B2B Customer Experience: How can you improve it?

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A better customer experience is a competitive advantage in today’s market scenario.

86% of buyers value customer experience more than product quality or price.
Buyers will willingly pay 16% more to receive a better customer experience.

For many years “customer experience” has been associated partially with B2C experience. Companies that serve in the B2C market have changed their game plan to keep up with their customer’s demands and positively deliver the expected customer experience.

The same, however, cannot be said about B2B customer experience.

According to McKinsey, B2B companies have an average CX score of less than 50%. This is lower than B2C experience which is 65 to 85%.

The gap in B2B customer experience is still too broad. To deliver onto B2B customer experience, firms cannot develop strategies inspired by B2C experience. These firms serving in the B2B market need to take extra steps to ensure that the B2B customers are happy with the value the services & products bring into their business.

So, how can B2B companies turn customer experience into their biggest differentiator, which lures more B2B buyers to do business with them? Before we explore some ‘practices,’ let’s clarify the basics of B2B customer experience.

Watch the video below to learn how Voxco can help you can enhance your overall customer experience.

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Defining B2B customer experience

B2B, which is short for “Business-to-Business,” means that the products and services your company offers are designed for the use of other companies/organizations instead of a single customer. So, a B2B customer experience defines how your company engages with other businesses throughout their buying journey.

In the B2B customer experience, the customer journey involves not one customer but many stakeholders, making the buying journey more complex. This makes B2B customer experience more critical because it is difficult to ensure a consistently great experience for all the decision-makers.

While B2C and B2B customer experience strategies follow the same pattern delivering seamless experience from discovery and consideration to decision and post-purchase service, the two incidents are fundamentally different. There are nuances to be considered on how you serve customers and business.

What are the expectations of B2B customers?

B2B customers have different needs and requirements than B2C customers. These needs must be met by their suppliers or vendors in high quality, reliability, and responsiveness. Often B2B customers require customized solutions tailored to their business needs.

For example, Voxco offers a customized solution. You can tailor the survey software, the features, and functionalities based on your unique business needs.

How do B2B customers determine which company they want to do business with?

B2B customers are often more analytical and logical when deciding which company they want to do business with. They consider multiple factors such as product quality, service quality, reliability, price, and delivery.

Companies often also conduct extensive research and comparison before closing the deal. In a B2B customer relationship, factors such as trust, responsiveness, and communication matter. As a result, it is important to implement B2B customer service best practices and build a strong relationship.

B2C Vs.B2B customer experience: What makes them different?

Customer experience takes into account every little interaction a customer has with the brand from the point the customer becomes aware of the brand/its products until after the purchase is made.

In the B2C landscape, companies cater to one segment with similar customers and similar needs. While in B2B, landscape companies cater to one company with different customers and different needs.

B2B customer experience:

In a B2B customer journey, multiple stakeholders with different needs participate in different parts of the journey. The purchase decision is not made by one person but requires approval by multiple stakeholders before the final decision.

The CEO & CFO may participate initially for strategic decision making.
Then the financial department may participate in negotiating the terms.
The legal department may take over to work out the contract details.

Understanding the perspective of all these stakeholders and more in-between, a B2B company needs to develop customer experience strategies that can help them glide smoothly through the complex journey.

Consequently, the involvement of multiple stakeholders and executives makes the B2B customer journey longer. It encompasses the continuous interaction of services and sales touchpoints. Moreover, it is technical and complex due to the participation of multiple teams from multiple departments.

B2C customer experience:

B2C customers primarily purchase for themselves or, in some cases, family. This means the purchase decision does not need to go through rounds of approval before the final decision.

To cater to the B2C market, companies often exercise customer segmentation to target multiple similar customers with a delightful experience. This makes the B2C customer journey shorter than B2B because the marketing is more targeted to a segment rather than individuals. Consequently, the customer journey leads to quicker conversion.

Now that we have established that B2B and B2C cannot have a one-size-fits-all CX approach let’s see how you can build long-term relationships in the B2B market and deliver a valuable customer experience.

How to design an exceptional B2B customer experience?

Designing B2B customer experience management involves creating a seamless and personalized experience, as you will read in best practices. Here are three steps to start the foundation of B2B customer experience strategy.

1. Identify key touchpoints in the B2B customer journey:

There are multiple touchpoints across a B2B customer journey. The journey includes sales, marketing, post-sales support, onboarding, customer services, and more.

It is important to identify the key touchpoints that impact the B2B customer experience. This allows you to ensure that each touchpoint is optimized for a positive experience.

