What is B2B Customer Experience? Trends, Benefits

B2B Customer Experience (CX) is all about business customer interactions while engaging with another business as a customer. With the business-to-business landscape evolving by the day, offering great experience will soon be the way to growth and success.

Having a customer-centric business outlook is critical in today’s business landscape. With this outlook, businesses have witnessed the meteoric rise of B2B customer experience, while they are closely related to each other.

The digitization of B2B is inevitable.

Forrester estimates that US B2B eCommerce will hit $1.8 trillion by 2023.

B2B companies across all industries are facing the customer ultimatum i.e. to simplify B2B shopping and the reason is simple – they want convenience, which eventually builds experience.

Improving the digital customer experience enables businesses to reach buyers who prefer to shop digitally and provide digital tools for both customer support & sales teams that make the buying process easier.

Let us explore why business-to-business customer experience is critical and tips to serve your B2B customers.

Table of Content

1 What is the B2B Customer Experience? (150-200)
2 Why does B2B CX matter?
3 What are the Benefits of a Superior B2B Customer Experience?
4 Key Stages of B2B Customer Experience (200)
5 Key Differences between B2C vs B2B Customer Experience
6 How to Deliver Excellent B2B Customer Experience (Best Practices & Tips)
7 Best Practices & Tips to Design B2B Customer Experience
8 Key Metrics to Measure B2B Customer Experience
9 B2B Customer Experience Examples
10 B2B Customer Experience: Future Trends
11 Grow Your Brand Trust with Excellent B2B Customer Experience
12 FAQs about B2B Customer Experience

What is the B2B Customer Experience? (150-200)

The B2B customer experience (B2B CX) refers to the overall perception a business has with its suppliers, vendors, or partners. It starts with the very first touchpoint the client has with your company and continues through their entire lifetime.
B2B CX is about ensuring your customers are satisfied every time they interact with your company from initial awareness to post-purchase evaluation. The main goal of business-to-business customer experience is to build strong business relationships that foster mutual growth and success.

Why does B2B CX matter?

Many B2B buyers feel that completing a purchase is complicated and time-consuming, hence sellers must provide their B2B audiences with well-designed user interfaces. By leveraging the right tools, businesses can use platforms to predict user needs based on past purchases, interests, services and products, making the customer journey easy to navigate.

Providing a digital experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations can help a company stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

B2B CX matter

The key areas that B2B CX impacts are as follows:

Building trust: A positive B2B customer experience is built on trust and credibility. It is crucial for establishing a long-term business relationship.
Streamlining processes: A seamless B2B customer experience streamlines processes, such as order fulfillment, invoicing, and customer support, to increase efficiency for both parties.
Offering personalized solutions: B2B customers often have unique business requirements and a positive B2B customer experience requires companies to offer personalized solutions that meet these needs.
Providing expert support: B2B customers require a high level of expertise and a positive B2B customer experience involves providing knowledgeable as well as responsive customer support.
Encouraging repeat business: A positive B2B customer experience leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat business, as well as positive word-of-mouth referrals.

What are the Benefits of a Superior B2B Customer Experience?

The importance of B2B customer experience cannot be overstated, as it has a significant impact on a company’s success.

Research on B2B experiences states that 86% of those who receive a great customer experience are likely to return for another purchase.

Businesses investing in great customer experience strategies witness reduced friction and delight customers with a memorable experience by meeting their expectations in real time.

B2B Customer Experience Benefits

Here are some of the key benefits of delivering a strong B2B customer experience:

Reduce the number of customer support tickets: Businesses providing outstanding CX can reduce the number of support tickets significantly. When customers have delightful experiences with the company, they are less likely to encounter issues.
More engagement means better conversions: A positive customer experience can lead to increased engagement and further into better conversions. When customers feel valued, they are likely to do business with a company in the future.
Higher ROI & increased customer lifetime value (CLTV): A strong CX results in increased customer loyalty and satisfaction, which leads to higher customer lifetime value. When CLTV is high, there are chances of more repeat purchases and the company can reap the benefits of a higher return on investment.
Lower customer churn: Providing a positive customer experience also helps reduce customer churn. Customers are more likely to stay with a company when they feel satisfied and well taken care of, which reduces churn rates.
More brand advocacy: When customers have amazing experiences with a company, they are more likely to advocate for the brand and recommend it to others. Word-of-mouth promotion can lead to increased brand awareness, which can have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line.

