Curatti

6 B2B Customer Experience Challenges (And Solutions)

  • Dhruv Mehta

    • In the past few years, Customer Experience or CX has become a factor in the divide between successful and struggling businesses. A layered CX strategy can excite and engage your customers, keeping them associated with you for a significant time. However, it’s unfortunate that brands have to struggle to execute their vision.

    Also, because CX has become such a widely used term, owing to its importance in most business spheres, it has become somewhat of an overused term that is thrown around without a proper understanding of what it actually entails. 

    6 B2B Customer Experience Challenges

    So to save everyone’s time, here we have listed the top 6 most relevant B2B Customer Experience challenges along with working methods on solving them.

    1. B2B Data Inaccessibility

    Most businesses find it challenging to get their hands on data, which is necessary for them to function effectively. And even if they have access to it, almost 95% of surveyed businesses face an urgent requirement to structure the data in a manner that’s useful.

    Solution: Gather data, and Integrate

    First of all, it’s imperative to find a solid location to store all of your data. Depending on your privacy needs and budget, you can either go cloud or choose an on-premises storage option. The next step would be to find software tools that can gather all the data and find correlations from the different metrics. In this case, for instance, you’ll know for sure how customer satisfaction varies with your response time.

    Editor’s note: Please do not store your data in only one place. External storage devices are historically cheap and getting ever cheaper for more capacity. By all means, use a cloud service. But no way should you only use the cloud for storage.

    2. Traditional Customer Support Like Cold Calling and Emails

    Cold calling had a good run until a few years ago but has long since become quite annoying to most people. Caller ID, and then spam call detectors have enabled people to easily ignore unwanted calls. The concept is now in the deep freeze, so just hang up the phone.

    Sending emails for customer support also doesn’t work because there’s a high chance it will land in the spam-box. And if for some reason it doesn’t, people won’t read it anyway. It has become an unnecessary expense and should not be considered as the focal exercise for CX improvement.

    Solution: Live Chat Software

    Technological innovation butchered cold calling and emails, only to bring you something better. Using live chat software is by far the most significant channel when it comes to boosting customer satisfaction, and hence CX. For any customer, live chat brings to life every interaction with the company they are contacting. And each chatbot experience adds something toward building lasting relationships.

    These are not hollow words. According to a survey, live chat has shown to have a 73% satisfaction rate as most customers are in a hurry and need immediate resolutions to their problems.

    It is more affordable, too, as agents can interact with multiple customers in real-time and improve the quality of support provided.

    3. No Omnichannel CX

    Customers think most companies have a long way to go when it comes to omnichannel CX. And they are right! Implementing it requires utter persistence and unfailing vision. The businesses whose CX ownership is shaky, or if they lack data or the discipline to implement it, need to rethink their CX strategy. So, what can be done?

    Solution: Implement Omnichannel Support

    Achieving omnichannel CX greatness needs every company department to take successive steps on a path that never ends. The executives need to be on their toes so that customers can communicate directly and instantly from any page of your website or app. So, each page must be built to be responsive. Moreover, ensure that your team is well-equipped to answer the expected queries and offer the necessary support.

    ‍A happy customer always comes back. So, if you meet or surpass their expectations, you are essentially buying more customers. According to a report by Harvard Business Review, a 5% increase in customer retention may mean an increase of up to 95% in a company’s annual earnings. The flexibility offered by an omnichannel experience can be a great ally for your company’s growth.‍

    4. Inability In Creating Customer Journey Map For B2B Clients

    When it comes to the customer experience you deliver, you absolutely need data to create a journey map. This helps your team find common issues and develop solutions in a systematic manner. But mapping the customer journey in B2B can be quite challenging.

    There are multiple stakeholders involved, and you need to decide whether you care about your product or the one working with it. So, if you’ve been discovering hurdles while creating a journey map, here’s what you can do:

    Solution: Create a hybrid journey map involving human and digital interactions

    The journey maps of every company are different, and details stem out of the extent of investment in their digitization. Nevertheless, if you really look, it’s easy to identify patterns. For example, if you offer a standard product but have a diversified customer base, you probably need to make a greater investment in understanding why a particular class of buyers needs your product and identifying doing what will prompt them to want it again.

    In contrast, if you’re a company offering customized commodities to a small set of sectors, you need to invest your resources in identifying unexpected events and collaborating with suppliers.

    5. Inability In Measuring CX Improvements

    Your customer support team may be doing everything ‘by the book’. But not having it quantified can make your business an institution without aim. So, how can you measure your moves toward advancing CX?

    Solution: Use NPS, Journey Analytics, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Effort Score

    Leveraging these metrics, you can easily quantify how good your CX is and in which direction it’s headed.

    6. Using Outdated Tools

    We have advanced exponentially in the past few years. Yet for some reason, the myriad advancements don’t reflect on our daily applications. Whether it’s artificial intelligence or understanding customer ideology, businesses have a lot of room to improve their CX. For the ones using outdated tools, it’s time to take a stand. Here’s what you can do:

    Solution: Keep abreast with the latest trends

    The internet is a wonderful place. Take your time and do your research. Read blogs, join forum discussions, or find a CX executive to help you out. Being one with the community is the easiest way to find out what your customers want. And it only shows leadership when you take their suggestions into account and deliver what they’ve been looking for.

    Being a regular reader of your emails and newsletters is also a productive activity that will bring you up to speed with the technologies and trends that can be leveraged to improve your CX.

    Wrapping Up

    It hasn’t been long since the concept of CX came to be. And we have already made a ton of progress in the right direction. But customer experience challenges will not go away any time soon!

    More and more companies are realizing that customers are their biggest assets. Part of that realization is understanding that their job is to deliver on their customers’ needs. As new trends appear, we must keep up. Can our existing system handle new business trends, or do some need to be replaced? It’s about pushing the pedal of innovation and going that extra mile to deliver. Doing that will differentiate successful businesses from the ones that people will never hear about.

    Sign Up For Our Mailing List

    If you’d like to receive more in-depth articles, videos, and Infographics in your inbox, please sign up below

    Featured image: Copyright: ‘https://www.123rf.com/profile_adzicnatasa‘ / 123RF Stock Photo

    The following two tabs change content below.

    Dhruv Mehta

    Dhruv Mehta is a Digital Marketing Professional who works at Acquire and provides solutions in the digital era. In his free time, he loves to write on tech and marketing. He is a frequent contributor to Tweak Your Biz.