2. Develop customer personas:

Create detailed profiles of the different target audiences across the B2B marketplace. It’s important to target not only the prospective companies but also the roles of the decision-makers.

The profile should identify their specific needs, pain points, behavior, preferences, and past experience. The customer profile data enables you to tailor the B2B customer journey and meet their unique needs.

3. Map customer journey:

Track and understand the steps B2B customers take when deciding which product to buy. From the first contact until post-sale support interaction, evaluate and understand all the steps taken. This helps you identify the key touchpoints, opportunities, pain points, and concerns to improve B2B customer experience.

Following these steps can help you tailor your process to the needs and expectations of the B2B customers. You can develop an efficient B2B customer experience management and deliver a seamless experience across all touchpoints.

B2B customer experience- Best practices

Here are eight best practices on how to improve the b2b customer experience. Let’s look at these eight best practices in detail.

01. Ease their purchase journey:

B2B customers make a purchase decision with the hopes of helping the entire organization and not for personal needs. They are responsible for spending the company’s funds wisely on a product that will enhance efficiency performance and boost revenue. For B2B buyers, there is constant anxiety and fear of making the right decision for the company.

Keeping this in mind is important to create a customer experience that makes their purchase journey easier. The aim is to deliver a customer experience that satisfies and delights all the individuals involved.

To ease the B2B customer journey, companies can begin by understanding the needs and requirements of the buyers. Understanding the customers is the foundation of delivering a better customer experience.

Additionally, make the process transparent to help the B2B customer know that they can trust you to deliver real value.

02. Empathize at every interaction:

In the current post-pandemic environment, empathy has become an important factor in communication.

According to a SalesForce survey, 68% of businesses expect companies to demonstrate empathy.

With the way the world is rapidly becoming digital, emotional intelligence is a critical skill and a valuable part of B2B customer experience management.

While B2B decision making is driven by business needs, ROI, and logic, behind the decision, there are real people who expect value and trust from you.

Take the time to understand how your experiences make your customer feel. Learn about their pain points, what they are trying to achieve, their individual goals, and make an effort to apply these insights into delivering a great customer experience boosting the perception that you care about the respective teams and the B2B buyer.

To empathize with your B2B customers is to acknowledge their needs and connect with them in every aspect of the business. Emotional connections are an effective part of marketing. It creates trust and loyalty, which helps in building lifetime relationships.

03. Deliver relevant & personalized experiences:

Unlike B2C customers, you can’t segment B2B customers. You can’t create a one-size-fits-all customer experience strategy for B2B customers. With the increasing competition on delivering better customer experience, targeted and personalized experience adds an extra charm.

With modern B2B buyers adding relevance to buyer experience is the key to converting leads into sales. Use the insights to personalize the B2B customer experience.

Add relevancy in every step of the buying journey, from communication to offering a suitable recommendation. Instead of offering them multiple, irrelevant services, B2B buyers will appreciate more if you offer services/ products that would provide the most value to them.

Creating a relevant and personalized experience tells customers that they are valued and appreciated. Use your information on B2B buyers to provide the offerings that matter to them.

04. Self-service customer experience:

As per Forrester, 74% of B2B customers research online before making the purchase.
While McKinsey finds that 86% of B2B buyers prefer using self-services tools rather than interacting with a representative.

Adopting self-service helps improve customer experience. While customers do want better services, they also want to have control of resolving issues by themselves. A well-designed self-service can help customers have that control and freedom to get what information they want, whenever they want.

Implement the following B2B customer service best practices to grow into the best B2B customer experience companies.

→A knowledge base, guides, videos, or articles can be some of the options that can enable customers to manage their decision-making process themselves.
→Engage them with contextual emails or direct them to the knowledge base to empower B2B customers with the right information they need.
→Update the buyers with rich content and information online to support them in making the right decision.

05. Use the power of AI, automation, and ML:

Customers, be it B2B or B2C, use the internet to find all the information they need before beginning their buying journey. Customers compare the experience provided by multiple companies before deciding which one to choose.

62% of customers say their experience with an organization influences their expectations of others.

It is vital for the best B2B customer experience companies to deliver on customer expectations and keep pace with the buyers’ needs.

Leveraging tools like AI, automation, and ML can help create a frictionless B2B experience and use it as a competitive advantage. Adopting such tools can help you generate intelligent insights that will further help in evolving with the buyers.

To satisfy customer expectations and deliver on their needs, you need updated customer data. →Use AI-driven solutions to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and experience.
→Build a predictive model to anticipate when a customer will need help or follow-up in the future.
→Use ML models to generate targeted offers or product recommendations.

Make use of such technology to keep a pulse of customer experience so that you can always stay on top of the B2B market.

