Customer Experience Beyond Customer Service: Breakpoints Within the B2B Organization
Customer experience is on the mind of business leaders in all industries today, as they recognize its strategic importance for securing the future of their organizations. Catering to the ever-growing customer expectations is no longer an instrument to create a competitive edge, but rather a necessity to ensure business longevity.
Even though customer experience has set the business world on fire, more often than not executives focus on specific customer touchpoints or channels, not yet realizing that CX is no longer the sole responsibility of customer service. The complexity of customer <> business interactions across the span of the customer journey naturally leads to customer information and touchpoints residing throughout the enterprise, permeating every single business function — from marketing and PR to product and engineering to UX design to sales and procurement. A fragmentary approach to ensuring customer success only allows organizations to keep pace with the competition rather than guaranteeing lasting achievements.
While customer-centricity has been rocking the b2c world for a while, b2b companies are somewhat slow and reactive to this not-so-new trend of placing the customer at the heart of the business. Traditionally, achieving favorable outcomes in the b2b field has always been closely related to leadership’s ability to define the ideal customer profile in the market, to possessing negotiating power with suppliers, lowering operational costs, and offering superior quality products. Overall customer experience has been more of an afterthought for b2b organizations as often the interaction with customers is custom-tailored and hence not following any formal guidelines. Things are about to change, however. B2b customers are people, too. They expect to receive the same service like the one they already get as b2c customers in their personal life.
To employ a holistic approach to offering excellent customer experience within your b2b organization, analyze all the touchpoints a customer would have with your business. Here’s a quick list of potential breakpoints throughout the organization:
- Lack of personalization and human touch (UX Design & Marketing domains)
Like I already mentioned, b2b clients are also humans. A summary of the ideal client profile (ICP), including organization type, turnover, purchasing triggers, employee count, is a must but is far from enough. The target persona(s) who are using the products, taking the decision to purchase, participating in the proof-of-concept and pilot projects, need to be profiled in detail, and their pain points, digital behavior, and interests, aspirations and pet peeves taken into account when constructing the digital customer journey.
In short, b2b customer relationships are far more complex, as they involve lots of stakeholders, and usually last longer, which makes them much more challenging to maintain.
- Cumbersome sales experience
The fact that the customer values your product and demonstrates purchasing intent does not yet mean they will buy. The process of ordering is an integral part of completing a deal. What’s more, to increase chances of cross- and upsell, customers should get recommendations to purchase additional products and services based on their needs and purchasing tendencies.
- Procurement
In b2b, providing the customer with a quote can take weeks and might require the submission of a number of complex ordering forms (on paper!). Once the customer fills them in and submits them, they are usually left in the dark about the status of their order. While these steps in the sales process would not necessarily influence the purchase decision customers have already made, they do weigh into the overall customer experience with the organization.
- Product delivery/subscription activation
According to McKinsey’s survey of a thousand b2b decision-makers, the number one pain point mentioned twice as often as price is the slow speed and reaction from b2b vendors when it comes to after-sales processes such as activating the paid subscription (or delivering the physical product), ensuring a seamless transition from a pilot/trial to company-wide adoption of the product. These peripheral to the actual sale functions might seem unimportant and irrelevant to customer success, however, they do add to the entire customer perception of the company, brand, care for the customer, and ease of use.
- Handling unforeseen events
Customer success should be the number one priority for every business. Your products and services should be helping customers become better and more successful in what they do. In the b2b context, customers would leverage the purchased product to create value for their end-users. Missed or delayed deliveries, equipment breakdowns, and product malfunctions can severely disrupt the customer experience.
- Subpar product quality and after-sales customer service
Satisfaction with a product and service is clearly the cherry on the cake with regards to customer experience. Again, in the b2b field, customers rely on the purchased product to further their own business and bottom line, hence customer onboarding, product quality, and quick resolution when issues occur are of utmost importance.
Session recording and user behavior analytics tools like SessionStack can help organizations get an understanding of how the existing customer base and new leads are using their product. SessionStack empowers b2b customer service and success teams, as well as product engineering and UX design, to ensure better product quality and stronger customer experience:
— Quick customer request resolution — customer service agents can easily replay a recorded session to see everything that happened to the customer before they contacted the support team. What’s more, SessionStack can be hooked to a help desk system to enable support reps to attach customer sessions to the ticket and forward it to more senior/technical staff, along with valuable tech data.
— Customer onboarding and success with the product — UX and Customer Success teams can leverage SessionStack to ensure their customers get successfully on-boarded with the product by analyzing how clients are using product features and by spotting usability issues at once.
— Better product quality — Engineers receive the customer sessions along with valuable tech details like errors, crashes, bugs, and network delays which can help them reproduce the problem faster.
- Difficulties with subscription renewals and product repurchase
Smooth, efficient and error-free renewal/repurchase is a primary concern for b2b customers, especially when they use your product in production. A failure to ensure smooth service and product functioning even while the customer has not paid yet is crucial to showing your support and dedication to customer success. The importance of a seamless renewal customer journey is also because b2b relationships usually last longer, easily spanning across years and decades, whereas goods in the b2c arena are often bought on a transactional basis.
When we talk about customer experience, another essential difference between b2b and b2c organizations is the fact that the latter have started shifting towards customer-centered models with the start of the digital era almost a couple of decades ago. Today, b2c is almost 100% consumer- rather than engineering-driven. Breaking down traditional silos and building cross-functional teams, empowering them to conceptualize, test, refine, and deploy innovations aimed at creating frictionless experiences for customers is on the agenda for many b2b organizations today.
