We live in a market that values experience. Just as much as in the business-to-consumer (B2C) world, business-to-business (B2B) brands need to deliver moments that matter for their customers. But how to determine if you’re delivering a good customer experience (CX)? What customer analytics should you track to know if you’re meeting your customer experience goals? How do you turn someone’s experience with your brand into a measurable outcome?

Finding effective methods to measure customer experience can be particularly challenging in the B2B world since the customer can be a person, a group of people, or an entire organisation. However, don’t allow this to deter you — CX is too important to the continued success of your business!

Customer Experience in the B2B Context

Numerous studies have shown the growing importance of customer experience in the B2B realm:

• As far back as 2013, Walker Consulting predicted that customer experience would be the key differentiator between B2B businesses by 2020.

• A recent survey that found that 90 per cent of B2B leaders say customer experience is a crucial strategic priority for their business.

• 80 per cent of B2B buyers now expect — not wish or ask for, but expect — the same buying experience as B2C customers (such as for companies to interact with them in real-time).

This highlights the fact that experience is more and more part of the value that B2B brands create.

In addition to the price of your service and the quality of your project, it’s the experience you provide to your customers that will determine if your business will thrive. As Forbes points out, B2B customer experience should be focused on building lasting relationships with clients through a personalised, omnichannel customer journey that provides convenient, digital solutions to their problem. B2B buyers are actively looking for vendors that deliver good CX and focus on consumer satisfaction.

Good Customer Experience = Good Business

Good customer experience means paying attention to client satisfaction, which in turn increases brand loyalty and customer lifetime value (LTV). The Harvard Business Review found that it costs companies on average 5 to 25 times as much to acquire a new customer as to retain an existing one. Research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company found that that increasing customer retention by as little as 5 per cent increases profits by between 25 per cent and 95 per cent. As explained in the report:

Return customers tend to buy more from a company over time. As they do, your operating costs to serve them decline. What’s more, return customers refer others to your company. And they’ll often pay a premium to continue to do business with you rather than switch to a competitor with whom they’re neither familiar nor comfortable.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Research done by Oracle supports Reichheld, where they found that 86 per cent of people are willing to pay more for superior customer experience. In their report “Experience is Everything: Here’s How To Get It Right” PwC found that “...the price premium for quality CX among consumers worldwide is real — and it adds up to a 16 per cent on products and services.” Furthermore, 73 per cent of global respondents to their survey responded that a positive experience is among the key drivers that influence their brand loyalties (in addition to price and quality).

Solid customer experience can also help boost market penetration and customer acquisition since buyers who received a very good customer experience with a company are 5 times more likely to recommend that business than consumers who have had a poor experience. Greater penetration leads to greater network effects, social proof, etc — it’s a virtuous circle.

Forrester found that over five years, companies that focused on CX delivered compound annual revenue growth rates (CAGR) of 17 per cent compared to just 3 per cent for companies with less focus on customer experience. Research has also shown that improving customer experience can lead to a 30-50 per cent increase in KPIs such as purchase frequency.

Measuring Customer Experience

When it comes to measuring customer experience in the B2B context, you need to think through an account-based perspective. Asking for feedback from random members of a client organisation will do businesses little good when trying to determine if they’re providing good customer experience. Rather, leverage the entire account team (sales, customer support, etc) to optimise contacts and identify the key stakeholders for the account from whom you need feedback.

A well-designed customer satisfaction survey, such as the Customer Effort Score (CES), can be one of the simplest and most reliable tools for getting a snapshot of what buyers think of your CX (such as your product, account manager performance, etc). However, while in the B2C world, they can use these types of surveys to calculate performance metrics, this approach doesn’t always work in the B2B context. This is due to smaller audience sizes which make it more difficult to run a statistically accurate survey. Even if you can't use it to calculate a performance metric, you can use the feedback provided in customer surveys as a guide for when to follow-up with clients or to uncover potential CX strengths and weaknesses.

Something to keep in mind, as Roger Dooley mentions in this Forbes article, is that the act of trying to measure customer experience can alter the customer’s satisfaction — often for the worse — since it can add extra effort to the interaction that diminishes the customer’s experience. For instance:

• Popups asking people for feedback right when they’re trying to complete a purchase task.

• Long, overly complicated surveys that don’t allow users to navigate easily between sections.

• Questionnaires that collect lots of granular details that might look good in a report, but aren’t relevant to the buyer.

If you want customers to tell you about their experience, make sure it will take almost no effort and is relevant to their needs. For example, Dooley mentions how once, when they went through customs after arriving from another country, they were able to easily rate their experience by slapping a happy, neutral, or sad face button on a panel while walking by. As Dooley puts it, "People interpret the emojis intuitively, and picking a smile or frown might capture a customer’s emotional state better than numeric ratings."

More than in the B2C sector, it’s often feasible for B2B businesses to collect and analyse free-form comments from their customers. While not as easy to organise and track, this data often yields much more valuable insight about the state of your customer experience. It’s useful to create a schedule for when each client should be contacted. Target survey requests very carefully and make the experience feel as personalised to each individual as possible. This includes reaching out for feedback in different ways. For instance, if a key stakeholder doesn’t respond to an email questionnaire, instead ask for their opinion during a check-in call.

In addition to active customer research, you should also make use of passive measurements available throughout your purchase journey. For example:

• Shopping cart abandonment rates

• How long prospects remain at different stages of the pipeline

• Where people drop out of the customer journey

• Web pages where people make repeated visits with no progression

This data can provide important insights regarding where your prospective buyers are running into trouble and where you should focus on improving their experience. Even better, you can track these kinds of customer experience variables over time and use them to compare results when testing possible improvements.

It’s important to combine both passive and active feedback to get a full picture, since regardless of what your data might say, it’s the client’s perception of your CX that matters. This is one of the areas where marketing automation tools really come into their own since they allow you manage both active customer measurements (such as scheduling targeted survey requests), and track passive performance metrics from a single platform.

Closing Thought

Collect, analyse, and use customer experience data to improve customer satisfaction at touchpoints throughout their customer journey. B2B customer experience isn’t always the easiest to quantify, due to smaller sample sizes, so make use of free-form responses. B2B customer experience often involves multiple people from within the same organisation, so give careful thought to who you approach for feedback. If you ask them the right way, your clients will provide valuable information about how you can better serve them and earn their continued loyalty. Most importantly, put the insights revealed from your CX measurements to work! Listen to when your clients are unsatisfied with your product or service and provide solutions.

If you'd like to find out more about how our suite of marketing automation tools can be used to measure and refine your customer experience, get in touch for a demo today.