The aftershock from the pandemic still reverberates around the business world. The customer experience has changed forever, and with it, their expectations.
Jeff Bezos said “Focussing on the customer makes a business more resilient” and it was his company, Amazon, that would come to characterize (indeed, capitalize) on this shift the most.
Whether you realize it or not, your customer experience could be costing you business. If you’re not offering a positive, personalized, and streamlined purchasing experience, it's a fair bet that your competitors are. Just a mouse click away.
But how can you stand out and make a real difference in your customers' journey?
In this article, you will find robust strategies for delivering stellar B2B customer experiences that create brand advocates and minimize churn. We'll dive deep into proven principles, share real-world examples, and provide actionable advice for making a lasting impression on your clients.
What is ‘Customer Experience’ in the Context of B2B Sales and Marketing?
In the realm of B2B sales and marketing, delivering an exceptional customer experience is crucial for retaining clients and fueling growth. As a B2B company, your focus should be on understanding the unique needs and expectations of your customers while crafting a personalized experience at every touchpoint.
In contrast to B2C, where individual consumers are the primary targets, B2B buyers often represent entire organizations. This means you need to tailor your customer experience and sales process to meet the needs of various stakeholders within the company. The B2B customer journey typically revolves around collective decision-making, from initial awareness, through evaluation, purchasing, and post-sale support.
To deliver a great B2B customer experience, you should pay close attention to the following areas:
- Seamless touchpoints: Create a consistent experience for customers across all channels, whether it's your website, social media, email, or via your phone system.
- Meaningful relationships: Develop genuine relationships with your customers, going beyond just transactions. Understand their needs and communicate proactively, addressing concerns before they escalate.
- Personalization: Tailor your communication and services to the individual needs of your customers. Utilize data and insights from their previous interactions or purchases to anticipate and meet their requirements.
- Data-driven decision-making: Collect and analyze customer feedback to continuously improve your processes, products, and services. This can help you identify opportunities to enhance the overall customer experience.
Remember, the key to success in B2B customer experience lies in continuously iterating and optimizing your approach. Keep your customers' needs at the center of your strategy, and you'll create lasting business-to-business relationships that drive mutual success.
What are the Key Customer Experience Trends in B2B SaaS?
Firstly, adopting a customer-centric approach is crucial for B2B organizations. This means understanding your customers' needs, preferences, and goals while delivering products and services that cater to their unique requirements.
To do this, use customer data to gain insights and provide the personalized experiences that McKinsey reports say lead to a 5-15% increase in revenue. A figure reinforced by our own 2021 Buyer Experience Study, which shows 64% of buyers actively look for and have their buying decisions influenced by this more tailored approach.
Another important trend is the use of metrics to measure the effectiveness of your customer experience efforts. Keep track of your key performance indicators (KPIs) and use this data to inform strategic decisions to improve your B2B customer experience.
Embracing real-time interactions and communication is a growing trend in B2B SaaS. Instant messaging and chat support allow your customers to get the assistance they need without delay. This approach can have a huge impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Providing self-service options can be highly beneficial too. This means offering tools and resources that empower customers to access information, solve problems, and answer questions without always needing to contact your support team.
Omnichannel experiences are becoming increasingly important. Ensure that your customers can interact with your business seamlessly across various platforms, including email, social media, and telephone. The result is a consistent and unified customer experience.
Staying ahead of the game in B2B CX requires paying attention to these trends and constantly evolving your strategies. By doing so, you'll ensure your organization stands out among competitors and delivers an exceptional customer experience at every touchpoint.
How to Audit & Improve Your Customer Experience
Auditing and improving your B2B customer experience is crucial for creating brand advocates, driving more revenue, and minimizing customer churn. As Maria Kopanarov highlights in MarketingProfs, “Of people who have had a subpar sales experience, only 13% said they would return to the same company.”
Collect Customer Feedback
Regularly collecting customer feedback is crucial for businesses to improve the overall customer experience.
Feedback can come in many forms, such as surveys, reviews, and interviews. Surveys should be short and focused on specific aspects of the customer experience to avoid survey fatigue. Customer reviews can provide valuable insights into what customers like and dislike about a business, while interviews can be useful for identifying pain points in the customer journey.
