
With the advent of digital commerce, the B2B customer expectations and purchase journey has evolved rapidly. Buyers now have extensive and instant access to information on multiple products and services. The brands that win in B2B customer engagement today, recognise that it is a continuous and proactive process. Industry research across several domains suggests that below are the main areas, a business needs to focus on, to reduce churn in customers.
- Complexity in Ordering , Re-Ordering and Tracking
A complex and non-timely re-ordering process is one of the main reasons of customer-vendor friction. In a B2B scenario, suppliers are engaged for a specific product or service delivery. The customer is not looking to kick start a fresh sales cycle with usual overhead of enquiries and information exchange on every re-order. After the customer-vendor relation is established, the buyer is best served by a dedicated ordering platform, that takes into account the buyer’s specific product , pricing and purchase preferences.
2. Delay in access to customer service
In the age of digital commerce, customers expect the service provider to be present on the go. Delay in issue resolution, or access to requested information can be detrimental to buyer perception of your service. Leading brands today focus on omni-channel, high touch customer support. This is enabled by digital platforms, harnessing customer analytics and AI, to pre-empt customer enquiries at any stage of the purchase decision. B2B world is now taking up the best practices from its B2C counterpart. For instance, a leading pulses and grains supplier has augmented the ordering platform for its industrial buyers, by a smart “research box”. This is inspired by the online travel aggregator sites, which provide instant flight ticket prices comparison by date and airline. The research box helps the buyers to experiment with various ordering options and compare product variants on the go, limiting dependence on sales enquiry and thus, reducing time and cost.
3. Sales team is not pro-active in follow up
Account managers and Sales Reps have a key role to play in customer engagement in the B2B world. For the customer, they represent your brand and in case of any hinderance or delay in outreach, it impacts your business reputation directly, causing buyer dissatisfaction or in worse cases, customer churn. A successful sales digitisation strategy does not replace the personal interaction factor, but augments it and makes it more efficient. The sales team has to execute a variety of roles while managing customer accounts and prospects pipeline. Capturing new demand, generating leads, and managing existing customers efficiently is a complex task. This can sometime create lack of focus where it is most required. The solution is to have a data-driven sales team. A platform that consolidates information across sales-channels for orders , enquiries , inventory and promotions can go beyond just helping sales reps to engage customers at the right occasion. It can help them to pre-empt buyer requirements, creating an efficient sales execution.
Trunkroad offers multi channel AI driven Sales automation and Order Management platform to help your business unleash growth with a customer centric value chain.

