Newly empowered customers want more—and not just from the Amazons of the world.
Suppliers worldwide are feeling competitive heat from their B2B customers as rapid changes in the consumer space drive new customer-experience demands.
by Spencer Lin | Industry Week
Empowered customers expect more and want to buy at the time and through the channel of their choosing. Many suppliers are paying the price in customer experience as they struggle to meet expectations, lagging behind their consumer counterparts. They tend to score, on average, less than 50% in customer experience index ratings, compared to B2C organizations that tend to score between 65% and 85%. Why?
B2B suppliers certainly know customer experience is important. In fact, IBM’s recent study of 375 industrial product manufacturers revealed that two-thirds of business suppliers believe it is vitally important to differentiate brand. Yet only a third said their organizations are good at it. These companies are also facing large gaps between objectives they identify as important—such as increasing market share, decreasing existing customer attrition and increasing share of wallet—and their current proficiency at acting on these objectives. What can manufacturers do to close these gaps and stand out?
We discovered that companies that self-reported having a high reputation for delivering an excellent customer experience delivered better financial performance than industry peers—five times better for both revenue growth and profitability. And all had something else in common beyond strong financial metrics. They share common practices for brand differentiation. They all excel at identifying customer engagement objectives. They approach design, culture and strategy differently. They view mobile, collaboration, automation and AI technology as critical enablers for digital transformation of the customer experience.
There are five concrete actions B2B manufacturers can take to learn from market outperformers, improve the overall customer experience and move into a leadership position within their industry:
1. Define a unifying vision and treat experience design as a core philosophy. Experience design takes an empathetic approach that puts the needs of users at the center of projects by looking at the “why” of a problem and asking questions about the specific challenges that need to be solved. The leaders we surveyed are pivoting from being product-focused to experience- or customer-focused. They help employees internalize a customer-centric vision that is clear, memorable and inspiring. Sixty-five percent of leaders in this area treat experience design as a core philosophy or have a dedicated program that crosses multiple business units with multidisciplinary teams, compared with 12% of their peers.