Although defining this concept is a challenging concept, nowadays, investing in creating an extremely positive customer experience for every organization or individual with whom you do business is considered essential. This is because doing so effectively can build love and loyalty to your company, deepen your connection with customers and increase revenue.
What is your customer experience strategy?
Please read on to fully understand what a great B2B customer experience is, why it is so important today, and the techniques and strategies for how to achieve it in your organization.
(Pro tip: Customer experience is often called CX, but don’t use that term for your customers.They may not want to be shortened to “C” or summarize their experience as “X”.）
What is customer experience?
Customer experience definition
Internet Encyclopedia:
“Forbes”:
The customer experience can contain many elements, but in the final analysis it is the customer’s perception of your brand.
“Harvard Business Review”:
HubSpot:
Gartner Corporation:
Customer perception and related feelings caused by the one-time and cumulative effects of interaction with the supplier’s employees, systems, channels, or products.
TechTarget Corporation:
Of course, the concept of customer experience covers B2B and B2C environments, especially because your corporate customers and customers’ views on your organization will always be affected by the personal views of key people in close contact with you.
Our company focuses on B2B customer experience strategy because it is at the heart of almost everything we do. Not only do we continue to lead the forefront of customer experience training, we also adopt a continuous improvement model to provide and cultivate an unparalleled B2B customer experience for every organization we work with.
The following is an extended view of our definition of customer experience, which includes the two key signs of our training work, namely focus on relationships and focus on your future：
Definition of the next level of B2B customer experience | Global partner training
B2B customer experience-The overall relationship between the customer and your organization is based on the sum of all your interactions with that customer, including the customer’s awareness that you are committed to understanding their most important business goals and focusing on their current and future success.
Customer experience and customer service
When analyzing the comparison between customer experience and customer service, the easiest way to look at it is that customer service belongs to the category of customer experience.
Although the customer experience includes every interaction between the customer and the company or other organization, the term customer service usually describes “direct one-to-one interaction between the consumer who buys and the representative of the company that sells it” (Investopedia). For many B2B organizations, it also refers to “the support you provide to your customers-whether before or after they purchase and use your products or services”.
Therefore, although customer experience and customer service are two very different things, it is very important to understand how they are interrelated in today’s business environment. Bottom line: Excellent customer service goes a long way to building a positive customer experience.
“Customer experience and service have been integrated,” said Peter Schwartz, senior vice president of strategic planning at Salesforce. “This is not just a call center and a successful response to a problem; it is a service opportunity in sales, support, and marketing. Now, providing a great customer experience means providing amazing and almost magical services at every opportunity.”
Why it’s so important to prioritize customer experience today
Let’s start with the basics. You don’t need a Harvard MBA to understand the overwhelmingly positive customer experience：
- Increase customer retention
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Increase the potential for up-selling and cross-selling
Increase the possibility of establishing a new business through positive word of mouth
A quick look at some enlightening statistics can verify the idea that the customer experience is more important than ever before. For example, a report by digital marketing giant HubSpot said：
- More than 80% of companies that prioritize customer experience reported increased revenue.
- 76% of customers want the company to understand their needs.
- Customers will spend 17% more to get a good experience.
- The profits of customer-centric companies are 60% higher than those of non-customer-centric companies.
- Due to poor customer service, 1.6 trillion U.S. dollars are lost every year.
Customer loyalty is another basic benefit of implementing a B2B customer experience strategy. Every company wants to develop loyal customers. Paying closer attention to the “overall situation” needs of each customer also helps to achieve this goal. After all, one of the keys to cultivating relationships that generate loyal customers is not only to solve the current needs of customers, but also to fully understand them to predict future needs.
The goal is to establish a business partnership in which customers not only see you as a provider, but also as a trusted consultant who understands their goals and is committed to helping them achieve them.
How to develop a successful customer experience strategy
Creating a next-level B2B customer experience strategy that can help you transform a typical supplier-customer relationship into a long-term, win-win relationship requires concentration and cultural change-change involves continuous commitment to better understand the overall situation of each customer.
The key steps and criteria involved in creating a successful B2B customer experience strategy include：
Have a clear understanding of who your customers are–this includes understanding your most important “buyer’s persona” and their “buyer journey.””In the B2B world, it is more important than ever to understand the customer’s business mission, processes, and values.
