Over the past few years, the B2C world has been at the forefront of using customer experience (CX) to nurture leads. Brands carefully target audience interactions across marketing tactics, communications, customer service, and online user experience to create a holistic customer experience.

The expectations business buyers have for an online experience are not markedly different from those they have as private consumers. Yet, the B2B space is still lagging when it comes to creating great customer experiences. Customer experience will be a major issue in B2B digital marketing strategy.

B2C Experiences Set B2B Expectations

In How to Future-Proof Your B2B Marketing Strategy we discuss how changing technologies and customer expectations require new ways of thinking about marketing. Instead of only viewing things in terms of promoting a product or service, marketing should instead focus on platforms, presence, and productivity. This is especially pertinent in regards to how the B2B world thinks about CX.

Decision-makers are increasingly demanding that companies provide the convenient, efficient, customised experiences they enjoy in B2C every day. According to one global study, 80% of B2B buyers have switched vendors to have their expectations met. A June 2020 survey found that ‘better digital purchasing experience’ was one of the top drivers of change in vendor preferences.

To succeed in the future, B2B organisations need to listen to customer feedback and develop more dynamic platforms. They need to adopt artificial intelligence and analytic tools to create a superior customer centric experience for business buyers. They also need to commit to culture change geared towards remaining present and relevant in the lives of their target audience.

Why Good Customer Experience Is so Important

The latest B2B statistics show that improving the customer experience of your clients will be critical moving forward. For instance:

• Qualtrics XM Institute’s ROI of Customer Experience, 2020 report found a strong correlation between CX quality and customer loyalty.

• The global B2B e-commerce market size will reach USD 20.9 trillion by 2027, expanding at a CAGR of 17.5% (Research and Markets)

• 72% of B2B sellers expect the ‘majority’ of business revenue will come from their e-commerce sites by 2025 (Digital Commerce 360)

• 90% of B2B marketers think their organisations need to be as focused on CX as their B2C counterparts (2020 Data-Driven Marketing & Advertising Outlook Report)

Trends Shaping the Future of Customer Experience Strategy

The internet has been the driving force behind ongoing cultural shifts for over two decades. We didn’t witness the birth of a new business paradigm in 2020. We have merely experienced an acceleration of existing trends that are now reshaping digital B2B marketing.

That so many companies were caught off-guard highlights how B2B has been slow in catching up with changing expectations. Moving forward, here are five trends we think that you should consider in regards to the future of customer experience.

1) Customer Centric Company Culture

Company culture is the most overlooked piece of your customer experience strategy. Your customers' satisfaction isn’t only about your external customers. It also relies on improving your internal customers' perceptions.

Great CX is enabled by technology. But technology cannot fill the gaps if you lack engaged and motivated staff.

Creating a strong culture is not easy. It is especially challenging when external factors have profound and long lasting implications for the organisation. But until you empower your employees and address policy shortcomings, you’re not going to have the internal support you need to achieve CX velocity.

For example, when a company’s culture stifles employees, it will suffer from a lack of innovation, creativity, and personal investment. Employees either won’t realise or won’t care about their role in creating a positive customer experience. Conversely, when you activate employees, providing them with resources and support, you’ll see the results in CX.

This applies across the board, not just with customer facing staff. Team members at every level understand how their work impacts customers and the overall goals of the organisation.

Strive to minimise the impact of a disruptive business environment on your CX by making sure you have a robust foundation in company culture.

2) Hyper-personalisation of the Customer Journey

Today's business buyers want tailored customer journeys, where vendors understand and meet their specific needs. B2B marketing is rooted in forming relationships. This is the foundation for account-based marketing (ABM) and explains why the method is so successful.

In ABM, personalising the customer journey isn't just about targeting a single individual. You need to tailor your marketing on different levels.

Because you're dealing with a committee of decision-makers, you need to create a consistent experience for the team as a whole. At the same time, you must also address the individual needs of each member. You can also target the people around those decision-makers to create a backdrop of awareness and encourage word of mouth to spread. 

