Inside Vector Solutions’ Customer Experience Revolution: A Conversation with Chief Customer Officer, Jeff Chapman

At Vector Solutions, prioritizing customer experience (CX) is another way that we achieve our mission of empowering the critical industries working to keep our communities safe. In the last two years, we have reimagined Vector’s CX function, investing in resources, revamping processes, integrating new technology, developing talent, and instilling a number of guiding principles that help us meet the growing needs of our customers – both now and into the future.

Our Customer Experience department is led by Chief Customer Officer, Jeff Chapman. While serving at the forefront of this CX revolution, one thing has remained constant since arriving at Vector: his dedication to continuous improvement. In this interview, Jeff shares what Customer Experience means at Vector – and why it’s a critical component to achieving our mission of helping the everyday heroes in our communities make safer, smarter, and better decisions.

Top Factors That Influence Customer Experience at Vector

Jeff’s extensive experience in technology operations, sales, and general management paved the way for his current role as Vector’s Chief Customer Officer. According to him, “Customers don’t buy products, they invest in solutions that solve their pain. My experience in tech, sales, and management taught me the importance of alleviating that pain, making sure customers aren’t caught up in tech issues, and building trust to establish long-term relationships with them.”

Jeff explains that “perception is everything” when it comes to Customer Experience. You may feel like you’re doing everything you can for your customers, putting effort into a broad range of areas,but if your customer is not actually aware of the benefits or care they are receiving, you will not be able to provide them with a successful Customer Experience.

Define and Invest In Customer Experience

Every organization has to determine what Customer Experience means to them, and then they must invest in it. Businesses enter different stages of growth and their process of scaling can change the way customers experience their brand. By investing in the leadership roles, teams, resources, and solutions to ensure Customer Experience, you make it a central pillar and value of your organization, which has a positive impact on internal and external stakeholders.

For Jeff, optimizing Customer Experience at Vector Solutions comes down to four critical areas:

• Customer Services: the processes and interactions to deliver solutions through implementation, onboarding, and other services to alleviate our customer’s pain
• Customer Care: beyond traditional support, this is a more intimate way of thinking and caring about our customer’s needs and wants while resolving problems effectively and efficiently.
• Customer Success: responsible for enabling our customers to reach their desired outcomes when using our solutions.
• Customer operations: Responsible for optimizing the end-to-end customer experience.

“Our team is laser focused on trying to provide the best possible experience. It’s software – we’re going to have issues sometimes. It’s how we work, how we respond to those issues, how we rally around them as an organization and, ultimately, how we get the customer in the best possible position to get the value out of the tools we provide them that matters.”

Don’t Get Siloed

Many organizations make the mistake of dispersing Customer Experience into different roles and departments, and not making it a dedicated pillar of their business. “They don’t bring it under one umbrella, they don’t have a Chief Customer Officer role so that dedication to success and support doesn’t ladder up to someone ultimately responsible for the customer experience.” That said, every department and role plays a part in the overall customer experience. If a team member is in sales, they are still part of the Customer Experience process; every team member plays a role in ensuring support to our customers that is efficient and valuable.

Jeff recognizes that his role is still somewhat rare. “There aren’t a lot of companies that invest in Customer Experience. It’s a sign that Vector Solutions takes the customer experience seriously and wants everyone to know that.”

Hiring Alone Won’t Guarantee Successful Scaling

As a business scales, the temptation can be to hire your way out of the problem, which is a mistake many organizations make, according to Jeff. “You cannot possibly hire enough people to service 33,000 customers and over one million users – you have to free people up to touch customers to bring value to them.” As you scale, getting the right tech and tools in place to support the humans at your organization frees them up for the high-value work of supporting clients.

For Jeff, this goes hand-in-hand with successfully integrating that technology within your processes. The right tech to meet your customer’s needs may exist, but if it isn’t being implemented across the board, the technology simply cannot function. “You’ve got to mandate it to make sure that the tech is a part of your employees’ core daily lives and how they actually manage their day-to-day work with customers.

