Take a Walk in Your Customer’s Shoes
Note: The following is a guest post from Thomas Shields, Vice President, Marketing Program Delivery, BancVue.
An Empathic Challenge To Your Customer Journey!
All of us want to delight our customers, engage their interest and drive true customer loyalty. However, many of us are fighting an uphill battle and significant challenges stand in our way. The problem becomes particularly pronounced as we focus on growth.
The root cause lies in our perspective. There is a flaw in the way we conceptualize our customer and the value we bring them. 
We almost always start by defining their journey by OUR milestones—simply because that is what we know. “We worked so hard on delivering the most brilliant, innovative product ever known to the industry. It truly defines perfection… why wouldn’t they want to hear about it right now?” Right?
The key to an effortless and truly graceful customer journey lies in our orientation, our ability to truly walk in our customers’ shoes and see our company, and our offerings, through their eyes. Let’s call it Empathic B2B. That perspective is totally unnatural for us because we are human and, in that way, are inherently biased by our own perspective.
Great companies know how to walk in their customers’ shoes and they build themselves around that. It sounds so obvious when you hear it – but do a quick gap analysis on how well you execute the theory.
- Do you have a customer journey document that accurately captures the customer’s perspective?
- Does the customer perspective lead and guide all your B2B efforts?
- Are your customer onboarding processes written in words your customer would use, not your internal jargon?
- Does your customer have the same milestones as you do in your sales documentation?
If you start to really peel back the layers you realize that we as leaders are sending conflicting messages to our troops. The primary message is “think on behalf of the customer,” but yet we fail to truly reinforce that at any point within the cultural and operational infrastructure we build. Too often, everything we build and say is “about them through our eyes” instead of being “about them through their eyes.”
So, how do you make this shift within your organization? Here are some tips:
- Go through an exercise and document your client journey from their perspective.
- Really challenge yourself to think like the client and forget your internal bias toward yourself.
- Include clients early and often. Choose some of your best clients (not necessarily those that love you the most) and talk to them. Validate that you have accurately captured their perspective and look for that sigh of relief or exclamation of excitement from them telling you that you “got it”.
- Don’t flatter yourself into thinking that you already know best because of your past experiences.
- Enlist internal champions to help you celebrate the transformation as a company priority and to make it a sustainable reality.
Once you’ve taken the above into consideration, start with your CRM system. No system should more clearly reinforce your customer’s journey than your CRM software. Use it to improve those metrics that define and reinforce the customer perspective for your team. Use it to reduce your customer’s efforts 
on their journey, not yours. At our company, we used SugarCRM to achieve this. We implemented Sugar as a true enterprise application, spanning Customer Service, Finance, Legal, Marketing Operations, Sales, Technical Operations and Training.
We found the platform especially ideal thanks to its flexibility. We could seamlessly assimilate our customer’s unique journey into the rhythm of our business. It’s a shift in thinking that leads to improved internal processes and external relationships. And, it has shown results at BancVue.
BancVue has tripled in size since 2006, and Sugar paces the growth with new uses, customizations and integrations. We’re experiencing another period of explosive growth right now, and I know we couldn’t be successful managing that without Sugar.
Want to learn more about how we delighted our customers at BancVue? Read our case study and watch the video here: https://www.sugarcrm.com/casestudy/case-study-bancvue
About the Author
Thomas Shields is a heavy lifter. As VP of Marketing Program Delivery for BancVue, he lifts revenue and results for community banks and credit unions across the nation by managing the deployment of internal applications and the development of BancVue’s enterprise process architecture.