B2B CX management can be drawn from B2C market as well. But there are B2B details that call for a different approach. Learn how to deliver the perfect B2B customer experience with our best practice guide.
You’ll find the best practices for each phase of a Customer Experience initiative from collecting feedback from the customers to reporting the results and putting them into action in this best practice guide. These best practice snippets have been collated by CX specialists at the most prestigious B2B brands such as Change Healthcare, Johnson Controls and Tetra Pak, and some of the best-respected professors and consultants in the space.
What’s in the guide:
- Understanding the B2B buyer journey
- B2B customer retention & churn
- Gathering B2B customer feedback
- B2B Customer Experience Measuring & Benchmarking – By Using the.
Read our full B2B panel results and more in-depth guidance on each of these topics here or download the full B2B whitepaper.
B2B Customer Experience – what does it look like?
We all know about customer experience (CX) — how companies connect with customers at all stages of the buying cycle, from marketing and sales to customer service and onwards.
Simply put, B2B CX is all the touchpoints a customer interacts with your brand online and offline except that the customer here is more of a composite group of stakeholders, not a single individual as it typically is in B2C.
Why does B2B CX matter?
The reality is, we are in the age of the experience economy: people demand and expect more than ever before.
And the companies that can make seamless experience are at the leading edge.
In bridging the B2B CX divide, brands and organizations will reduce customer churn, increase customer satisfaction, retention, awareness and perception and in turn, expand their business.
A solid B2B CX program considers every phase of the buyer journey — from awareness and interest, to purchase and post-sale conversion. It makes sure that customers who are just beginning their journeys have what they need when they need it, and current customers have support at all times. In the end, best-practice B2B CX makes sure prospects and customers — no matter where they are in their journey — are met.
And of course, there is no one experience exactly the same. Every company and every client is different — and every B2B and B2C company is completely different.
B2B or B2C: What is the customer journey?
People don’t want B2B experiences to be any more like B2C than they are today, but brands must have unique B2B strategies if they are to be successful and not be just an extension of B2C.
The B2B customer experience
For a B2B company, the “customer” is likely to be composed of many different stakeholders that all have their own requirements in terms of delivering the ultimate customer experience. Think of this as the “Account in General”.
Every stakeholder is very important in a client’s renewal/expansion choice. We always talk about this: you need to see the health of the account is a sum, it’s no longer just one hand you shake with to do business with.
Not to mention the fact that other parts of your customer’s organization might have different objectives for their experiences with your brand, or may have different timeframes for completing the purchase journey.
So your touchpoints will have to be customised to the customer journey and their needs rather than tossed around over the entire buying cycle.
This business customer experience will be long-term, and there will be many touchpoints and multiple key people involved. That makes uniformity of experience – and catering for multiple needs – imperative.
The B2C customer experience
Customers in B2C are either individuals or small groups like family members. Experience design will be something of a segmentation game — how to create many the same customers to deliver a great experience to a wide population.
Customer journeys are usually shorter since interactions are made for the majority instead of the individuals (which happens in the B2B world). The result is quick and easy transactions — completely different from B2B relationships that are long-term.
B2B Digital CX: Taking the lead from the beginning.
Digital innovation, differentiation and offering frictionless, long-term customer experience is what will help you outperform your competitors. The majority of us these days should be able to use multiple sources (digital or otherwise) to fuel the purchase.
A quarter of all B2B customers say they’d never want to deal with a salesperson, Gartner says.
The fact of the matter is that as B2B buyers discontinue a buying model altogether — digitally or face-to-face — the winning brands are those who realize and cater to these changing patterns for digital and buyer-first experiences.
For instance, technology can drive your product by giving your consumers more ways to connect with your brand and consume your services quickly. Digital platforms (e.g. email, chatbots, knowledge bases, live chat, and your website), so that your prospects and customers can engage with you in the channels and mediums that are familiar. They can come in when they’re convenient, speak to someone (or a robot), and self-operate in knowledge bases to access information they want.
What you also need to consider is attracting your best sales people and product experts to drive prospects and customers’ journeys and help them make informed decisions.
All that matters is to make it frictionless for your customers: a frictionless process where effort is minimal and the encounter high.
What about brand visibility?
But there are third party references to your brand as well as frictionless. Your customers can receive reviews or mentions online that can skew your brand and how they think about your B2B digital customer experience.
In this scenario, one system for all the digital experiences you’re building – and to keep track of every third-party mention of your brand – can allow you to acquire and keep customers, avoid customer churn with less customer effort, and maximise the customer experience.