Key Stages of B2B Customer Experience (200)

The customer journey is the sum of the collective interactions that consumers experience as they interact with a brand. Understanding the different phases of the customer journey can help organizations provide customers with a great user experience for their product that in turn will increase customer retention, thereby maximizing profits.

The B2B customer experience can be broken down into several stages, including awareness, consideration, evaluation, purchase and post-purchase.

Awareness: In this stage, the customer becomes aware of a company’s products/services/solutions through various marketing channels, like advertisements, trade shows, or word-of-mouth recommendations.
Consideration: The customer then assesses whether the company’s offerings meet their business needs. He also considers the potential benefits and drawbacks of using the company’s products/services.
Evaluation: This stage involves a level deeper evaluation of the company and its offerings, including researching the company’s reputation as well as customer feedback.
Purchase: If the customer determines that the company’s products or services align with their needs. This stage requires a high degree of trust and credibility, as well as efficient communication throughout the buying process.
Post-purchase: This stage is crucial in building long-term business relationships and customer loyalty. The customer evaluates their experience with the company, including the quality of the products/services, the effectiveness of customer support and overall satisfaction.

Key Differences between B2C vs B2B Customer Experience

Usually, the biggest difference between B2B and B2C customer journeys is the scope. With a standard consumer, you only need to convince the client to fall in love with your brand and potentially keep coming back for more in the future.

The below table will help to understand better the difference between B2C vs B2B customer experience.

B2C vs B2B Customer Experience

Target audience: B2C CX targets individual consumers, while B2B CX targets businesses and organizations.
Purchasing behavior: Usually B2C purchases are driven by personal preferences and emotions, while B2B purchases are driven by business needs and rational decision-making.
Buying cycle: More often B2C purchases are made on a one-off basis, while B2B purchases involve longer, more complex buying cycles with multiple decision-makers.
Sales approach: In B2C sales focus is on emotional appeals and brand image, while in B2B it is on building trust.
Customer service: B2C customer service is often reactive and focused on resolving individual issues, while B2B service is proactive on maintaining long-term business relationships.

How to Deliver Excellent B2B Customer Experience (Best Practices & Tips)

Customer experience is the key in the modern business landscape. It is more important than ever to keep your customers happy with the kind of service you are offering, or else they can take their business elsewhere.
Long story short, customers can make or break your business. It means B2B companies need to focus on creating a great experience where customers choose to do business with them.

B2B Customer Experience Best Practices

We have summarized certain tips to deliver a superb B2B customer experience.

1. Map your B2B customer journey
2. Create an omnichannel approach
3. Make every interaction hyper-personalized
4. Develop data-driven strategies to automate customer experience
5. Break down silos and equip your team for success
6. Provide self-service capabilities
7. Use a customer experience platform

Let’s hop in to understand more about the tips and best practices of B2B CX.

1. Map Your B2B Customer Journey

Customer journey is no less than a roller coaster ride. Hence, it is very important to map their journey to deliver excellent customer experience. Understanding how customers interact with your business helps you to deliver the kind of support they are looking for..

Mapping your B2B customer journey can also help you identify potential pain points and areas for improvement. By doing this, you can tailor your customer experience to meet the needs of each customer.

Best Practices:

Identify key touchpoints in the customer journey.
Understand customer goals & pain points at each stage, then evaluate current CX to identify areas for improvement.

2. Create an Omnichannel Approach

An omnichannel approach involves providing a seamless customer experience across all online and offline channels, including in-person, online/phone.

Leveraging an omnichannel approach helps you to streamline your customer interactions under one platform so that you can deliver a consistent experience across their preferred channels.

Customer Demand Real-Time Interactions

It helps businesses to answer customer queries instantly and resolve the issues in the first touch point, which increases customer experience. Eventually, it helps build trust and loyalty with customers.

Best Practices:

Consistently offer the same level of customer service across all channels.
Provide a unified customer view and multiple ways for customers to reach you.

3. Make Every Interaction Hyper Personalized

Personalization is always in vogue. It helps to create a more meaningful connection with customers. When you as a business understand your customer needs rightly, you can craft the best solution for them.

Tailor your interactions to meet their individual needs so that you can build trust and deepen customer relationships that lead to higher customer lifetime value (CLTV).

Best Practices:

Collect customer data, preferences, and history to create personalized experiences.
Continuously collect and analyze customer feedback to improve personalization efforts.

4. Develop Data-Driven Strategies to Automate Customer Experience

Following data-driven decision-making, businesses can create more efficient and effective customer experiences. Automating certain processes can also free up time for customer service representatives to focus on more complex interactions.

