Unlike the B2C customer experience, the B2B customer experience involves more complexities that can include longer sales cycles, a team of decision-makers, and in some cases higher stakes. The more competitive the B2B space becomes, the more essential it will be to establish lasting relationships that fuel your bottom line for years to come – that’s where developing a solid customer experience comes in.
In this guide, we’re breaking down what the B2B customer experience is, why it’s important, and how you can leverage it to set your business apart from the competition.
Why is The B2B Customer Experience So Important?
From the moment a buyer contacts you to support post-purchase, the B2B customer experience includes the full lifecycle of the interactions between you and the customer. The more positive experiences buyers have with you, the more likely you’re creating advocates of your business who a not only satisfied but loyal. On the other side of that, a negative experience can stifle your business growth and reputation. With the value of long-term relationships in the B2B space, improving each engagement with buyers is critical to sustainable growth.
Effectively harnessing those relationships can look like reliable communication, using data to understand customer needs, and ultimately providing a high-quality service or product. The result? What B2B businesses thrive on – repeat business and referrals.
Mapping The B2B Customer Journey
Understanding the B2B customer experience involves understanding the customer journey as well. The B2B customer journey includes multiple touch points where interactions occur. Key touch points in the customer journey include:
Awareness and Research
At this point, the potential buyer is looking for a solution or product and may discover your business through marketing channels such as search engines, social media, or referrals.
Consideration and Evaluation
This touch point involves in-depth comparison. The prospect is likely comparing your solutions or products and prices to competitors and looking for detailed discussions or even presentations before making a decision.
Purchase and Onboarding
During this stage, the buyer has found the right fit and likely worked with a team of decision-makers to make an unanimous decision about which solution fits their needs. This is also where your team would come in to properly onboard their team and get them comfortable with the service or product purchased.
Post-Purchase Support
This is a critical touch point in B2B customer experience. Buyers are looking for ongoing support with their operations and the challenges they face with your service or product.
During this journey challenges are inevitable, and how you navigate through them can be the difference between a great B2B customer experience or a bad experience. There are pain points you should be aware of to keep the path from awareness to post-purchase support as clear as possible. Those pain points can look like:
- Complex Procurement Processes: lengthy or complicated purchasing procedures.
- Poor Communication: misunderstandings that can easily lead to dissatisfaction.
- Inadequate Support: unreliable post-purchase support that damages relationships.
Strategies For Improving The B2B Customer Experience
When you understand the B2B customer experience and how the stages of the customer journey impact it, you can build a comprehensive strategy that gives you the tools you need to improve it. Those tools include:
Leveraging Data
Understanding the buyers’ needs and behaviors starts with data analysis. That’s how you create personalized experiences and effectively tailor solutions and communication to improve satisfaction and loyalty with buyers.
Improving Procurement Process
Streamlining the procurement process by reducing complexity, automating workflows, and providing clear information is a great way to refine the customer experience. The simpler the process, the easier it is for customers to work with you.
Enhancing Communication
The B2B customer experience will suffer without effective communication. Keeping buyers updated, streamlining your processes, and offering reliable support builds the trust you need to create advocates for your business.
Relationship Management
Being proactive with regular check-ins, addressing concerns, and providing value long after purchase and onboarding are ways to build strong relationships with your customers.
What Does Success Look Like?
Improving the B2B customer experience has a rippling effect on your business. Once you consistently have positive and effective interactions with customers, that turns into more sales, which results in an ever-flowing pipeline. These things can be broken down into metrics that you can then use to enhance your offerings.
Key Metrics For Measure Success
- Customer Satisfaction
- Net Promoter Score
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Churn Rate
With these metrics, you can better measure the impact of your products, services, and customer experience. It’s essential that you regularly monitor them to identify areas of improvement and track progress alongside the goals you have set.
Case Study: A 142% Increase In Revenue For Nivel
Metrics matter and Nivel, a specialty automotive parts manufacturer and distributor, is a testament to how improving the customer experience has a direct impact on your bottom line. Using Kibo’s B2B eCommerce platform to manage its complex product catalog and leverage buyers’ data to create valuable content to help buyers make informed decisions, Nivel saw sustainable growth in its revenue.
Learn more about how Nivel improved its customer experience.
Go Beyond The Transactions
If you haven’t caught on by now, there’s a theme to improving the B2B customer experience and it involves streamlining processes, personalizing interactions, and providing valuable support. A common factor that ensures that all happens is the technology you use to support that process.
From advanced CRM systems that centralize customer data for better tracking and relationship management to B2B eCommerce platforms that simplify the purchasing process – innovative tech is needed to see real results in the customer experience you provide.
Happy Customers = Thriving Bottom Line
Though it sounds simple – make your customers happy, putting that into practice requires a thorough strategy. Putting the pieces together like understanding customer needs, streamlining processes, and leveraging technology is how you succeed at creating a B2B customer experience that your customers value and your competition can’t keep up with.
Kibo Commerce has spent years helping B2B businesses make every interaction count with our cutting-edge technology that supports that full customer journey. Learn more about how the B2B customer experience is improved on the Kibo Platform.