Even some prophetic business forecasters could not have envisioned how far the marketing world would grow in the coming decades. Fast forward to today, and we’re now unearthing the terms like ‘B2B experience’. Creating, curating, and executing excellent customer experiences is increasingly important from business-to-business and business-to-consumer perspectives. But what is the customer experience exactly?
“Customer experience is the new competitive battleground.”
CXM is an art aimed at improving your customers' overall experience and obtaining a 360-degree view of their interaction with your business. However, customer experience management cannot be solely understood through such a simple formula. The concept of customer experience encompasses a wide range of interactions. It involves investing time and attention to deliver the best, most satisfying experience possible.
Working on a B2B CX is challenging. You must manage heightened expectations and compete against competitors while securing more clients in your pipeline. But before you begin crafting the best B2B sales experience for your prospects, you must understand what business-to-business sales means.
B2B sales is simply the process of selling products or services from one business to another. It may be perceived as a long and tedious process if you approach it the wrong way.
The lines between B2C and B2B are becoming increasingly blurred each year, with B2B customers now expecting the same level of service and experience as B2C companies offer. Customers are demanding a more engaging and personalized human experience.
Understand Buyer’s Journey
These days, customers expect extraordinary experiences, which means that your brand competes within your industry and with almost everyone else. The buyer's journey is the complete process from initial awareness of your business to using your products and services and finally deciding to purchase. This journey can shape a customer's path through the purchase process. Phases in the journey can include:
- Awareness
- Search
- Evaluation
- Experimentation
- Purchase
- Commitment
A B2B buyer journey map can provide a detailed model of how prospects interact with a business at different stages and touchpoints.
Great B2B Customer Experience Examples
When customers purchase from you, they want the experience to be enjoyable and worth their valuable time. It's about guiding customers in a way that caters to their interests, needs, wants, concerns, and questions. With so much emphasis on customer experience, businesses can no longer depend solely on their product offering. Some of the famous brands that have adopted a customer-first culture include:
FedEx
Regular follow-up with customers to provide support, resolve their issues, and collect feedback made FedEx one of the most liked and trusted B2B companies. Instead of sending out different emails and making more calls, they streamlined communication by making each team work together to improve customer engagement and internal team coordination
HubSpot
Almost everyone likes approaching businesses that offer proactive support. HubSpot has won clients in the B2B sales experience with its on-page chatbot. Whenever a visitor lands on the homepage, they're welcomed by HubSpot and asked a few questions to provide the best services and connect with the right agent.
Tetra Pak
Tetra Pak is a B2B leader in the food packaging and processing industry. They have a mission to make food safe and available everywhere. However, while achieving that mission, discovered that their clients were unhappy, even if the deadlines were met. After investigating via surveys and feedback, the company discovered that quality matters most to their customers, not speed. Observing customer experience was a huge driver for Tetra Pak’s success.
With self-service, a knowledge base, streamlined communication, and collaboration, you can create a memorable B2B customer journey for your prospects.
How to Create a Memorable B2B Experience
What creates a memorable B2B experience is the ease and positive feeling you create for your customers, whilst ensuring the longevity and success of your business. You will have a longer-lasting relationship with your customers if they are happy with your services. But how do you create a positive experience for your prospects?
Know Your Customers
Before planning to provide a quality customer experience, knowing who you're working with is important. Unfortunately, in B2B, people may not be very excited to do business with you. They may feel that B2B sales reps push their agendas instead of solving problems. Understanding the unique needs of each B2B buyer can be challenging.
A memorable B2B experience is built from every customer interaction with your business. Therefore, setting the tone within your business is important to always put the customer first.
Affordable Technology
Every business that wants to compete in the 21st-century marketplace must fight a battle. With the help of rapidly evolving technology, you can automate your business and choose your battles. With affordable plans, the availability of technology at your fingertips can provide your business with the data and feedback you need to gain insights and adjust your business strategies. But be careful not to overdo it.
In this fast-paced era of technological innovation, don't worry about an outdated website, integrations, maintaining healthy relationships with customers, lead conversion, or data security. Instead, start using Picktime. Picktime can satisfy your clients with real-time responsiveness to simplify complicated, high-volume engagement requirements. Try Picktime for free today. No credit card is required, and no extra software to install.
Try Hands with Omnichannel Approach
Omnichannel isn't a new concept, but with customers becoming more demanding, it has gained more traction in recent years. The omnichannel strategy provides customers with an effortless and seamless experience. An effective omnichannel experience requires an approach that transforms data and feedback into actionable insights.
Don't explore a one-size-fits-all solution, as omnichannel is the best approach to convert many visitors into customers. An efficacious omnichannel strategy includes components such as:
- Consistent branding across all channels
- A centralized customer base
- A personalized experience for each customer
- Tracking the whole journeys and customer interactions across all channels
- Focus on clients always, not on the channel
According to a Salesforce survey, over 50 percent of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, and the omnichannel strategy is a solution. It can be used across different communication channels, from advertising to selling and assisting.
Take Regular Followup and Feedback
Regular follow-ups can help you identify why customers are leaving your business, enabling you to work on improving customer retention and reducing churn rates. Routine feedback, adapting to customer needs, offering flexibility, and implementing loyalty programs can help you remain competitive while building strong customer relationships. However, collecting feedback and doing nothing about it is not enough. Use customer insights to improve your product and service offerings. Once you've won the deal, reflect on what could have been done differently and consider where you can improve.
A Perfectly Tailored Solution for B2B Customer Experience - Picktime
Convenience is an important factor in determining how we make our decisions. Whether it's about what to purchase, what services to use, where to go, or who to engage with, the main goal is to reduce the time and effort required to complete the process. Picktime allows clients to easily schedule and update appointments, making it a useful tool for creating a memorable B2B experience. Allowing clients to set meetings according to their convenience without the back-and-forth of calls and emails can improve customer satisfaction. Picktime is a great choice for providing an excellent B2B sales experience.
If you're still confused, we can help. Start using Picktime and put customers at the heart of everything you do. Picktime is a simplified appointment scheduling software for businesses of all sizes and types. With Picktime, you can get a customized booking page to integrate with your website and a booking button to turn your visitors into long-term customers.
It can help the sales team connect with buyers, schedule multi-person or one-on-one meetings, and send automated SMS and email reminders. To use Picktime seamlessly, you only need an internet connection and a web browser. With just a little investment of time, you can give your clients a well-organized, impeccable B2B sales experience.
Features
Picktime has an extensive list of features. You can book initial meetings, add staff and services, have multiple location access, reduce no-shows and cancellations, offer upfront payment options (PayPal, Square, Stripe), approve bookings, generate detailed analytics reports, get 24/7 email support, and integrate easily with other business tools. The list goes on. Picktime can serve every business's needs, from medical and beauty & wellness to education and personal events.
Are you still looking for the right tools to power up your B2B customer journey? Sign up for Picktime now and delight your customers throughout their experience. It can help you capture and analyze data insights to focus on improvement opportunities.