Without putting such measures in place, your organization could be in big trouble: “Your tech and customer operations team can fall down if your process is not set up to enable and empower your team members.”

Communication Is Critical

At Vector, we believe that communication is critical, and that belief is central to the way we function. In customer interactions, communication takes on special importance. “We are supporting customers, so by and large our conversations happen when they need something, not when things are going perfectly. Support issues, negative feedback, that’s our world. Where we worry is when things go silent. If they’re not talking to us – that’s a problem.” By creating open, trusting, long-term relationships with customers, you’re ensuring dialogue and an opportunity to resolve their issues and support them to success. “Disengagement is the enemy.”

For Jeff, part of this process is being available where your clients and team members need you. “10 years ago we were always on the phone, but now our customers have so many modes of communication at their fingertips and preferences for when they use which. It’s important to us to meet them where they are at.”

Take Direct Action

“Customers want to feel heard – but then they want to see action.” With the right technology in place, then you can leverage the data you receive from it to address issues and to improve the customer experience. For instance, Jeff is a huge proponent of implementing a regimented schedule of reviewing Net Promoter Score feedback. While some businesses may have NPS results that are tied to some sort of compensation, at Vector, we tie compensation to NPS responses. This means reviewing the positive and negative on both the macro and micro level and developing a plan of action to improve.

“How often are your customers using the system? Are they getting the value they purchased the solution for? You have to know the answers to these questions so you can use that data to optimize and continue to positively impact your customers.”

Commit to Continuous Improvement

Jeff is inspired by the concept of working to get 1% better every single day. Did your organization experience great retention last year? Excellent! Now, set your goals even higher for the coming year so that you can continue to evolve and pursue ongoing improvement.

“Break it down into very small, simple tasks of getting a little bit better each day. All that adds up if you’re consistent with it. So we talked about getting that 1% better each day by taking small bites, fixing processes, avoiding meetings you don’t need to be so you can be more strategic and focus on key customer related issues, eliminating waste, making sure what matters most is central again.”

Connect Everything Back to the Mission

Of course, it all ties back to our mission to help our customers make safer, smarter, and better decisions through our mission-critical training technology solutions. When you’re working with the critical sectors of our communities, it gives your daily work a profound sense of purpose. “This is an incredible organization because we serve heroes. We are keeping our customers safe, making sure they are properly trained and can go home at night. When you think about that, it’s clear why the customer experience is so important.

“Our jobs here are more critical than at other organizations I’ve worked with because if our customer is in trouble, we have to react – it can be a matter of life or death. We’re serving frontline heroes and ensuring our products are effective, optimized, and up and running is always our top priority.”

Customer Experience Is Much More than Traditional Support

At Vector, customer care isn’t about troubleshooting tech issues, it’s about advocating on behalf of our customers. “You can get overly focused on a task, resolving a complex issue, and lose sight of the customer – of the human being who is counting on you. Give them your attention, empathy, respect, and talent – that’s what matters most. You’ve got to wrap that care around your customers.”

It’s important to remember that Customer Experience is a key differentiator that can set your organization apart from the competition. “The piece here that is so inspiring, is that making sure the customer is successful isn’t a job or a strategy, it’s truly the economy. That customer experience and everything we do is the game-changer, it allows us to either be successful or not. So we want to make sure we revolve around that customer experience and really take it to heart and understand that is a differentiator for us.”

Jeff Chapman

Chief Customer Officer

As Vector Solutions Chief Customer Officer (CCO), Jeff Chapman leads Vector’s customer strategy and brings over 20 years of experience in general management, customer success, and service delivery in B2B software.  He brings passion and experience for enabling organic and M&A business growth through scalable and repeatable processes.  Prior to Vector, Chapman was the EVP of client success and services at Virgin Pulse, a leader in employee engagement and business outcomes.  He also previously served as SVP and General Manager of the Global Trading and Risk division at Enverus as well as held senior executive positions with SumTotal Systems and Lawson Software. Chapman earned his MBA from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

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