acquisition Managers, or Payroll Specialists.
All this to say, our very unique and therefore complex customer- and user-base comes with different requirements, needs and budgets.
Mission, Vision and Strategic Pillars
At Personio, all teams follow a mission. They describe the reason for their existence and help to define mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE) responsibilities. The CX organisation’s mission is to Maximise Customer Value which directly pays into Personio’s overarching one of Enabling Better Organisations.
Derived from the mission, our vision is to provide our customers with “The most remarkable B2B experience through impactful interactions that drive our customers’ success so they stay forever.” It paints a bold picture of the future that we aim to build. It emphasizes points which are specifically important to us, such as:
- creating innovative, memorable and impactful experiences
- adapting our engagement for different segments to grow healthily
- becoming experts in our customers’ work
- driving adoption, guiding on what success looks and eventually calculating ROI
- working towards 0% unavoidable churn.
Lastly, the five strategic pillars break down the vision into fields of action with a clearly described end state. In combination with company strategic pillars, they provide guidance on where teams should set the focus in their planning and day-to-day work.
What Customer Experience Provides
Customer Journey
The Customer Journey is a function of our customers’ needs and our (product) offering. It entails all the experiences that our customers go through when they are interacting with us or our product. In the CX organisation, we are focusing on everything that happens post-sales. Yet, there are also interface points with go-to-market teams, like when analysing data about sales loss and churn reasons together.
The journey should be an exhaustive and detailed sum of all customer events and interactions. Over the last years, though, we’ve learned to start simple and then extend. Thus, we are focusing on a set of core journeys shown in the table to the right.
There are defined outcomes and associated success metrics for each step in the journey (more on that later).
Generally, there are two flavours of interactions that initiate a journey: Customer-driven interactions like support requests, and CX-driven interactions like new feature updates. Our ambition is to reduce unnecessary customer-driven interactions, which can lead to more control over the steps in the journey. CX-driven interactions should always target a specific business goal.
Customer Segmentation
Our customers have different needs, expectations and budgets. To accommodate those differences, we need to find different ways to interact with each customer. To do so, we adjust the mix of tech- and human-driven touchpoints in our customer journey to three different segments. We add customer value through most effective channels, while ensuring healthy organisational growth.
Moreover, the segmentation allows us to set targets for each segment for both operational drivers (e.g. first reply times) and KPIs (e.g. product attachment). This makes it easier for the organisation to create focus and drive supporting initiatives.
(Recurring) Premium Services
Premium Services allow customers to self-select into a higher service level or acquire additional value. For example, by adding a Customer Success Manager who helps to map the status quo of the current People Tech Stack and Workflows and advises customers how to build towards a contemporary setup with Personio powering people processes. Depending on the product, Premium Services are not absolutely necessary, but can be a great opportunity for offering more flexibility for customers and creating another revenue stream for the business.
The recurring services should have a positive margin (service revenues vs. related cost) and a positive impact on the recurring software business (adoption, satisfaction, retention for cohorts with the service attached should be better). However, the latter impact is the far more important one for a SaaS.
Customer Engagement Model
The Engagement Model is where the customer journey (rows) and segmentation (columns) come together. It describes our business goal with each customer and the investments we take to pursue it for each journey. It’s also the fundamental guidance on how everyone in CX consistently interacts with different customer segments across the journey.
Our Engagement Model follows an efficient, omni-channel design where the most suitable best-next-step is recommended given the respective segment. Additionally, premium spend and temporary risk are factors that are being considered for the level of engagement.
How Customer Experience Operates
CX Operating Model
Back to the beginning. The Operating Model translates our vision and strategy into outcomes. It helps to assign responsibilities, define interfaces, steer and govern our operations, manage change, set focus, and hold ourselves accountable. It docks on the Engagement Model, as it shapes our organisational setup to be built around the journeys and outcomes we look to achieve with our customers.
Besides the organisational structure and the split of responsibilities, the Operating Model describes our organisational structure and split of responsibilities in (cross-) functions to work most effectively. It describes the recurring routines that the organisation needs to inform decisions, learn, course-correct and celebrate.
- Organisation: Roles, teams and responsibilities within the CX org to maximise customer value across their journey.
- Talent: Activities to acquire, grow and retain the talent we need to deliver on our strategy.
- Governance: Mechanisms we use to steer our activities and hold ourselves accountable.
- Technology: Toolset and the data flow between them across different teams to support customer engagement.
- Interfaces: Processes that drive bi-directional feedback and communications between CX and other internal groups.
An essential piece in the intersection of organisation and governance is the collaboration of different teams with customers. Therefore, each journey has a clearly defined business owner who is accountable for the operational success. A dedicated program manager / journey owner is responsible for driving procedural improvements in that journey in collaboration with systems and data teams. And all of them work towards the same set of success metrics within their journey.
This setup both creates clear accountability and empowers smaller groups to make faster decisions.
Change Process
We are operating in hyper-growth, so change is our daily companion. Besides the fast growing customer base and organisation, this means that on a regular basis there are new major strategic initiatives that need to be properly incorporated in our Operating Model. Let’s take for example the rollout of a complex new product or the entry in a large new market with different regulations. For either one, we need a solid change process to avoid distracting teams from their daily doing while ensuring that CX can support and adopt the changes.
To achieve this, there is a second type of program management role, also sitting within the CX Enablement team, who ensures that requirements and dependencies are collected, timelines are held and change is nothing scary but part of our normal doing. On a side note, there should be only 1–2 of the bigger change initiatives running in parallel as they otherwise consume too much capacity from teams — prioritisation is key.
How Customer Experience Measures Success
Success Metrics
Ultimately it is goals — not passes — that win the match. For each journey, it is key to have a clear understanding of the goal. That goal should be an infinite one. From that you can derive KPIs and, eventually, operational drivers. The KPIs are as outcome-driven as possible and capture success in the work towards the goal. Operational drivers, on the other hand, are more upstream and input-heavy. Think about them as the levers you can pull through actioning initiatives to influence the KPIs. Below is an example from Customer Support:
Let’s look at the Support Journey as an example : One of our goals is a best-in-class inbound support that can be measured by KPIs like Service Level, CSAT and First Contact Resolution Rate. Operational Drivers for the Service Level are Average Resolution Time, Capacity, Operational Hours and Shift Adherence. The Average Resolution Time could, for example, be influenced by initiatives around training and tooling.
Once this driver tree is defined for each journey, there is a lot of freedom and ownership for the accountable team around how to improve. It enables the team to experiment and test different hypotheses while having the same understanding of what to work towards.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
The main purpose of OKRs is to give direction and focus. While Objectives are inspirational goals, Key Results break them down into measurable milestones. Thus, OKRs should not be an exhaustive list of every single thing your team is doing. That’s what dashboards of success metrics and operational drivers are for. OKRs are limited to the most important strategic items.
We use OKRs to either put the spotlight on improvements within one or across journeys. For example reducing the first reply time for a specific segment. Or, we use OKRs to ensure that a new strategic topic has the respective attention across all teams. For example, rolling out a new product and ensuring that all teams have fully operationalised that in their daily work after the OKR period. Lastly, for completeness, OKRs are also used for internal topics around the operating model. For example the development and implementation of a new onboarding process for new joiners.
OKRs should be tied to the strategic pillars mentioned above, but they don’t necessarily need to be. However, the pillars do provide guidance during the OKR planning process as to which topics should be prioritised.
Customer-facing organisations work very differently depending on the type of product they support, the properties of the customer base, the go-to-market motion and other factors. We hope that by sharing our setup, we can contribute to the ecosystem and help other teams to find their mojo.
