As the B2B business environment becomes increasingly competitive, it’s more important than ever to provide an exceptional customer experience. Business-to-business (B2B) deals are more complex than business-to-consumer (B2C) deals. With B2B, the sales process is longer, and more effort is required to reach key stakeholders and close deals. That’s why it’s crucial for B2B businesses to focus their efforts on developing excellent customer experiences to stand out from the crowd. In fact, research shows that B2B businesses with customer experience as their main focus see an 80% increase in revenue.
B2B businesses must understand what customers seek, nurture customers throughout their journey, and provide valuable solutions to customer issues. Read on to learn how to improve B2B customer experience, from the first touchpoint to the last.
6 Strategies to Improve the B2B Customer Experience
To improve the B2B customer experience, there are many effective practices that businesses can use. Here, we have provided six of the best strategies proven to enhance customer experiences in the B2B space.
1. Embrace a Customer-Centric Mindset
To improve the B2B customer experience, businesses need to adopt a customer-centric mindset. Your business should be obsessed with improving customer service, providing better support, and gaining data to help you enhance processes for your prospects, leads, and customers. Here are seven strategies to help your business develop this customer-centric strategy and approach.
Understand Your Customers
To enhance the customer experience, you must understand your customers’ pain points and interactions with your business. You can identify your customers’ needs by creating a buyer persona. Buyer personas represent your company’s ideal customer and help you better understand your target audience. By identifying target audience information such as demographics, behaviors, and pain points, you can launch more effective marketing campaign strategies.
Another strategy for elevating the customer experience is to map the customer journey. By mapping this buying journey, you gain insight into how and when customers engage with your company.
Check out our B2B customer journey basics article for more information about mapping the customer journey.
Share Valuable Content with Customers
Your customers want to know that they can trust your business. Showcase your expertise by providing your customers with educational content that addresses their pain points. It’s important that you listen to your customers’ concerns in order to provide them with the most helpful information. By establishing yourself as an industry expert through valuable and relevant content, you ease your customers’ concerns and build trust. Some valuable content includes:
Blog posts
Case studies
Industry-specific guides
Ebooks
How-to videos
Provide Post-Purchase Support
In B2B, you want to build long-lasting relationships with your customers. After your customer makes a purchase, be sure to provide them with additional support. Show them how to get the most out of your product or service. You should also regularly check in with them to see how to improve the product or enhance your service. Overall, you’ll want to stay in touch with your customers so you can best understand their needs and provide them with effective solutions.
Implement Customer Self-Service
Research shows that 70% of customers expect a company’s website to include a self-service option.
Your B2B business can help customers find solutions through self-service tools like online chatbots and knowledge bases. These self-service options allow customers to ask questions at any time and they also lessen the workload for customer service teams by utilizing AI and automation. They can also reduce customer service expenses by up to 30%.
When customers use self-service tools, it provides your business with customer data that improves the overall customer experience. By implementing customer-service technology, you benefit both the customers and your business.
Optimize Website Navigation
To improve the B2B customer experience, it’s crucial that your website is accessible and easy to use. You will also want to ensure that it is mobile-friendly, as customers increasingly search the web on smartphone devices. Implementing features such as alt text for images and video captions ensures that your content is more accessible. Using clear and concise language also makes your content easier to digest and understand.
Collect and Utilize Customer Feedback
B2B businesses can collect customer feedback through surveys, customer reviews, and social media. Through customer feedback, you’ll learn what your business needs to improve in your customer service approach. With this data, your business can focus on improving those areas to enhance customer satisfaction and close more deals.
Personalize Customer Interactions
The key to an exceptional customer experience is to make your customers feel valued and appreciated. 80% of B2B customers are more likely to make a purchase if they have a personalized experience. To provide your customers with a tailored experience, get to know your customers and understand their pain points so you can provide solutions that match their needs. When you provide your customers with relevant content and support, you increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and closed deals.