Collecting feedback provides valuable insights into customers' needs and expectations, allowing businesses to make data-driven decisions that ultimately lead to a better customer experience.
Measure Customer Satisfaction
Measuring customer satisfaction is another critical step in auditing and improving your business's customer experience. Key performance indicators (KPIs) like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores, and Customer Effort Score (CES) can help quantify how happy your customers are with your products and services.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your business to others. This score can help you identify areas where you need to improve your customer experience and increase customer loyalty.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores measure how satisfied customers are with a particular product or service. This score can help you identify areas where you need to improve your products or services to meet your customer's needs and expectations better.
Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it is for customers to do business with your company. This score can help you identify areas where you can streamline your processes and reduce customer effort, leading to a better customer experience.
By regularly measuring customer satisfaction using these KPIs, you can track your progress over time and identify areas where you need to focus your efforts to improve the customer experience. This data can also help you make data-driven decisions about where to allocate resources and prioritize improvements to your products, services, and processes.
Monitor Customer Loyalty
Monitoring customer loyalty is crucial for improving your business's customer experience. Tracking retention rates, repeat purchases, and referral patterns can help you understand how loyal your customers are and what factors contribute to their continued business.
High retention rates indicate customer satisfaction, high repeat purchase rates indicate customer trust, and high referral rates indicate customer satisfaction and willingness to recommend your business.
By monitoring customer loyalty using these metrics, you can identify what factors contribute to your customers' continued business and loyalty, allowing you to make data-driven decisions about where to where to double down and where to tighten up.
Identify Decision-Makers
In B2B eCommerce, there are typically multiple decision-makers involved in the purchasing process, including managers, executives, and procurement specialists. It's important to identify these decision-makers and understand their roles and responsibilities in the purchasing process. This will help you develop strategies that address their specific needs and pain points, and ultimately improve the overall customer experience.
For example, if your key decision-makers are procurement specialists, you may want to focus on streamlining your order processing and fulfillment processes to make it easier for them to place orders.
If your key decision-makers are executives, you may want to focus on providing detailed analytics and reporting to help them make informed purchasing decisions and quicker, easier agreements.
Identifying decision-makers is an important step in improving your business's customer experience in B2B eCommerce.
Optimize Your Touchpoints
If you want to improve your business's customer experience, optimizing your touchpoints is a crucial step.
Touchpoints are all the places where your customers interact with your brand, like your website, online chat, social media, email communication, and phone support. By assessing all of these touchpoints and making targeted improvements, you can make your customers happier and build stronger relationships with them.
Your website is the obvious one to focus on. It's often the first place customers go to learn about your brand- your shop window and your showroom- so you want to make a good first impression. This can involve improving the design and functionality of your website, making it easy for customers to find what they're looking for, and ensuring that it works well on mobile devices.
Another important touchpoint to optimize is your customer support channels. By providing fast and efficient customer support, you can improve the overall customer experience and build stronger customer relationships. If possible, use chatbots to handle routine inquiries, self-service options for common issues, and support staff for more complex problems.
Optimizing your touchpoints is a critical step in improving your business's customer experience. By assessing all the areas where your customers interact with your brand and making targeted improvements, you can create a better experience for your customers, build stronger relationships with them, and ultimately grow your business.
Implement Personalization
Personalization is a great way to improve your business's customer experience. By customizing your communication, offers, and content to address the unique needs and preferences of your customers, you can create a more personalized experience that not only improves the customer experience but also builds trust and loyalty.
There are many ways to do this, like sending personalized emails and product recommendations or creating customized landing pages and targeted advertising. The key is to use data and insights to understand your customers' needs and preferences and tailor your communication and offerings accordingly.
For example, you can use customer data to create personalized email campaigns that address specific pain points or offer customized product recommendations based on past purchases.
Implementing personalization not only improves the customer experience but also builds trust and loyalty. When customers feel that you understand their needs and preferences and are offering solutions tailored to them, they are more likely to trust your brand and become loyal customers.