06. Gather feedback:

The B2B market is different from the B2C market. An ideal customer experience depends on the specific needs of many individuals from a company, the business need, and the competitive company in the same industry as yours.

Gathering customer feedback can help you know first-hand how the B2B customers feel about their experience, your products/services, and your company. Leveraging the real voice of customers can help you see the experience from their perspective. Moreover, customer feedback can help you understand the root cause of lead drop-offs or attrition and how you can overcome these hurdles.

NPS and CSAT surveys can tell you how satisfied the customers are with your company and the issues they face. While CES can tell how much effort the customer had to put into the process with the provider.

Customer feedback, be it poor or excellent performance, indicates how much more you can improve to deliver an exceptional B2B customer experience.

07. Offer proactive support:

Contact and offer customer service to your customers instead of waiting for them to reach out to you.

A buyer’s journey is captured within a centralized system thanks to a customer’s digital engagement. Every digital footprint left by the customer is saved and updated in real-time in the CRM. This allows the B2B companies to understand when’s the right time to contact and offer support to the buyer.

Leverage the following ways to offer proactive support and redefine an efficient B2B customer experience strategy.

→Use customer data and map the customer journey to anticipate when customers need your help.
→Reach out to solve their issue proactively before the customer becomes aware of it.
→Identify the roadblocks ahead and resolve them efficiently to ensure a seamless customer experience for your B2B buyers.

08. Timely yet right response:

Customer responsiveness is not only a driving factor in B2C CX but also in B2B customer experience. B2B buyers are also customers who expect speedy and effective resolution of their issues.

In a B2B customer journey, there are many back-and-forths before the buyers reach a final decision. It is important for the customer service team to cut down on too much discussion and ease the process.

In a B2B market, every stakeholder’s opinion matters for the strategic decision. Each customer issue that gets delayed or unresolved results in the buyer’s loss of trust. However, an immediate response, if not effective, an immediate response is a waste of time for both parties.

Focus on delivering the right answer that offers a solution instead of offering fast & ineffective

See Voxco survey software in action with a Free demo.

B2B customer experience -How can Voxco help you reimagine it?

Voxco is trusted by 450+ global clients in over 40 countries. When it comes to listening to the customer’s voice, Voxco is the leading platform. Voxco is the ultimate platform to get closer to your B2B customers and understand their expectations with its sophisticated and scalable offerings.

Voxco’s offerings Voxco Research and Voxco Intelligence come with dynamic research capabilities, predictive intelligence, AI-infused data analytics solution, and powerful dashboard and closed-loop reporting capabilities.

Voxco Research empowers you to hear the needs, expectations, and pain points directly from your customers. Voxco Intelligence enables you to make sense of all customer feedback, comments, and complaints.

Remove the guesswork from your decision-making process and listen to what your customers have to say without any filter.

Reinvent B2B customer experience & build a loyal relationship

B2C or B2B market, the brand that puts customer experience at the heart of its business, is the one that wins.

While excelling in B2B customer experience is more complex and critical, the competitive advantage and the enhanced efficiency make it worth the effort.

Take a leaf out of the B2C company’s CX strategy to innovate how you engage with your B2B customers. Understand the business needs, the needs of individual stakeholders & executives, and the goal of every department. Create a memorable experience for everyone involved in the decision-making to build trust and loyalty.

Improve Customer Loyalty with Voxco

We have developed a guide which gives you an all around view of customer loyalty

FAQs

1. What is B2B customer experience?

B2B customer experience is the interaction that a business customer (a company) has with another company. When two companies engage in a business transaction or relationship, the experience is known as business-to-business customer experience.

It generally involves all the touchpoints similar to business-to-customer. A B2B customer journey includes customer services, product, delivery, billing, and customer satisfaction.

2. How can you create efficient B2B customer experience management?

Here are some ways you can redefine your B2B customer experience strategy:

Understand customers’ needs and concerns.
Deliver a personalized and customized experience.
Offer proactive support and efficient customer service.
Ensure high product quality and reliability.
Gather feedback and act on them in a timely manner.

3. How can you measure your B2B customer experience?

You can use metrics used by B2C companies to evaluate the B2B experience. Metrics such as NPS, CSAT, CES, and retention can help you gauge customer loyalty.

4. What are some common challenges in creating exceptional B2B customer experience management?

Some of the usual challenges faced by the best B2B customer experience companies are:

Understanding the complex needs of B2B customers.
Delivering seamless and cohesive experience across different touchpoints in the B2B customer journey.
Balancing cost and quality of B2B customer service.
Keeping up with evolving preferences and market trends.

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