Best Practices:

Continuously monitor and adjust automated processes to ensure they are meeting customer needs.
Ensure automated processes provide a consistent and high-quality customer experience.

5. Break Down Silos and Equip Your Team for Success

Breaking down silos and ensuring all teams have the necessary resources as well as training can help improve overall customer experience. A collaborative team approach can also help to identify and resolve customer issues more quickly.

Best Practices:

Encourage cross-functional collaboration and information sharing.
Provide ongoing training and development opportunities.
Empower team members to make decisions and take action to improve customer experience.

6. Provide Self-Service Capabilities

Providing self-service options can help customers quickly find answers and resolve issues on their own.

It acts as a great tool to help customers in real time without approaching your help desk. It also frees up time for customer service representatives to focus on more complex interactions.

Best Practices:

Offer a robust knowledge base or FAQ section that ensures it is easily accessible and user-friendly.
Continuously evaluate and improve self-service options based on customer feedback.

7. Use a Customer Experience Platform

A customer experience platform is highly efficient for any customer-facing business as it can help streamline processes and gather customer data in one place.

Deploying a well-designed CX platform can help to improve the overall customer experience by providing a unified view of the customer and enabling data-driven decision-making.

Best Practices:

Prefer a CX platform that integrates with existing systems and tools.
Continuously evaluate and optimize the platform to meet changing customer needs.
Ensure the platform provides a consistent and high-quality customer experience across all channels.

Best Practices & Tips to Design B2B Customer Experience

More than price or product quality, experience will soon be the biggest differentiator for getting customers, even in the B2B space.

Design B2B Customer Experience

Hence, let us take a closer look at the customer experience best practices that the sales teams should adopt, to stay competitive, meet or exceed expectations and build loyalty.

Gather data about customers to understand their needs, pain points, and preferences to create a tailored experience.
Offer customized experiences and content that cater to the specific needs of each customer.
Provide a seamless experience across all channels, including email, phone, and website.
Ensure that your website is user-friendly, accessible, and easy to navigate.
Foster empathy and a human connection with customers to enhance the customer experience.
Respond to customer inquiries efficiently to build trust and satisfaction.
Continuously monitor, evaluate, and improve the customer experience to stay ahead of customer expectations.
Use data & analytics to inform decision-making and understand the impact of customer experience initiatives.
Implement technology that enhances the customer experience, such as chatbots and AI-powered customer service.
Encourage a customer-centric culture throughout the organization and empower employees to prioritize customer satisfaction.

Key Metrics to Measure B2B Customer Experience

The things that can’t be tracked, can’t be improved.

The same applies to B2B customer experience as well. There are a set of metrics and KPIs defined to measure CX. No matter what industry you belong in, measuring customer experience is the one step you can never skip.

B2B Customer Experience Key Metrics

Here are the key metrics that can be used to grasp the quality of experiences you’re delivering:

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): CSAT is a very good tool if you want to measure if a customer is satisfied with one-time interaction. It is most often used in customer service.
Net promoter score (NPS): NPS consists of only two questions – it gives that one customer experience-related number your leadership needs for target setting and bonuses. NPS is often used to rate a brand, service, or product in general.
Customer effort score (CES): Customer Effort Score is the most popular customer experience metric that involves the customer’s input. CES typically answers “How easy was it to solve your problem today?” and has a 5- or 7-point scale system
Customer lifetime value (CLV): Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.
Customer retention rate: Customer retention rate  is the measurement of how a business retains customers over a specific period. The metric is highly connected to the churn rate: the higher the retention is, the lower the churn rate will be.

All the above-mentioned metrics are customer-focused as business-to-business customer experience resolves around customers.

B2B Customer Experience Examples

A well-designed strategy is a vital element of customer experience initiatives. It has been identified that the top emerging customer engagement trends will have the biggest impact on your CX. If your business wants to improve customer engagement the latest customer experience technology trends can help your strategic plans to leverage.

1. Customer-Centric & Personalized Experiences

Modern customers expect personalized and more human experiences with more options than ever. They want to be treated like you value them and understand their needs, pain points, and expectations and put yourself in their shoes before offering service.

It will prove that you are so much obsessed with your customers and go the extra mile to deliver personalized support that will convert into a delightful experience. A scalable customer service model helps ensure customer retention while boosting customer lifetime value (CLV).