Capture and analyze customer feedback–customer surveys and other first-hand methods to gather insight into your company’s performance related to customer needs and expectations are of course important. However, some of this information constitutes “historical data”, that is, information about specific problem solving, interactions, or service calls. More valuable feedback is those that prompt you to better understand and anticipate the ongoing business goals of your customers and how you can help achieve them.
Encourage and take action based on employee feedback–front-line personnel in your organization, such as customer service and field service professionals, act as priceless “eyes of the customer.” This is why so many benefits can be gained by training and encouraging these employees to form unique insights into your customers, report their findings, and use this information to better serve your customers. For example, insights collected by well-trained field service technicians may be more valuable than some written responses in traditional customer feedback surveys.
Understand and resolve customer pain points–Helping your customers solve challenging pain points is the top priority for generating a positive customer experience, so it is important to focus on this when developing a B2B customer experience strategy.
Of course, this is not just about simply repairing damaged things. Truly understanding the most important pain points of customers is easier said than done. One way to solve this problem is to train the team members who are most often in close contact with customers, not only to solve the immediate problem or problem, but also to regard each contact point as an opportunity to please customers and learn more about their most important needs and goals.
Build emotional connections with customers–truly understanding your customers allows you to better understand how to go beyond simply providing products or services to find ways to surprise and delight them. In addition to customized outreach and problem solving, some of the basics here include being authentic, fulfilling promises, and telling your brand story in an inspiring way (including through social media).
Build a vision for the ideal B2B customer experience–use the insights you gain from the above actions to develop your internal vision for what your ideal and aspiring customer experience should look like. Then, you will be in a good position to reverse engineer the experience you want to provide. When implementing your customer experience strategy, be sure to make it an organization-wide plan with strong support at all levels and high-level leadership support. This may even require or stimulate a “cultural shift” within the organization.
McKinsey, a global management consulting firm, discussed the future-centered topic of customer experience strategy by suggesting, “How an organization provides services to customers is becoming as important as what it provides.”The question is “what does my client want?””It said, “This is a question that every executive will ask, and the smartest executives are asking this question more frequently than ever before.””
This is undoubtedly correct. In the global partner training, we have gone one step further and adopted an effective method to discover the answers to the two questions “What do my customers want”. And “What are they most likely to want in the future?””Adopt a unique method for each customer.
Develop ways to measure customer experience indicators–is there anything like measuring the “return on investment in customer experience”? Well, it is safe to say that this is still an imprecise science.
However, one of the ways we measure the success of using the next level of customer experience to build win-win business relationships is to incorporate it into our proven customer relationship training methods.
For example, we not only provide your front-line team members with advanced communication skills to help them succeed in the above-mentioned relationship building, we also train them to record success stories. These skills bring victory to your customers. These small case studies usually contain measurable results for customers, quantified based on the most important indicators for customers, including one of the most important indicators-revenue.
To help illustrate how this method produces results, the following are excerpted reports from customers who have completed our Total Customer Focus™ training program：
Our semiconductor service team created a collaborative solution with a customer who applied Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity to improve logistics efficiency. By being proactive, using the knowledge that exists in the supplier logistics organisation, and using our fully customer-centered training, we have helped our customers reduce the average equipment downtime by 100 hours. In addition, the project saved customers 500,000 in direct supply chain costs. Our company has also achieved a significant reduction in wasted time and repeated savings on a regular basis. Most importantly, through in-depth discussions, we were able to identify新10,000 in new revenue opportunities with our customers.
Related articles: A guide to result-based service model and how to transform
How to achieve a higher level of B2B customer experience [Next step]
Customer service. Customer experience. Establish customer relationships. Progressive, customer-centered approach to business success today puts customers at the center of everything-ideally, win-win customer partnerships bring revenue opportunities, and satisfied customer reputation brings new business.
However, the customer-centered model and customer experience strategy that many visionary companies now adopt are not achieved overnight. As mentioned earlier, it requires cultural change and customised training.
Training designed to position your B2B company as a trusted partner provider that customers want to work with in the future because you continue to prove that you are committed to helping them achieve today’s most important business goals and take action on upcoming new opportunities. We call it the next level of B2B customer relationship training, which is completely customer-centric™.