Learn about our Customer experience management software and how it can help you build the best digital customer experience.
B2B Customer Experience Trends What’s Hot?
Customer-centric, personalised experiences
Now that there are more options than ever, users demand personalized, human service. They do not want to be another investor but a valuable customer; someone the company down-shifts and irons out for them so they will continue doing business with them.
Self-service options
Although they are after experiences that they can have personally, they also want to be able to fix problems as quickly as possible. Sometimes having a good and well-designed self-service channel can give customers what they need for an optimal experience.
For instance, if you can offer a comprehensive knowledge base (or information resource such as how-tos or videos) this can help customers who are willing to handle things themselves. It’s also useful to have a chatbot that can take customers to relevant collateral to ease friction and add value.
The right channel for the right experience
Customers demand experiences that align with their shifting needs. This means a brand should have the right channel for the right experience, not just a few channels at each stage of the customer journey.
There are customers, for instance, who would prefer to communicate via email, and then there are customers who prefer to send text or Tweet. The brands and businesses that do well are the ones that listen to what their prospects and customers want, and deliver it in the right channels.
Great B2B customer experience examples
What do you do then, once you know the above? What can be done at every point to give customers power and provide an exceptional experience? Among some of the brands we’ve done this for, here are some recent ones.
Change Healthcare — making underperforming accounts top performers
Change Healthcare had to see more of their customer experience — and not just how each experience impacted customers, but how it played out on a customer’s relationship with the company in the long term.
They wanted to create a system to be able to identify those customers that would be leaving so they could step in and save them. When they built a new team just for that, though, the team leaders found themselves identifying better means to do the job.
Not only did Qualtrics provide them with the capability to quickly identify experience pain points with the right customers but also pinpoint opportunities to actively tweak the experience to drive growth.
With Qualtrics, Change Healthcare was able to revamp its VoC program and enable its CX team to share data from every department within the organization, on every customer segment, touchpoint, respondent, etc.
With this new feature, they now have access to deeper customer health in their various product lines and better customer insight. The result? Change Healthcare went from 65% to 95% ticket resolution for unhappy customers in a year. They’ve also opened the floodgates to new channels of customer engagement and closed-loop ticketing for issue resolution.
Johnson Controls — focus company’s development around the customer.
Johnson Controls provides the technology, services and infrastructure so that buildings around the world run at maximum efficiency. The 100 brands of the company are anchors from universities to sports stadiums. When a recent slew of acquisitions and mergers drew on the organisation’s complexity, they needed to think outside the box to stay on top of who their customers were and how they engaged with the company.
Efficiency is Johnson Controls’ biggest brand promise with its suite of smart, automated building management solutions. But with 20 different business teams covering over 500 different brands, each having their own feedback-collecting platform (and 13 different vendors) it was difficult to gather and capture a view of the customer journey across the company.
Thanks to the Qualtrics XM platform and best-of-breed, however, Johnson Controls was able to generate new insights with bite that were easy to implement. They could create a more organised method for gathering data and creating the key findings, which lead them to create a visual journey map that shows 20 customer touchpoints along the customer journey.
This omnichannel view has allowed all teams within the business to grasp the end-to-end customer journey. They can now determine friction points on the fly and the activities that customers love the most.
By leveraging Qualtrics XM, Johnson Controls can now clearly link CX with business-unit revenues, raised their budget by 30% when they saw the correlation between CX and customer spending, and gained 25% in cost savings by bringing CX vendors together.
Tetra Pak — easy-to-digest customer feedback and make it relevant to your organization.
Tetra Pak, Enterprise-sized manufacturing B2B brand, an innovator in food packaging and processing, with a vision to keep food fresh and convenient.
But when they got their food processing and packaging products out to the customers, they weren’t happy — not even when the deadlines were met.
When they dug in, they discovered that customer responses were slow to turn into real-time actionable information. So, they decided to implement both X (experience) and O (operational) data as an everyday activity for customer experiences.
The result was that they made better choices. It gives them real time insights and granular analytics so they can work on what matters, according to one team member.
In addition to that, the company programmed triggers to push customer satisfaction surveys at key stages in the customer journey. They were also a lot faster to fill out (only two minutes), which made the research 300% faster, and gave Tetra Pak the ability to learn that quality was not speed but quality that mattered to their customers.
Tetra Pak reversed B2B sales by making sure their people adopted the new customer-first culture, from the front-line service reps that closed the circle with disgruntled customers to senior management who crunched Net Promoter Score (NPS) and revenue.