Continuously Improve
To stay relevant and competitive, your customer experience must be a constant work in progress. And that means regularly revisiting your strategy and adjusting based on new learnings, feedback, and industry trends.
Ask your customers for feedback. Use surveys, focus groups, or even social media to gather insights into what they like and what they don't like.
Another way to improve is by staying up-to-date with industry trends. You can attend conferences, read industry publications, and network with other professionals.
And don't forget to stay agile and adaptive in your approach. Be willing to try new things and change your strategy as you learn more about what your customers really want.
If you want to meet your customers' needs and stay ahead of the game, keep improving that customer experience. Stay curious, stay open-minded, and always strive for excellence.
By following these seven steps, you'll be well on your way to delivering an exceptional B2B customer experience that drives loyalty, satisfaction, and, ultimately, business growth.
What are Some Quick Customer Experience Wins?
In today's competitive B2B landscape, providing an excellent customer experience is a key differentiator for your business. Amazon et al. have raised the bar, and here are five quick wins to help you keep in step.
1. Personalize the buyer journey: As a SaaS provider, your software should cater to your users' unique needs by adapting to their preferences and decision-making processes. This personalization will enable your users to experience value from your product faster, leading to improved customer retention.
2. Implement chatbots for instant support: Chatbots can provide real-time customer support to your customers, addressing their inquiries and technical issues with minimal delays. By incorporating chatbots, you ensure immediate assistance, which enhances the overall customer experience. You can keep human operators for the more in-depth answers, giving your customers the best of both worlds.
3. Leverage Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure satisfaction: The NPS metric is an essential tool for SaaS companies to measure your customers' willingness to recommend your product to others. It allows you to identify areas for improvement and gauge the effectiveness of your customer experience management strategy.
4. Map out the customer journey: For B2B businesses, creating a detailed journey map can help you understand your customer's needs and expectations better. Use data to identify the touchpoints where customers interact with your brand and streamline those interactions to deliver a great customer experience.
5. Foster customer success with proactive communication: Establish regular communication with your clients to keep them updated on new features, industry trends, and best practices. Providing valuable information and support resources can help your clients succeed and make them feel valued, leading to strong, long-term relationships. Provide a detailed customer success plan to support this communication.
Implement these quick wins, and you'll be well on your way to enhancing your B2B customer experience and separating your brand from the competition.
FAQs
How can you improve user experience for new customers in B2B Customer Experience?
Focusing on user experience is essential for new customers. By creating an onboarding process that’s intuitive and informative, you can ensure a smooth transition. Additionally, provide clear communication channels and responsive support to address any concerns your new customers may have.
What are the four common stages of the B2B customer experience?
The four common stages of the B2B customer experience are awareness, consideration, purchase, and post-purchase. By focusing on these four stages and providing a positive experience at each step, businesses can create strong customer relationships and achieve long-term success.
What are the best practices when it comes to B2B CX?
To provide a great B2B customer experience, businesses should know their customers, communicate clearly, and deliver on their promises. They should focus on the entire customer journey, continuously improve, and empower their employees to provide a positive experience. By following these best practices, businesses can create a customer-centric culture that leads to increased loyalty, revenue, and profitability.
Final Thoughts
A well-executed customer experience strategy can lead to reduced customer churn, increased loyalty, and a more efficient onboarding process. And those improvements often lead to revenue growth and improved profitability. Quite the virtuous circle!
Don't be afraid to explore new ways of delivering a positive customer experience to keep your clients engaged. Continually assess your initiatives and be open to adjustments as you go. Remember, small changes compound to make a big difference.
And if you're looking for a tool to streamline your proposals and other business communications, why not book a demo with us? It's a simple step towards providing a better, more customized experience for your clients.
Our sales proposal templates help you create impressive, persuasive, and highly-personalized proposals in record time too.
But don’t just take our word for it, have a look for yourself. Your sales team, customers, and bottom line will thank you!
About the author
Marissa Taffer|Founder & President of M. Taffer Consulting
Marissa Taffer is the Founder & President of M. Taffer Consulting. She brings over 15 years of sales and marketing experience across various industries to a broad range of clients.
