Is your B2B business serving customers according to their needs, especially when it comes to digital buying journeys? The dimension “Customer Experience” — one of the pillars of the Digital Maturity Assessment created by commercetools in collaboration with Master B2B — offers fresh perspectives on how B2B organizations can pursue customer-centric digital maturity. Here’s an overview of what this means for your business.
Advancing your digital customer experience begins with… Your customer
It comes as no surprise that your customer should be at the heart of every business decision. To truly level up digital maturity, you must embrace a customer-centric approach that extends beyond simple lip service. Prioritizing customer input and incorporating feedback into processes, strategies and actions is crucial. Of course, this can’t happen overnight, which is why determining your customer experience maturity assessment is so important.
There’s no denying that B2B eCommerce has rapidly accelerated in the last couple of years. Much of this advancement comes from the acknowledgment that for B2B organizations to grow, they need to meet customer needs, which have dramatically shifted toward digital. Not only have digital expectations arisen due to the COVID-19 pandemic, when there was a flurry of digital projects, but also because of the demographic shift in B2B decision-making. Today, more than 66% of buyers involved in large and complex transactions valued over $1 million USD are millennials and Gen Z buyers.
In addition, remember that your B2B buyers are consumers buying online. Their consumer-grade experiences have raised the bar for digital purchasing journeys they have become accustomed to.
Because digital B2B experiences are more crucial than ever, assessing how your customers can discover, buy, and engage with your business online to meet their needs is an important step in starting your digital maturity journey.
Like all the other pillars of a digital maturity assessment — Digital Tools, Data and Insights, and Team Culture — you can establish where your business stands in Customer Experience through four stages.
Assessing digital Customer Experience across four stages
How much does your organization meet buyer expectations across digital B2B customer journey touchpoints?
This is the key question when evaluating the state of your Customer Experience dimension, as outlined in the Digital Maturity Assessment by commercetools and Master B2B. Every manufacturer, distributor or wholesaler is part of a spectrum of digital evolution, from offering basic customer interactions to delivering personalized experiences across channels. Let’s break it down:
Companies in Stage 1 digital maturity in the customer experience dimension either don’t offer online ordering capabilities or only offer their buyers a simplistic website with a narrow range of products. To fully deliver a mature customer experience, you’ll have to progress in the other dimensions. However, you can take some first steps.
At this stage, some of your customers probably made it clear they want and expect more. While you may be tempted to turn to your IT team for direction, you can shift focus to your customers before starting to build technology. Talk to them. They will tell you what will make their lives easier, and they can share what they like and don’t like about other B2B sites.
Your customer service group can also be a great source of ideas. While they might have limited exposure to eCommerce, they have a direct connection to your buyers and often share insights that can make a big impact on what your experience ultimately delivers.
Once you’ve selected one or two new functionalities that customers have asked for, and are actively implementing the technology to deliver them, you will enter Stage 2. When this happens, you will probably discover that your existing platform can’t support the types of customer experiences you want to deliver in the long term.
Offering a richer, more customized experience to your buyers simply requires more flexible, agile technology, which B2B organizations are increasingly finding by transitioning to a composable commerce environment. If you want your B2B business lines to remain relevant in the future, there’s just no other way around it.
With composable commerce, you don’t have to wait until you build an entirely new tech stack to launch your new digital experience. Thanks to a best-of-breed approach, you can transition individual components one at a time. The approach allows you to start integrating the tools you need to improve your customer experience, such as site search, checkout and marketing automation, so that you can move on to Stage 3.
At Stage 3, you are on a path to meeting customer needs. You can provide negotiated prices, live chat support, and real-time order status information to your customers. Your buyers can research and purchase wherever they wish while enjoying a seamless experience across all channels — they can see orders they’ve placed offline in their online accounts.
Customer service also has access to those orders and pricing is consistent and reflects pre-negotiated discounts, no matter which channel they’re on. As a result, eCommerce is driving a significant percentage of your revenue.
In addition, all employees have tools that can support customers’ needs, and your salespeople no longer fear that digital is cannibalizing their role in the organization. Instead, they see how it frees them up to provide more consultative services while driving higher commissions, enabling hybrid sales to thrive.
By this point, your team culture has shifted so that every stakeholder has a voice and is empowered to contribute to continuous improvement. Thus, they provide customer feedback that helps shape ongoing digital transformation efforts.
Once you’ve arrived at Stage 4, this is the time to explore what’s next for your organization. Now that you’ve got a strong foundation that’s delivering results, you can confidently start experimenting with adding new payment methods, offering collaborative buying, expanding your online assortment and creating tools to predict when commonly ordered products need to be replenished.
In Stage 4, you can leverage data to deliver personalized customer engagement and anticipate customer needs and buying preferences. As long as you stay committed to laser-focused customer-centricity, backed by the right tools and a culture of continuous innovation, you can skyrocket your organization’s digital maturity across the entire B2B customer lifecycle.
Conclusion: Evolving B2B customer experience management
Customer experience is not just about offering products or services online. It’s about understanding your client’s needs and providing solutions that cater to those needs. With the rise of digital commerce, customer expectations of B2B organizations have changed. They now demand the same convenience, responsiveness and personalized experiences they get from B2C platforms. Therefore, placing your customers at the center of your digital transformation strategy is key.
It’s critical to acknowledge that your competitors are continually investing in modern technologies that can deliver outstanding customer experiences. Don’t let complacency seep into your organization. Fully embrace the future of digital transformation, and you can be confident that your business will continue to thrive.
Gain a comprehensive understanding of your organization’s digital maturity journey and the steps for success with the full report, Establishing Your Baseline: Assessing B2B Digital Maturity.
Julia is a Senior B2B Product Expert at commercetools. With over a decade of experience across product and marketing teams in the tech world, she is an expert at creating innovative, customer-first strategies, and excelling in cross-functional growth & GTM initiatives.