When it comes to building an effective B2B platform, ensuring the best CX or customer experience, is a KPI that can deliver on ROI. However, CX should not be confused with CI – Customer Intimacy, and that is knowing who your customer is well.
CX is about how the B2B shopping experience can be made easy despite the complexity of the B2B environment.
We can have the tools needed to feed the eCommerce site in real time in terms of product supply, logistics, kitting, recommending complimentary products, accounting ease and more. Do we have all the self-service tools in place to make the experience online easier, smoother? We can but we might still not know our customer.
CI kicks in when we transfer those in person tools that great salespeople have to a hybrid digital-personal relationship – knowing when and how to best communicate with our buyer and most of all, what drives their brand selection, why are they buying, who are their customers, what else are they buying from competitors, how do they want to grow – can we help? Let’s delve deeper into basic standards we can measure.
CX should not be confused with CI – Customer Intimacy
Improve Customer Experience With Digital Self Service Tools
We have to keep innovating, personalizing here – with product search being so key to better ROIs, we have to keep speeding up the process. Can we get faster at guessing the product even with misspellings, wrong numbers, half descriptors? Plus, your site speed must keep up with the B2B Joneses. In just the last two years, site speeds have been reduced from 3 seconds to 1.5. Another one, can we get better at presenting products that can or are kitted together better? We have to continue to look at ourselves and ask, ‘how can I improve’ and ‘where can I improve’? Technology is changing and we need to keep up. Our competition certainly will.
Sales Teams and Customer Intimacy
We are using a mix of digital and personal tools to gain knowledge for the best CI experience. Our sales people need to be given credit for strengthening the customer relationship even when sales are registered through eCommerce. Knowing a customer’s why, where they are coming from and where they are going can lead to a better, stronger relationship. If we can help them grow, we will also be growing. Our sales teams need to be used much more effectively in garnering information and then ingraining that information into the eCommerce experience with the right digital tools in combination with a CRM.
In thinking about CX and CI, we should redesign our strategy and work with our teams. The more we know our customer, the better the experience online and closer the relationship we can drive in creating a win-win situation.
