Excellence and evolution in B2B customer experience

B2B CX is generally underwhelming, underserved and very generic. To succeed, organisations must be simple, genuine, focus on the experience. Understand their customers and their employees. Empathize with them. That's key to establishing connections and getting a deeper understanding of their needs.

B2B CX is the perception of your clients, your customers, your buyer as well as your end-users

CX is a very simple way of saying, whenever we go and interact with an organisation we create moments, and we bring back those moments and remember what we enjoyed or disliked. That's experience. CX has seen the transition from service to experience. Service was delivering what customers wanted, but experience has gone beyond that. It’s creating the wow factor, where you deliver to customers something that is not expected.

Walt Disney said “whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they want to come back and they want to see you do it again, and they want to bring their friends to make them see how you do it”.

In B2B CX, you need to do something so well throughout the journey of a customer’s life cycle with you that you make them visit you again and again. That’s the best experience anybody can provide.

Differentiating between B2B frameworks and B2C frameworks

• The concept of CX has evolved over time.

• B2B is more complex and more personalised than B2C, thus the philosophy that used for B2C will not suffice for B2B.

In the B2B context, when we say customer encounter, it’s not a one-off experience. So, capturing these experiences is more complex. In B2C, you have the buyer and you have the seller. But for B2B, you have 3 layers here. You have the buyer, the supplier and then you have your clients, who are your buyer and then you have your end-user. When these players interact together, they have different types of objectives and different types of perceptions. It’s not like B2C. It’s not simply an individual perception but rather a product of interaction between these players. So, actually, B2B CX is the perception of your clients, your customers, your buyer as well as your end-users. In B2B CX you need to infuse customer success management, which goes hand in hand with your customer experience management, in meeting the customer expectations and delivering brilliant customer experiences.

Evolution of CX - the current state of B2B CX

• Where do we need to look as B2B CX evolves?

• What are the sources of information?

The definition of CX and our interaction with customers has evolved because of the Covid situation. There is a new perception which questions whether B2B or B2C should actually be called human-to-human or HX. Even if it’s business-to-business, there is a human interaction at the other end and experiences revolve around these interactions. The dimension of customer experience these days is changing very fast. The transformations that would have taken 3 or 4 years were expedited in the current situation. The agility and the movement of customer experience into the digital world have been very quick.

It’s like a race. It’s who gets there first and who provides a better solution to the customer sitting at home. Would you have believed that you would have been talking across different channels rather than face-to-face? In banking, we were used to meeting face-to-face but now everything is happening from a remote perspective. This region has also adopted very very quickly. Things have moved from face-to-face to remote and most organizations are also adopting accordingly.

Faran Niaz, CEO & Co-founder, CX Future

Next: Components of a CX maturity model. Read on.