Create a great B2B omnichannel customer experience

Author: Rieva Lesonsky | June 6, 2019

The way B2B buyers make purchases is changing, from a buying process based on “real world” interactions with a salesperson to a hybrid approach in which buyers research, compare, and buy largely. online.

Whether your B2B customers prefer to buy from you online or offline, creating an exceptional omnichannel experience ensures they enjoy the same great service and experience both ways.

Here’s how to encourage consistency across all of your sales channels and keep customers happy.

Understanding Multi-Channel

While many B2B companies do well in omnichannel marketing and sales, a few have built an omnichannel customer experience.

What’s the difference? Omnichannel means interacting with customers across multiple channels — mobile, social, web, mobile — without necessarily connecting all of them.

Omnichannel takes it one step further. Whether customers interact with your business online or offline, on your website or social feed, on mobile or on desktop, they enjoy the same experience. Great customers, same message and same ease of use.

Why is Omnichannel important?

If you’re not delivering a truly omnichannel experience to your B2B customers, you risk losing them to your competitors. If ordering products on desktop is easy but doing so on mobile is confusing, it erodes customers’ perception of the sophistication of your business.

Inconsistent information across channels — for example, seeing one price on your website and hearing another from a salesperson — reduces customer and prospect confidence in your business. your career.

Without a doubt, your B2B buyers buy a lot of things on Amazon, which has mastered the omnichannel customer experience. Whether that seems fair or not, buyers now expect the same quality of customer experience from your business as they did when they purchased from Amazon. According to Walker’s Customer 2020: Progress Report, by 2020, customer experience will overtake product or price as the key differentiator for B2B companies.

How to create the ultimate omnichannel customer experience

To develop a great omnichannel B2B customer experience, follow these steps.

First, gather the relevant teams.

Get input from everyone involved in the buyer’s journey, including product development, marketing, sales, IT, and customer support.

Next, map the buyer’s journey and identify touchpoints.

Once upon a time, the buyer’s journey began with asking for a catalog or receiving a call from a salesperson. Now, it’s more likely to start online. Nearly two-thirds of B2B buyers say they research at least half of businesses that buy online, according to Forrester.

Think of every touchpoint a buyer might have throughout the journey, including:

1. Discover

To meet buyer needs in the discovery phase, create and curate content that answers the questions B2B buyers are asking when they first land on your website. These can include ebooks, white papers, blog posts, and videos.

You may use controlled content and forms to collect data about website visitors and provide relevant, personalized information for future visits or through other channels of communication. marketing and other sales.

You can even collect data about your website visitors anonymously: For example, based on your IP address or mobile device ID, you can find out what type of company is accessing your website and the type of content they are viewing. Savvy marketers can use this information to create more relevant content and impressionsExcessive website SEO.

2. Rating

As buyers continue to follow the sales funnel, provide tools to help them evaluate their options and make comparisons. These can include product reviews, specifications or price lists, FAQs, and chatbots to answer questions. Since many B2B buying processes involve group buying, providing users with the ability to easily share content with other decision makers.

Use technology like location services to help you deliver the most relevant information and ensure all your channels are optimized for mobile phones use. Track which marketing campaigns get the best results with specific leads and use that information to tailor your messaging.

3. Decision

Once a lead becomes a lead, continue to collect data on every interaction, both online and offline. This can include live chats, email exchanges, chats, and search or download history. Connect interactions and be consistent — for example, follow up a phone call with an email suggesting next steps or providing requested information.

Give your salespeople access to all of this data so they can make informed recommendations and deliver relevant information personalized to what specific buyers are interested in. By seeing which channels buyers use the most, and what content they keep coming back to, sales can interact the way the buyer prefers and work through unanswered questions to close.

4. Purchases

By 2020, the number of business purchases made online by B2B buyers is expected to reach 55%, and by 2021, Forrester predicts B2B e-commerce transactions to reach $1.2 trillion per year.

Take advantage of today’s e-commerce trends and prepare for the future by streamlining your online shopping process so it’s seamless across all devices. Make it easy for B2B buyers to shop online by providing options like saved preferences, subscription delivery, and automatic discounts.

Easy online payments and payment terms, such as Fundbox Online Payment Options, can also help improve sales volume, transaction speed, and overall customer experience. With Fundbox, B2B businesses get paid instantly, while getting approved buyer enjoy the traditional net-30, or more generous terms net-60 or net-90.

In addition to discounts

Customer experience doesn’t end with closure. Once a prospect becomes a customer, nurture the relationship to build lifetime customer value. Keep records including purchase history and interactions in one repository so customers, customer support, and sales all have access to data when needed.

In the future, give buyers the option of self-service online (such as for simple re-orders) or have a salesperson hand-in-hand (for more complex purchases) . Give salespeople access to a customer’s past buying habits so they can offer personalized advice and value-added, upselling, and upselling recommendations.

Creating a great omnichannel customer experience for B2B takes time and effort, but the rewards — easier sales, happier customers, and better profits — are well worth the work.

Looking for more ways to improve your customer experience? Get more tips about how to retain your B2B customers.