Customer Experience is the New B2B Goldmine
Customer Experience is the New B2B Goldmine
How does a customer experience your business?
Hopefully that’s a question you’ve asked yourself before.
One of the few pervasive business concepts across every industry is the customer experience. It affects sales. It alters marketing. It even determines whether your client will be a one-off or a loyal source of business.
Millions of dollars each year are spent because of an experience. More than ever, it’s vital for businesses to cater their message toward creating a positive experience.
This is the “Age of the Customer.” Let’s help you get to know yours.
What is Customer Experience, and Why Should I Bother?
It’s important here to differentiate customer experience from customer service, as the two are often confused.
Good customer service is when a client calls your service department and their issue is handled with aplomb. Good customer experience is more all-encompassing. It’s the cumulative result of every interaction that client has with your business reaching from the first time they visit your website to (hopefully) many years in the future.
Emphasizing customer experience is a widespread practice in the B2C realm, but B2B companies are only recently coming around on the customer-centric approach. It’s a practice that’s reaching maturity and is likely to pass the test of time.
To keep a competitive edge for your business, you need to engage in creating a positive customer experience. To do so, you need to fine tune thousands of different elements across your business.
To help you improve, we’re going to focus on the highlights.
Consider how you can enhance the following aspects of your business:
1. User Experience
There’s no way to provide top-notch customer experience without optimizing the User Experience of whatever product, service, or digital presence you provide.
In terms of your product or service it’s likely you have this on lockdown. Most fruitful B2B companies are successful for a reason – and it often relies on having a product that makes life easier in some way for the layman.
Where far too many B2B businesses fail with user experience is online. I’m talking about old, outdated websites that are hard to navigate and have no clear direction for the user. This hurts you!
Do this test: See how long it takes someone unacquainted with your business to find a way to contact you just by using your website. If it takes more than 5 seconds, you need an update.
Dial in your user experience both on and offline to start boosting your overall customer experience.
2. Brand Experience
Brand experience is a more ubiquitous idea, but it plays a part in the overall culmination of customer experience.
This subset seeks to create a pleasant impression of your company to everyone – even those uninterested in potentially using your services.
Your brand is your reputation. It’s how you’re perceived by your customers, competition, and even the general population. If your brand fails, your business fails.
Safeguard your brand by being proactive about growing it. Find ways to be involved in the world around you that helps others and gets good press. Your brand will grow, and you’ll see happier customers because of it.
3. Employee Experience
Let’s talk about culture for a moment.
The way employees feel about their employer comes through when they’re interacting with customers.
If a customer interacts with a highly engaged solution oriented and generally enthusiastic employee, they’re going to enjoy the experience. That interaction only comes from great company culture.
When a potential client has a negative experience with one of your employees, it affects the lifetime value of that person and their network. One bad experience can even spiral into a mass exodus from your business.
The only way you can prevent that – and boost your employee experience – is by creating an outstanding company culture. When you have a company that everyone want to come to work at, you’ll have a company that everyone wants to do business with as well.
There are many other factors worth considering when it comes to creating a good customer experience. Just a name a few, there’s:
Every business needs can find ways to improve their customer experience, whether on or offline. For those looking to boost their online presence – we invite you to click the link below to get started!