B2B customer experience, it should be no surprise, is a different ballgame from B2C experience. While some aspects are very similar, there are a lot of philosophical differences in the marketing and research ends as well as the customer support and service aspect (called customer success in B2B). So, when you’ve got some experience with customer experience in B2C, but find yourself approaching a B2B scenario, it may seem hard to approach.
Well, it’s not so difficult when you get down to it, but the differences are something that really does need to be explored closely. So, let’s take a look at the three most important things to consider for B2B customer experience. These aren’t the only nuances to worry over ultimately, but they are, in a nutshell, the biggest paradigm shifts you will have to cope with when it comes to moving over to the B2B side of things.
Some experienced B2B people may find parts of this a little redundant to them, but I trust they will find insight as well into maybe where some of their approaches may have gone wrong in the past at least.
#1 – Your Marketing
So, a big change in thinking is all about marketing with this scenario. You see, it’s not so much about being pretty, catchy or clever when marketing to a business so much as appealing to a genuine need and appealing to a pocket book.
But, the bigger thing to consider as far as customer experience with marketing is the channel you use. Media-based marketing and even the vaunted social marketing have limited practicality for businesses, because they’re just not listening on these frequencies as much.
As a result, to make them aware of you, you want to use SEO, blogs and email marketing to reach out to them.
#2 – Research Publication
Again, it’s all about hard facts and making yourself very easy to access for research. If you’re going B2B, you want your website to have an exhaustive amount of material for research, and to try to control the user’s exposure to third party sources, which they’re not really going to have time to go after anyhow.
So, your site needs a ton of case studies, white papers, descriptions, comparison pieces and much more so that businesses can do a lot of research into your company and service from one spot. Omnipresence across the web is not as important in B2B.
#3 – Fast and Prioritized Customer Success
While this is important in B2C as well, speed and convenience, as well as improved responsiveness with your support and service in B2B is paramount for good customer experience. You see, every moment they have a problem, it is costing them profits, so you need to devote a lot (sparing no expense) to making your success team able to solve problems with no wait.
This is solved by the diversification of support channels we’ve talked about before, along with self service adoption. Furthermore, as I said, you can’t spare expenses with your success department, meaning having a giant staff to back this up and make it able to multitask isn’t just a good idea, it’s mandatory.
So, B2B customer experience depends on handling the same things right that you need to do for B2C … but you can see that you have to handle each one a little differently. It’s no nonsense with B2B.