Meet Karin Walter, Customer Experience Manager at Tele2

For Tele2’s B2B operations, customer experience (CX) has been one of the main strategic areas, with NPS as key performance indicator. To be able to measure and act on customer experience, a Voice of Customer (VoC) program was established about four years ago.

Responsible for the implementation – where Differ played an important role in the project team – was Karin Walter, who today works with CX within Tele2’s consumer operations.

We asked Karin some questions about the B2B-CX journey.

What was the purpose of establishing a VoC program within B2B?

The purpose of the VoC (Voice of the Customer) program was severalfold:

We needed a common way to measure the customer experience within B2B, since we previously lacked a unified structure across our measurements. We wanted to ensure that we asked the same type of question in the same way across our different surveys and touchpoints. The aim was to create a better understanding of shifts in customer satisfaction across different parts of the customer lifecycle, and to better understand what we needed to adjust to create good customer experiences throughout the customer’s entire lifetime with us.

We also needed to find ways to effectively capture, prioritize, and drive improvement activities within a large organization—especially since we didn’t have a large CX team to do this. We wanted to design the program so that responsibility for the customer experience (KPIs and activities) was placed within the parts of the organization where decisions are made, whether related to products, offerings, or touchpoints. Therefore, we distributed the responsibility for KPI follow-up and feedback loops within the organization for each measurement and touchpoint, supported by a general structure for follow-up and requirement specifications—ensuring that activities were carried out to improve CX.

How did you and the team go about it?

We started by looking at what our customer lifecycle looks like — which main touchpoints our customers have, what we measure today, and what we need to measure to ensure good customer experiences throughout the customer’s lifetime. Here we had to select our most important touchpoints to measure, primarily from a customer perspective but also based on our internal ability to act on CX insights (we don’t want to measure things we can’t work with). We also wanted to ensure that, alongside our touchpoint measurements, we included relationship and product-specific surveys to capture the customer’s overall relationship with us and our products and offerings.

Since we work with business customers, we also needed to take a closer look at the customer perspective itself and focus on the recipient perspective for different segments — because in our larger customer segments, for example, we interact with different contact persons for different touchpoints. For instance, the person who signs contracts with us may not be the same person who contacts customer service. Therefore, we needed to make sure we had relevant contact persons for the various surveys, both initially and through ongoing updates over time.

In addition to measurement, we also needed to look at how we reported the results. Just as important as measuring the customer experience correctly is ensuring that the right person understands the reports and that the right information reaches the right person at the right time. Therefore, we developed reports together with different functions and teams to make sure they had the information they needed and understood how the reports worked so they could navigate them independently. We also looked at how we could provide sales and customer service with access to essential CX insights directly in their systems, supporting them during customer interactions. We developed simplified solutions for a quick feedback loop, enabling the right person from our side to quickly contact customers in cases of dissatisfaction — to listen and hopefully resolve the issue.

To enable continuous improvement, we examined our internal organizational structure to identify the right ownership of CX throughout the customer lifecycle. We established CX ownership in a waterfall structure for KPIs and follow-up, with ongoing alignment and reviews both at management level and within responsible teams. This way, we ensured attention to KPIs and CX improvement activities from top management all the way down to the teams driving concrete improvements — for example, in routines, processes, and IT solutions.

To make this work, an engaged management team and committed employees who understood the value of great customer experiences were, of course, essential. We worked extensively with communication, storytelling, and transparency through various communication channels to continue driving engagement around CX and our results.

What were the main challenges?

Of course, such a comprehensive VoC program comes with many challenges. The biggest challenge was ensuring that we had — and could continuously update — the correct contact person for each of our customers. That’s a major task requiring involvement from customer service, sales, and IT systems. The IT setup for the program was also demanding, as we needed to ensure that the right survey was sent to the right customer at the right time, that customers didn’t receive too many surveys, and that the results were continuously fed into our reporting systems. Our teams were highly engaged and quickly provided feedback whenever something didn’t work as intended — which was great!

Another challenge was getting alignment around the shift in CX KPIs, since we had previously mixed NPS and CSAT in different surveys. Naturally, there were various opinions and ideas about what was best, which made the KPI selection challenging. We chose to use NPS as our main CX KPI — primarily to simplify internal communication, but also because it aligned best with the KPI that helped us strive toward our ambitious CX goals.

The reason we chose not to mix different CX KPIs was that simplified internal communication was crucial to maintaining employee engagement around CX. Having too many KPIs makes it complex and confusing to interpret results and reports, which risks reducing engagement — especially since CX KPIs are only one of several metrics we report on continuously.

What were the main results short term?

The work on the VoC program was part of a larger CX initiative that B2B undertook during the period 2021–2023. By the end of 2023, B2B had achieved impressive results — we reached Sweden’s most satisfied customers (according to SKI), increased the internal NPS score by an average of +18 points and strengthened both employee confidence within CX and revenue from end-user services. By the end of the period, we had a strong ability to attract and retain customers.

The CX focus was clearly felt internally — with great interest and strong motivation to drive CX improvements. We had many internal CX ambassadors, actively working across most teams with our CX vision, and we found more ways to integrate CX into our daily operations — for example, through a synchronized process framework aligned with the CX framework to bridge the internal perspective with the customer perspective.

In summary, I would say that the shift we made in our CX maturity and results during the period was very impressive — where the key factor was strong engagement from a unified leadership team, which naturally spread to the employees.

To learn more about B2B CX, contact:

Frank van Gelder, frank.van.gelder@differ.se