When we asked Tina about the secret of their success, she was clear that none of it would be possible without commitment from the top to drive buy-in throughout the organisation.

“The fundamental reason we've gone from -27 to +30 is about senior leadership, governance, and buy-in from senior leadership and operational teams all the way down to frontline colleagues. If you don't get that buy-in from the top, their sponsorship, talking about it, you're never going to move a score.”

Without that passion from the top, it’s very hard to drive through customer-centric change.

When survey results showed that one of the things customers wanted was a more visible presence from senior leaders within the business, this resulted in an immediate call to action for the executive team to be more visible when it came to customer relationships. And customers have noticed:

The core of Mitie’s approach to customer insight is an annual NPS survey with senior clients. Some wanted to increase the frequency of the survey, but Tina, rightly, feels that it doesn’t make sense to repeat a relationship survey too often.

“You need to give yourself a chance to act because what these guys will tell you will be quite strategic, quite long term impact; it’ll be about your relationship, how you manage your contract. If you go out more than once a year, you're not really giving yourself a chance.”

With any customer research it’s essential that the survey gets to the right people, and that it asks the right questions, but in the B2B world it’s particularly important to make sure the survey is positioned correctly with customers, and that the outputs are used actively as part of account management and development. That starts with the communication that goes out to customers before the survey to warm them up.

Tina says: “The point for me is that the survey has to be about the actions, it’s not about the survey by itself. The work that goes on before is as important as the survey itself. One of the lessons I’ve learned is that the pre-comms to customers is critical, letting them know what's happening.”

In the future, Tina is making plans to expand that core NPS relationship survey into a programme that covers all end users at every touchpoint:

“We've got big plans, and technology's at the heart of that. We want to build a touchpoint plan with customer measurement everywhere. We've just put live a pilot on our handheld devices in our Technical Services business with our engineers, so that at the end of a job, they ask for feedback on the performance of that job. We've never done that before. I know from my days at Premier Inn that if you can make those links to specific customers, you change behaviours. We are also busy deploying NPS surveys in Apps that we are developing - again taking every opportunity to capture feedback where possible.” 

We find again and again that getting the right combination of relationship and event-driven customer insight is the secret to really cementing the momentum of customer experience improvement programmes. It can be a really powerful force that shapes the culture of the organisation and helps staff throughout the business to understand their role in the customer experience.

There can be a real Catch-22 in customer insight, that it is either too centralised, or too splintered and ad-hoc. The secret, we believe, is to centralise the planning and organisation of a customer insight programme, making sure that it is approached consistently wherever it is needed and that organisation-wide initiatives can be taken, but to make sure that the information is very rapidly disseminated to the people who need it.

Tina says: “It’s not just about the individual accounts, I call it the ‘Mitie mothership’. What are the things that we're doing collectively across Mitie that are adding value, or conversely making it hard to do business? The lessons learned from 2019 were applied systematically across Mitie to deliver change.”

This is a really important principle of using customer insight to improve—don’t just communicate actions to the teams at the frontline who need to make change, but get them the data and the insight that they need to understand customers.

Tina adds: “I strongly believe that if you operationalise insight and you give it to the people to whom it matters most, that's how you make magic happen. What is the purpose behind doing insight and research if it's not to help our people on the frontline and colleagues drive a better experience for customers?”

In a B2B organisation, that usually means the account teams who are responsible for managing relationships with customers. In order to effectively act on customer insight, you need to create an environment of transparency, accountability, and support.

“Once we have the data, we act. We give them dashboards, we present the feedback to the account teams and help them understand what the key issues are, and then work with them to implement plans against those. It all comes back to how do you then close the loop back with a customer that says, ‘We've heard this, this is what we're doing about it’? The Mitie account leads are some of the best account leads I've ever worked with in my career. They’re really action-oriented, they listen. Some of the action-planning I’ve seen is best in class stuff they're doing on the back of what the customers have told them.”

In one particular case, with a key account that had started with an NPS of -33, the team worked on customer feedback from surveys persistently for two years, using a “You said, We did” model in every meeting to update on progress. That account’s score is now +73: a remarkable testament to the truism that customers can be made satisfied and loyal if you show that you are working on their feedback and commit to change. 

B2B customer experience has to work hand in hand with account management. That’s obvious to anyone who has worked in B2B markets, but from a research perspective you immediately run into the issue of confidentiality. What’s more important: to preserve the option for customers to give their responses anonymously, or to ensure that account teams can take action on specific feedback?

Tina feels strongly that keeping the option of confidentiality is important, and we agree. Yes, there will be some awkward conversations with account teams, but the truth is that it is still possible to act on anonymous feedback.

Tina says: “You can still deliver an action plan. You can't target individuals, but you can still work with what they're telling you.”

Most customers, though, are quite willing to be identified, and it’s knowing that their feedback will be read and acted upon that helps to make sure that they are open in the research. That means insight has to be turned into action, and those actions need to be communicated back to customers.

When customer feedback is openly shared within the business, that automatically creates accountability:

 “When you get to the level of transparency we've got, the unhappy customers are looked at by the whole organisation, there's
no hiding place. So when you've got customers who are just fundamentally not getting the service standards they've been promised, or we've not delivered on our promises to them, this goes up to a very senior level in the business.”

So what can we learn from Mitie’s impressive results? The core message, I think, is very simple—in B2B markets you need to get customer insight and account management working together to start to build a virtuous circle of improvement, in which account teams see the value of insight, and customers see that their feedback is acted upon. Transparency, accountability, and support are all essential to make that work.