High quality customer service has always been the hidden hero driving company profits. Yet, delivering excellent customer experience (CX) at the business-to-business (B2B) level is much more complex than B2C. Often it involves multiple decision-making parties and significantly higher value or volume of purchases per customer over a lifetime.
Changing a vendor is a significant effort for B2B customers, but every bad experience increases the risk of their leaving – taking their annual spend or yearly renewal with them. Ultimately getting the CX journey wrong for just one B2B customer holds the potential to influence the overall health of a business.
The demand for fast, flexible, personalised interactions has rapidly increased in the B2B camp. Yet, there are nuances that must be taken into consideration to ensure a company’s CX investment positively impacts its reputation, builds greater brand loyalty and drives up the bottom line.
The changing face of B2B CX & sales
Physical meetings once sat at the heart of B2B sales, yet Gartner found that 43% would prefer not to interact with a sales rep at all. Changing demographics, coupled with the aftermath of the pandemic, have since increased buyers’ trust in and reliance on digital channels.
Organisations must now be prepared to assist customers on whichever medium they prefer, whether by phone, video, email, SMS, or chatbot. According to McKinsey, B2B mobile app ordering has increased 250% since the pandemic while millennial tech buyers are now twice as likely to discover products online than older generations.
To stay relevant among an ever-evolving target audience, B2B companies of the future must build a robust, digitally driven CX, irrespective of their headcount, location, or language.
WFH operations levelling the playing field
The rapid rise of remote and work-from-home (WFH) operations has levelled the playing field for businesses. Companies can now be judged solely on their digital presence and the experience they provide, rather than location or headcount. This provides an opportunity for sellers that master the art of digital and omnichannel CX to thrive on a global stage.
However, for some, the shift to WFH negatively impacted their ability to manage technical issues or offer consistency across home network environments. Voice quality and desktop related issues have become increasingly prevalent, negatively impacting CX quality, which, for sales-focused team members can harm the organisation’s top-line revenue. And, given ninety per cent of Australians want to keep working from home, in some capacity, according to PwC, B2B companies need to invest time and resources into getting them the right technology and tools.
Getting to know your B2B customers
With approximately 4.48 billion social media users worldwide, social media channels offer companies a unique opportunity to engage with customers in a more creative – but still professional – way than traditional communication channels. Often B2B enterprises overlook the importance and impact of social media when it comes to their CX strategy. Yet, publishing high-quality, valuable content for a company’s audience of key stakeholders, customers, and potential leads on social media is vital to help drive traffic to the organisation’s website.
Social media offers a platform for executives and employees to genuinely engage with audiences. This can be done by providing product updates and news, educational content, and insights into the inner workings of the brand. It also creates an opportunity for business leaders to get to know their customer base better, by gaining an understanding of their pain points as well as the positive impacts of their companies’ products or services.
The vital role of your B2B contact centre
To design more effective customer journeys, companies need to not only understand the end-to-end paths their customers take but ensure every segment of their experience functions as intended. B2B contact centres often play a key role in how that service is delivered and received.
Often traditional on-premises contact centres only benefit from updates to CX software a few times a year because it is such a heavy lift. By moving contact centres to the cloud, businesses can benefit from increased agility, including cloud based CX technologies that can be updated and enhanced regularly.
Consistent CX testing and monitoring also provides greater visibility on every aspect of the customers’ journeys. This data gives businesses a holistic view that can be used to uncover issues, determine root causes, and fix such issues as they arise in real time.
Today’s B2B buyers are consumers too – with the added complexity of needing to deliver results for their company, fast. While more and more organisations are understanding the value of high-quality CX, successful delivery requires people, processes, and technology to play their vital roles from the first customer interaction through to the last.