Designing a B2B CX strategy
You have a B2B strategy that has to outdo the consumer choices. And given that 65% of B2B customers say they don’t receive the same customer experience as B2B customers – and 96% of customers tell us that their experience impacts if they will purchase again, you better know your approach.
The Art of Implementing a Successful Customer Experience Strategy is an elaborate work. Your B2B customers are hidden and a good CX strategy will depend on your awareness of them. Deep analysis – and tailored execution – will detail a CX plan that can scale with threats and requirements.
Create your customer health benchmark score.
You need to compare where you are – and where you can be – to ensure you have the best customer experience possible.
Even if you’re using different metrics for assessing your relationship with customers, if all of the metric data you collect is broken down into one clear, simple to read score, your customer relationships will be elevated.
You might, for instance, consider the number of years a person has been a customer and the number of times a new product has been offered to them. This may also give you a picture of what they’re interested in new products and services and whether or not they’re likely to buy.
Then, you can compare that data with new customers and/or the people who don’t upgrade much. How do you get these customers engaged and making the change that will matter?
Learn how to create an awesome customer health score in our customer health score tutorial.
Collect feedback
The right B2B CX strategy is all about quality over quantity. Those reviews must be gathered and interpreted in the right manner so that you get a clear picture of what your customers would like to see from your brand.
Important things to focus on are:
- Calling customers and asking for feedback in a custom way.
- Taking polls of your customers at a relevant interval.
- Seeing where your weak spots in your response rates and strengthening them.
- Rewards your strategy for obtaining customer data in the right direction.
- Breaking the cycle and doing something.
Find out how to do feedback collecting right in our guide.
Understand the B2B customer journey
Getting insights into how customers come to purchase decisions is key to continuously updating and scaling your CX.
And that starts with the buyer journey.
There are basically three phases to a typical B2B buyer journey:
- Awareness: the buyer realises they have a problem.
- Deliberation: the buyer defines the problem and considers alternatives for resolving it.
- Decision: the purchaser weighs and decides which provider/vendor will implement the solution.
You’ll need to collect data, segment your customers and create a better buyer journey to create the desired customer experience. You’ll also need to craft for each phase of the buyer journey to engage leads to conversion and purchase.
You can optimize every stage according to your prospects, which in a B2B situation is always better value and more chances of customer generation.
Learn how to make the best moments from the B2B customer journey in our complete guide.
How can you make B2B a better experience?
Create an omnichannel approach
The way you plan for it will be based on all the channels your customer – and their stakeholders – will use. If you’re offering one-size-fits-all buy/problem-solving solutions, it might be unattractive to customers who have different contact preferences.
Customer journeys could have many different interdependent channels encompassing physical and digital engagements, which can be solved only by a truly agile CX approach.
Develop data-driven, automated strategies
An omnichannel approach is needed to make data and feedback meaningful.
B2B customers are usually very different and may have multiple stakeholders so customer profiles must be supported by data in order to provide the best experience. Having customer feedback regularly in your collection can help you make fast tweaks to your strategy with automation giving you the additional benefit of speed in determining follow-up steps.
Bring personalisation to the fore
Every B2B customer – and stakeholder – is different and so, their customer experience should be curated to keep them engaged. If you don’t want to give customers an ordinary stock experience, but instead a personalized customer experience on your preferred channels, then you will discourage them from taking a better chance somewhere else.
Determine what is driving customer churn.
You can increase your retention rate and reduce your churn if you understand why your customers are inclined to walk away. With feedback, customer engagement and flexibility in addition to loyalty programmes you can cultivate a better customer relationship and gain an edge over the competition.
How to integrate customer retention best in your CX program with our infographic.
Eliminate silos and get your team set up for victory.
Having an integrated CX strategy, with a shared CX strategy among all of your teams makes your CX a more integrated and unified one. Real-time, automated, and role-based dashboards for your employees, sales reps, etc empower your front line employees, sales teams, etc to synchronize their strategy, design better products and services and deliver an immersive experience.
Review closed/successful deals and move on.
If you start thinking strategically about your wins and losses as a company, you can set up a particular process for better customer interactions.
Strategies for getting a clearer idea of why your brand acquires or loses customers are:
- Know how your CRO is doing.
- Look for the feedback loops that allow during the deal cycle.
- Evaluating CRM data
- Hosting post-decision interviews
- Calculating your closed/won deals
To get the most out of your win/loss ratio check out our guide.