Uber is an excellent B2B customer experience example. It shows exactly what you need to do to provide an outstanding customer experience. The Uber managers identified all the pain points people faced while hailing a cab. They eliminated the anticipation while waiting for the cab.

2. Self-Service Options

Customers expect their issues to be resolved as fast as possible. Offering self-serve options is a great way of handling customer’s patience. It has the power to resolve the issue in real time without connecting with the support executive.

According to Gartner, almost 43% of B2B customers would prefer to not interact with a sales representative at all.

For example:

Providing a detailed knowledge base (or repository of information, including how-to guides and videos) can aid customers who want to manage things themselves.
Having a chatbot that can direct customers to the relevant documents can help to reduce friction and provide value.

Hence, having an effective and well-designed self-service option can help customers to get what they need for a better experience.

Apple support is well known for its self-service game. For starters, their support page opens with an integrated search tool and personalized flow options for customers to click through based on their questions. They offer even more resources like a link to their support community, their YouTube channel that offers educational videos and their Twitter handle, which also offers
helpful tips ‍.

3. Quicker Response Times & 24/7 Customer Service

The consumer shift to multi-channel digital tools reflects their expectation of urgency and for improved accessibility to customer service.

AI and automation have made it possible for companies to meet customers’ expectations in terms of providing instant resolutions to their issues – and on their preferred channel. With the rise of remote and hybrid work, many B2B customer service requests come outside of regular business hours.

Archer is a tech-driven financial services company that streamlines operational processes for brokers, so they can focus on investments. Archer deployed the digital channel to deliver excellent service and quick results for their clients. The team was able to automate ticket analysis and routing freeing agents to focus on more important aspects of their work.

4. The Right Channel for the Right Experience

Customers are looking for experiences that reflect their changing needs. Research by A.T. Kearney shows that companies with well-developed digital platforms that make the best use of technology and automation generate an average of 8.1% revenue growth per year.

It requires brands to offer the right channel for the right experience, rather than offering limited channels for all points in the customer journey. For example: Some customers may prefer to communicate via email, while others are more comfortable sending text messages or Tweets.

The brands that succeed are those that take into account the preferences of their customers and provide the appropriate mediums.

B2B Customer Experience: Future Trends

If customers aren’t happy, they won’t stick around for long. Luckily, businesses are starting to focus more on CX by embracing some really exciting trends emerging, such as:

B2B Customer Experience- Future Trends

Hyper-Personalization with Conversational AI

Conversational AI, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, will become increasingly common in B2B customer experience. The technology can improve efficiency by providing 24/7 support, while also providing a more personalized and human-like experience for customers.

Reduce Support Tickets with Workflow and Automation

Workflow and automation tools will continue to play a significant role in the B2B customer experience. By streamlining processes and freeing up time for customer service representatives, businesses can provide a more effective experience for customers.

Consistent Omnichannel Experience Across all Channels

Omnichannel experience will remain a top priority for B2B customers. Businesses that provide a seamless experience across all touchpoints, including online, in-person and over the phone, will have a competitive advantage.

Prioritize Voice of Customer (VOC) Even More

Listening to the voice of the customer (VOC) will continue to be a critical aspect of the B2B customer experience. By gathering customer feedback, businesses can identify areas for improvement and continuously evolve their approach to meet the changing needs of customers.

Grow Your Brand Trust with Excellent B2B Customer Experience

Improving your B2B customer experience not only delights customers but also increases retention and helps your business stand out from the competition. Because your B2B CX considers every touchpoint in the buyer’s journey, you need to work across teams to make progress efficiently.

You also have to pay close attention to all these facets of a successful customer experience strategy and target audience needs. An ongoing exercise of a holistic approach to customer satisfaction to boost CX from start to finish should be the prime objective.

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FAQs about B2B Customer Experience

How important is customer experience in B2B?

Customer experience (CX) in B2B is crucial in creating positive emotions in your customers. All decisions are based on emotions, so how customers feel during their interaction with your company has a significant impact on their interest and trust in your brand.
How does B2B measure customer experience?

What are the main components of the B2B customer experience?

There are 3 main components of the B2B customer experience journey Discovery – how the new customer found you. Engagement – before they buy, customers research. This step relates to answering customers’ questions or providing further info about your products. Delivery – your goal here is to deliver the orders on time and in good condition.

What is the best B2B customer service experience?

The best B2B customer service experience includes creating a personalized, omnichannel experience and building lasting relationships while providing convenient, digital solutions. It also includes a focus on employees because engaged employees are more likely to create a superior customer experience.