2. Implement an Omnichannel Approach
B2B customers often use multiple channels (in-person representatives, online chatbots, etc.) throughout the course of the customer journey. For example, customers will likely interact with different content on your brand’s website, use email for support, or reach out to ask questions via a web chat.
B2B businesses need to accommodate multiple channels if they want the best chances of reaching customers where they are, nurturing customers, and closing deals. With an omnichannel approach, it’s crucial to provide a consistent customer experience across multiple channels. A consistent experience leads to more credibility for your business and higher customer satisfaction rates.
For B2B businesses, you should consider having the following channels set up:
Live web chat
SMS and MMS
Email
Social media
Chat apps (WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger)
3. Harness the Power of Data and Automation
Customer data and automation help significantly streamline customer service tasks when used effectively. The data that your business collects can be used to understand your customers better and create automations that provide quicker solutions to specific customer issues. Overall, today’s customers expect seamless interactions and timely responses. AI and automation allow your B2B business to improve customer response times and these technological tools give your business a competitive advantage. You should consider using tools and outreach platforms to help you set up automated replies and take some manual work from your teams.
4. Identify and Address Causes of Customer Churn
Your B2B business can use customer feedback to identify the reasons why your customers don’t take action or leave your company. By simply paying attention to what customers feel is lacking, you can improve your customer service approach and keep customers from going with another business. It’s important always to evaluate and refine your customer service strategy as more feedback comes in. Identifying why some of your customers leave is crucial to improving the experience for new customers. You can also set up a strategy to help win back customers who are leaving. For example, if they want to leave over price, consider negotiating to keep them as a customer.
5. Encourage Cross-Departmental Collaboration
By aligning multiple departments such as marketing and sales, you ensure that everyone understands your business goals. This alignment not only ensures you provide consistent messaging to your customers but also makes your offerings more memorable and improves the overall customer experience. For example, aligned departments from product to sales to marketing can lead to:
Better ideas: Sales can help marketing and product teams develop better resources because they consistently talk to customers.
Improved processes: Aligned departments can help ensure processes are streamlined and improved for customers. There aren’t any disjointed handoffs from customer support to sales.
Higher revenue: When B2B teams are aligned and working toward the same goal, they are more likely to delight customers to retain them and acquire them.
6. Learn from Successful Deals
B2B businesses can tremendously benefit from analyzing successful deals. By understanding what went right and led customers to make purchases, your business can implement those successful tactics into your customer acquisition strategy.
You should consider analyzing a few key elements of deal closing, including:
Negotiation tactics: What negotiation strategies worked best?
Touchpoints: How many touchpoints were necessary to close the deal?
Relationship: Were there clear relationship-building efforts by a sales representative?
Value: What content was used to help convert a buyer? Was the product value proposition clear?
Objection handling: How did sales reps effectively handle objections?
How B2B Data Providers Can Help Improve Customer Experience
Collecting, analyzing, and using customer data can be a lengthy and tedious process. Luckily, data providers can help B2B businesses gather and utilize customer data quickly and efficiently. Data providers offer clear and accurate data to give businesses a better understanding of customer needs and behaviors. These data platforms can also spot trends and patterns that show marketing and sales leaders key information, such as common customer pain points and buying intent signals. Armed with the right data, businesses can reach the right customers at the right time to gain loyal customers and improve the B2B customer experience.
Optimize Your B2B Customer Experience with Nimbler
An enhanced B2B customer experience relies on accurate customer data. Nimbler is a B2B data provider and an all-in-one prospecting and sales automation platform that can assist your business in optimizing the customer journey. With 120M+ high-quality B2B contacts, Nimbler gives your business an advantage over your competitors. Plus, Nimbler is not just a contact database. Nimbler helps sales and marketing professionals enhance the buying journey with AI-assisted lead scoring, campaign building, and more.
Ready to improve your B2B customer experience and drive customer satisfaction? Try Nimbler for free today.
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