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Account Experience Awards 2022: What We Learned From the Winners

Blog by Ian Luck
January 13, 2023

The CustomerGauge AX Awards are over—what a wonderful celebration of B2B customer experience leaders it was.

The 200 guests heard all about what it means to be “best-in-class” at putting your customer’s experience.

From companies in bottle and chemical manufacturing to transport and aviation equipment, the winners showed us that all industries have woken up to the power of CX-driven account management.

In this round up, we'll dive into the B2B CX best practices shared with us by the winners of these awards.

Each of these are awards for elements of a world-class Account Experience program (we'll take a look at what each one means as we go).

For each winning team, we sat down after the awards show to hear their thoughts and best practices, here are those insights:

What we learned from the winning teams

1. Briggs Equipment - Winner of the Closing the Loop Award

First, we caught up with Gemma Beddow at Briggs Equipment.

Briggs Equipment offers materials handling solutions that utilize a host of equipment options: forklifts, terminal tractors, telescoping booms, scissor lifts, railcar movers and the like!

The Briggs team won the closing the loop award because they closed the loop with 97% of all customer feedback survey responses—and they did so, on average, within 11 hours! (Learn what closing the loop is in our guide here)

So, how did her team manage to achieve those incredible results?

Gemma notes that one key aspect is her “extremely passionate” team who consider “every piece of feedback as important.”

“It’s so important that we get back to our customers, feed that information back, what we’re doing with it and what actions we’re taking, and delivering on that corrective action.”

Gemma also notes the positive impact closing the loop is having on their NPS response rates.

“The most common response we get [from customers] is ‘oh, I didn’t think anyone actually read my responses’. We’ve even had messages from non-responders they followed up with who said ‘you know what, next time I’m going to respond because I didn’t realise anyone did anything with the surveys’.”

This is a key learning we’ve seen again and again with our users at CustomerGauge: If you show customers you’re listening, then they will *actually* want to fill out surveys and help you improve.

Survey fatigue is only a thing if you get constantly ignored and your advice is not actioned.

Listen to the video below to catch the rest of Gemma’s insights:

  • How customer feedback is being received across their organization

  • How Gemma reports feedback to executives and other teams

  • How Gemma persuades people to give people feedback (what incentives are in place)

2. Coca-Cola Helenic - Winner of the Engaugement Award

Next, we catch up with Stuart Ward at Coca-Cola HBC (CCH).

CCH bottles and sells the beverages of The Coca-Cola Company exclusively in 28 markets and partners with other beverage businesses to also sell their brands.

As the winner of the Most Engauged Award, the CCH team has spread Account Experience to the most users across their organization—empowering their entire organization with the best practices, certifications, methodology and technology needed to put the customer first.

So, how did Stuart manage to engage their team so effectively in an innovative NPS program?

“First of all, at CCH we are absolutely committed to driving our customer experience for customers and to create value, but at the same time by empowering our people. Customer focus is a core value for all of our employees.”

CCH developed a clear definition of what it means to be customer-focused: “We’re only customer-centric when our customers tell us so.”

When living with that ethos, to be able to truly hear and act upon feedback from every single customer is a natural conclusion.

Living and breathing a customer focus allowed the CCH team to roll out Account Experience software across all of their sales teams in all their markets in just 8 months—and have adoption taken up so readily.

Listen to the video below to catch the rest of Stuart’s insights:

  • How the team has adapted and used tech to serve the customers at CCH.

  • How CCH has become so fast at bringing new ideas to the market

  • Why front line insights for the sales team has been so powerful for growth

3. Engro Polymer & Chemicals - Winner of the Account Response Award

Our penultimate winner is Engro Polymer & Chemicals (EPC).

EPC is a global manufacturer of PVC resin and producer of Caustic Soda, Sodium Hypochlorite, EDC and VCM.

As the winner of the Account Response Award, EPC have an incredibly high 98% account response rate on their NPS surveys—meaning 98% of customer accounts have given feedback.

Within less than a year, EPC’s team has worked relentlessly to roll out the survey program, get feedback and close the loop.

They’re three surveys in (running a quarterly survey frequency), so how did they manage to get such a high response rate so far?

“If I’m a customer and I’m being asked for feedback and my voice is being heard, I’ll take it seriously.”

Showing their customers they’re listening and taking action is what drives all their customers to respond in the future. Perhaps they didn’t respond the first time around, but they sure are when they find out their being listened to.

Listen to the video below to catch insights from the entire EPC team:

  • What was surprising in the customer feedback they collected

  • Why it’s critical to have a Salesforce integration with customer feedback

4. Unilode - Winner of the Revenue Coverage Award

Last but not least, our final winner is Unilode.

Unilode manages the largest global fleet of unit load devices (for those of us not in the business, these are incredibly important containers for loading luggage and freight onto aircraft).

Revenue Coverage is how much of the customer base is covered by the NPS response program. Unilode has covered 100% of their revenue base covered by responses—wow!

Every single Unilode customer was surveyed, giving them clear visibility on the health of their customer account base.

Here’s what Marc Groenewegen had to say about their success:

“We have been on a journey, by culture we are customer-focused. We want to go above and beyond for our customers. Sometimes by absence of process we end up working nights and weekends to go above and beyond for customers—our commitment is super high and our customers know and feel that. But we need to take that to the next level with NPS, closing the loop and implementing change.”

Listen to the video below to catch insights from the entire EPC team:

  • Why NPS drivers have been so important for improvement in CX

  • Why closing the loop via customer calls has been so insightful and impactful

  • What Unilode has learned in their customer-focused journey

What a night!

We had an incredible night, and we saw some incredible results.

The customer-first revolution hasn’t been an easy one, so it is a relief to see the tide turning both in our own community and in others.

If you missed the award show itself, you can watch the recording here.

Until next year, thank you to everyone who attended!

About the Author

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Ian Luck
Ian has been in the CX market for over a decade evangelizing best-practices and strategies for increasing the ROI of customer programs. He loves a loud guitar, a thick non-fiction book, and a beach day with his family. You can catch him around the north shore of Boston, MA.
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