Prioritizing the B2B Customer Journey for Ecommerce Success

Today, shopping is more about the experience as buyers are pressed for time and look for efficiency in every aspect of their online buying, from onsite search to checkout. They have heightened expectations around customer service, where instant answers that address immediate concerns are the norm. Logistics have moved into the forefront as shoppers make purchases based on convenience, with same-day delivery becoming more and more common. Ultimately, it is the complete experience with a brand that must be present to drive conversion.

The core of any customer journey, digital or otherwise, is customer value. Our customer experience experts suggest focusing on:

• Solving a problem by analyzing the current customer journey to surface pain points, frustrations, and barriers.
• Making life simpler by removing the time, effort, and/or friction the customer has in engaging with you. Look at the problem from a holistic point, where logistical information can improve the life of someone dealing with customer service.
• Engaging the customer with the right digital tools can help organizations proactively engage with customers, keeping a customer-centric and omnichannel view based on the customer journey.

The digital B2B experience is increasingly important, and it’s critical that the customer journey invites potential clients and turns them into repeat customers.

The vast majority of B2B buyers do research online before they contact a company and are 57% of the way through the marketing funnel before they talk to a sales rep. Because so many buyers use the Internet to do research before ever contacting a company, it is crucial that B2B retailers and manufacturers make the customer journey exceptional.

Some of the most important aspects to consider when constructing your digital B2B experience include the following.

Access to product information: Ensure that information on your products is easily accessible and understandable. Make your website simple to navigate so customers can quickly and easily find exactly what they’re looking for. If your digital experience is confusing, cluttered, or otherwise difficult to navigate, customers will quickly turn to your competitors.

Simple order management: Access to inventory levels, order history, one-click purchase, and multi-address shipping should all be available to B2B customers.

Quality customer service: An aspect often overlooked in B2B eCommerce, quality customer service can be the difference between losing a customer’s business and saving their repeat business.

Computers can be finicky, and if a prospective client has trouble with your digital B2B experience, it’s important to address their questions and concerns and satisfy their needs however possible.
Personalized customer experience: Invite customers to return to your website with a personalized experience. Keep track of their order history so they can quickly place reorders, save their shipping and contact information to streamline reorder entry, and stay in touch to make certain they are satisfied with your products and customer service.

By prioritizing your B2B customer journey, businesses can create a digital experience that customers will feel comfortable using, returning to, and recommending to acquaintances.

Move towards deploying Digitized functions in the organization

There could not have been a better time than now for B2B ecommerce, with digitization on the racks. It has been responsible for transforming businesses and radically so in the past year. According to Gartner’s 2018-19 annual edition "Top Insights for the C-Suite", 87% of industry leaders see digitization as a top priority. 66% of CEOs see their business models changing in the next three years to suit these trends. However, what is all-too-desirable can only be achieved with considerable (yet attainable) levels of effort. 

Why the Need?

With transactions spilling into mobile phones, B2B customers have come to expect a lot more. They demand nothing short of data-driven personalized experiences typical of B2C ecommerce. But relying on traditional sales forces and direct sales relationships has created tension between online and offline sales channels in B2B ecommerce. This leads to gaps in communication with customers and eventual rupture in the rapport. It is high time that B2B borrows the customer-centric approach and multi-stakeholder decision-making approaches of B2C for good. 

Feeling apprehensive to embark on this great journey of transformation? The key to changing your business model is to re-organize every function in the direction of digitization. Here’s how:

Get New Digital Business Tools

Shifting to digital solutions is the first smart choice that you need to make. You can choose to make a cautious start by experimenting with one item for each category. Your digital toolkit will cater to different goals like financial and product information management, handling customer relations, great ecommerce visibility, and marketing via emails and social media.  By making the best use of available resources, you can adopt an omnichannel experience. This is the buzz of the hour in B2B ecommerce.  

Digitize Your Workflows

There are several benefits to be reaped from digitizing your company's workflows. For starters, you can save time by reducing the number of actions required to complete a task. This automatically cuts down the scope for errors and slack. Your employees keep motivated to be ultra-consistent and productive. If you have been looking to take an environment-friendly initiative, workflow digitization will also significantly reduce the usage of paper.  As a B2B business, this is a great investment for managing inventories, sales activities, contracts, accounts, and bills.

Empower Your Employees Digitally 

The big lift that is eluding most B2B businesses is a transformation of their traditional sales forces. It is crucial for employees to be well-armed to respond to ever-increasing customer requirements. For instance, digital abilities like call scheduling and sales forecast reporting greatly assist sales representatives in the personal profiling of clients. This will allow them to tap into what’s in demand and initiate consultative interaction over them. A digital self-service portal will also give your customer service team some much-needed support.

Shift to an Ecommerce Platform

Make the most of digitization by using it to utilize customers' data for personalized experiences. To keep track of this process, it is time to make the leap to an ecommerce platform and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. These will help you create tailor-made promotional strategies based on each customer’s purchase history. You will also be able to create specific product catalogs and price lists for each segment of your customers. In a time of cutthroat competition, this is what you need to excel in the B2B domain. 

Have a Long-Term Commerce Program

The great transformation that B2B ecommerce should be aiming for involves a re-conceptualization of B2B commerce strategies. A recent survey by Forrester found that B2B businesses had web conversion rates of 8% triple that of B2C businesses. To capitalize on such facts, you must move your commerce operations to the digital space.  While B2B companies have been typically averse to long-term commerce capabilities, you must now consider adapting to new geographies and lines of business. A digitized commerce program will allow you to have a unified storefront spanning across such diversities.

Persona Profiling and Customer Journey are the two things to keep in mind when reorienting your business functions in the 21st century. Personas refer to typical customer profiles. The road to digitization is about delivering according to the specific needs of these personas. Sound persona profiling leads to great customer journeys marked by easy interactions and self-service tools. Missing from the domain of B2B ecommerce for long, these objectives have now made the need for digitization all the more pertinent.