While highly effective, this approach does require an investment of resources in research, lead cultivation and relationship building. However, advances in marketing automation technology enable seamless customer experience management at scale.

Marketers can understand who the decision-makers are and when they take desired actions indicating they’re ready for further cultivation. An automation platform, like SharpSpring, can then deploy targeted content to move prospects through their journey. Every touchpoint throughout the buyer’s journey can be personalised.

3) Customers Expectations of Immediacy

It’s no secret that B2B customers want quicker response times and faster access to service. For example, a 2020 report by McKinsey noted a strong increase in demand for self-service across the B2B customer journey. To meet this desire for immediacy a growing number of organisations are using marketing automation technologies like behavioural triggers and automated workflows. They're also experimenting with AI-powered chatbots.

Bots excel at simple, factual, frequently occurring interactions where customer needs are well understood. They are also increasingly able to anticipate needs, measure customers satisfaction and offer tailored engagement based on past interactions. 

The thoughtful integration of chatbots into marketing, sales, and customer service can greatly improve workflow in a way that makes CX more human, not less. For instance, advanced Natural Language Understanding (NLU) software makes the interaction with customer service bots a more seamless user experience. Customers know they’re talking to a robot, but the conversation flows more naturally.

However, it’s important to know when using robots is appropriate and when it isn’t. Careful design is necessary with consideration given to when automation will introduce friction and frustration into an interaction. Use bots to handle basic live chat requests. Get humans to handle the more complex, higher value interactions.

4) Voice Assisted Search & Commerce

The growing popularity of voice-assisted technology in personal life makes it something to keep an eye on. In Perficient’s 2020 Mobile Voice Usage Trends survey, they found that people are becoming increasingly comfortable using voice commands in a variety of situations. For instance, over 60% of respondents use voice ‘at home alone’, and close to 50% ‘at office alone’. Even more interesting is the increased percentage of people who are comfortable using voice commands ‘in the office with coworkers’.

Advances in AI and machine learning are making voice-assisted search more capable of handling complex queries. And large corporations like Amazon are at the forefront of developing and promoting voice commerce. As previously mentioned, people often come to expect the same conveniences in their professional customer experiences as they enjoy in their personal ones.

Moving forward, it is worth spending some time considering how your customers might engage with your brand using voice technology. For instance, how can you optimise more complex B2B content for voice search? Or how easily can buyers place orders on your website using voice commands?

5) Is the Best Experience Zero Experience?

More and more companies are finding ways to utilise technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) to anticipate and remove tedious experiences from their client's lives.

The consumer experience of switching energy suppliers has gradually improved by shifting to zero experience. At one point, customers had to do their own research. Then price comparison sites emerged, but switching was still the customer’s problem. Then the task of switching was taken on by the comparison sites. Finally, a new wave of switching services that automatically switch customers to the best energy deal. This an optimal zero experience. The customer doesn’t have to take any action to get the best deal. Along the way, brand relationships have moved from the old, negative experiences of dealing with energy companies to the ideal zero experience of auto switching companies. The lack of interaction is what makes the relationship stronger.

A good rule of thumb should be that if you can't make an experience amazing, find ways to automate it away instead. Doing so can remove friction, resulting in total flow. Think, for example, about how Uber eliminated the need for having payment on hand to get around town.

In a B2B context, this might look like a printer that not only tells you when you’re about to run out of ink but also orders the new cartridges for you. However, this raises an interesting question: if a machine is doing the buying, how do you sell to a non-human? What does CX mean for a machine?

How 1827 Marketing Can Help

Customer experience is something forward-thinking companies are prioritising entering the new decade. The B2B purchase journey is increasingly digital, making it critical to deliver a consistent, seamless online experience. To find innovative ways to meet client needs and reduce friction.

We believe quality CX depends on leveraging marketing technology to create highly relevant interactions. Our AI-powered marketing automation solutions help improve CX with scalable conversational, collaborative content creation and delivery. By coupling automation, strategic content creation, social media amplification, and remarketing PPC campaigns, you can be an active, helpful presence in your clients' lives.

To learn more, contact 1827 Marketing today!