B2B companies want to give their customers an excellent experience – while gaining the business impact that comes with it – but many fall short. Why? The biggest obstacle to superior customer experience (CX) in the B2B sector is organizational complexity.
With digital CX now the number one determinant of market share, according to research firm TSIA, B2B companies must learn to master the art of delivering the same fast, simple, and convenient digital experiences as their B2C counterparts. Amazon offers the best example. It has transformed customer expectations for digital CX, allowing customers to make purchases and resolve virtually any problem in just a few clicks. Regardless of the number of suppliers that may be involved in a single transaction, the customer doesn’t see the complexity – that remains internal to Amazon. Instead, the customer receives a cohesive, hyper-personalized, connected, and fast experience.
But simplifying B2B customer journeys is highly complicated and nuanced, particularly for those companies that have grown through acquisitions, offer diverse portfolios, or sell through tens of thousands of partners. These challenges complicate the ability to connect CX across various business units, products, selling partners, and channels, such as email, search, chat, events, and video. They fuel an enormous need for unification of customer data and digital engagement across the enterprise – from the time of purchase all the way to renewal, product refresh, upselling or expansion.
Four Steps to Digital Unification
Unification is the process of bringing together a multitude of digital interactions to create one cohesive customer experience. The cornerstone of this process is data. Connecting it across the company to ensure all people, departments, and CX motions operate from a single and complete source of data gives you total transparency into the customer’s mindset. When integrated with the latest market research and trends, this single data source allows you to really understand your customers and quickly anticipate and address their needs.
Here are four principles that B2B companies of all sizes and organizational complexity can use to unify enterprise-wide customer data and digital engagement to boost CX.
1) Consistency
Standardizing customer engagement channels across the business ensures that interactions are similar, cohesive, and expected. Uniformity across content, messaging, and cadence enables greater control over how your company and products appear in the marketplace while providing customers with a more predictable and trustworthy experience.
2) Orchestration of data/people/content/process
Leveraging data (user/account, behavioral, and telemetry) and analytics allows companies to anticipate customer needs and automate decisions that trigger the right message or offer to the right person at the right time. This approach drives personalization and coordination between the AI/digital and human-led CX activities that guide customers in choosing, using, and loving your solutions and enhance overall customer success.
3) Seamless
Eliminating friction points in the customer journey is essential to CX. This involves ensuring that motions between different touchpoints are simple and connected and that redundancies -- like multiple steps, clicks, and authentication points -- are eliminated. By minimizing points of frustration and streamlining every phase of the journey, customers can research, try, purchase, adopt, and renew products and interact with greater ease and convenience.
4) Collaborative
Improving collaboration across communication channels, teams, and selling partners can drive greater customer value. For manufacturers of B2B tech and components, CX can be highly fragmented. Often, partners have direct ownership of end-user relationships, so companies must operate together with these partners using shared platforms and customer data to present digitally as one company and deliver a unified experience to customers.
Similarly, collaboration is critical across internal business units and product teams. Providing all parties with 360-degree visibility into the entire B2B customer experience connects previously disjointed activities and creates new value and customer growth opportunities.
Unification is not a one-time project but a continuous, company-wide effort – one that requires breaking down silos between people, data, and processes and reimaging your business with a customer-centric mindset. Unified digital interactions lead to more simplified experiences that keep B2B customers happy and engaged while giving companies a powerful way to drive customer growth, market share, and long-term success.
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Zarina Pasalic is Director of Digital Experience (DX) at Cisco, ensuring tech-driven innovations meet the ever-changing needs of business clients. She has over 20 years of experience in driving transformational customer-centric change, optimizing the customer journey, and streamlining the digital experience.
