How You Can Nail Your B2B Customer Experience Perfectly!

A huge 75% of company executives think that their company is customer-centric, while just 30% of their customers agree, which is a big mismatch. It's also stopping a number of companies from investing in an improved B2B customer experience when they should actually be considering a B2B transformation for the customer experience.

Customer expectations are at the highest than ever, and raging B2Bs are no longer just competing with customer experiences in the sector. They are now also competing with the B2Cs too. Digital natives are quickly coming up the corporate ladder through the new generation hot in pursuit. This new buyer wants the same and smooth customer experience while a work purchase or getting a smart speaker from Amazon, or even streaming a movie on Netflix.

Don’t be tricked: transforming the B2B customer experience is tough. A number of transformations are not up to the mark, that leaves the buyers unsatisfied. Companies that actually get it right, however, benefit from the "stacked wins." Not just do they enhance loyalty and differentiation, but also reduce the cost-to-serve with the help of automation and also position themselves better for growth and enhance the agility as well.

How B2B leaders design their own superior customer experiences

Companies needing a B2B customer experience revamp can find a lot of advice online. The problem is: much of this advice is redundant. Forget about nitpicking the consumer-like customer practices from the newest B2C. Customers can have different wants, needs, and desires. There's no reason to think that what works in another industry or a rival company will also provide the most significant ROI for your business. You need to design keeping the outcomes in mind, not just the features.

Also, ignore any advice that focuses on enhancing the individual points. It is crucial. You can get a sales team, an account management team, customer support team, and even a logistics team that all work flawlessly when rated in isolation, but the complete B2B customer experience can still suck big time. Failure to personalize, an underwhelming product configuration, and the lack of self-serve options are three of the many failures that cannot be ignored.

Companies who wish to transform their B2B customer experience successfully need to think that the "customer journey"is a complete sum of all experiences that the buyers receive when they interact with your brand. It's the customer journey that dictates whether then buyers will order from you or not, the next time. And it's again the customer journey that is analyzed by professional B2B customer experience practitioners.

For companies who are hoping to enhance their B2B customer experience, McKinsey identifies six steps that act as a guide:

Step 1: Define the aims of B2B customer experience

What’s exactly your purpose? Companies that are looking to improve their B2B customer experience should have the aspiration that every single employee can be of use, even in a large, distributed organization.

Step 2: Figure out what’s most important for the customers:

Copying a competitor who tasted success in its B2B customer experience choices is of no use. In order to give the best experience to your customers, you need to identify and choose the most important customer journeys for every segment and select where actual opportunities exist.

Step 3: Keep note of the buyer experiences:

This is the place where a buyer’s behavioral psychology comes into existence. By skillfully shaping customer perceptions of the operational improvements, you can derive maximum value from your B2B investments. The smallest and least expensive changes often make the biggest impact. Simply rearranging the steps in the process of product configuration, for example, can enforce a sense of progress and efficiency.

Step 4: Bring in innovations with digital means and designs for customers:

You don't have to be a genius to figure out the shaft in B2B buying preferences. The value that buyers used to place on companies with high EQ (the kind of relationship selling that B2B was built on) has now shifted on businesses with high IQ (advanced technology through digital channels.) As such, the customer experience transformations need to be viewed through progressive digital transformation.

Design thinking makes an effort to get inside the buyers’ psyche, understanding their behavior and demands and providing them with what they need even before they even come to know it themselves.

Step 5: Make the first line as impeccable as possible.

Companies that provide best-in-class B2B customer experiences include customer-centrism in the entire hierarchy. Frontline workers, comprising both humans and now AI too, are empowered to utilise their initiative and provide the most amazing customer services possible.

Step 6: Set up the right set of metrics.

Which metrics should be on your list to measure the performance in B2B customer experience? It's a tough question to answer. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been the best standard for over a decade, but it's not without its faults. Customers are now very tired of these surveys and are taking part in them less frequently than ever. Those who are still doing it, belong to a very narrow band of survey-lovers, skewing the results.

Big data is the last blow for NPS. By analyzing huge data sets from the internal and external sources, companies can get a deep and predictive understanding of how the customers feel and the changes that can be brought into effect to improve everything, from the deal size to margins, and even retention.

How can the manufacturers enhance the B2B customer experience through a Visual Product Configurator.

Manufacturers of complicated, engineer-to-order products have found the switch from relationship-selling to the digital channels pretty challenging. With thousands (sometimes millions) of product options and the tough rules that govern them, product configuration has still remained the domain of knowledgeable and highly experienced sales reps, to the annoyance of present day buyers who prefer digital channels.

Manufacturers providing the best-in-class B2B customer experience use the power of visual product configuration to synchronize the sales processes and reduce the sales cycles. Through a visual product configurator, buyers can configure complicated products with an intuitive visual interface that ranges in complexity from a 2D configurator with an Amazon-style filtering system, right up to a fully interactive, 3D configurator powered with AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) capabilities.

Through a visual product configurator, buyers just point and click to customize products as they need them to be. They can resize sections, add or remove the parts, upgrade their features, change colors, and so much more with the prices that change dynamically in real-time. Product rules that are built into the back-end ensure that the human error is completely eliminated and every configuration gets optimized from an engineering viewpoint.

Buyers can use a visual product configurator absolutely anytime and anywhere, from any device. Products become alive on the screens, connecting the buyers to a brand on deeper and more emotional levels. Buyers take the full ownership of the entire configuration process, understand all available options, and feel invested in their decisions.