24 Tips to Succeed With B2B Customer Experience in 2024

This December I compiled a CX Advent calendar of 24 actionable tips on B2B Customer Experience. As we get ready to bid farewell to 2023, I decided to put the Advent calendar tips together as a comprehensive list of best practices you can take with you as you start to prepare for the next year.

So here we go: 24 tips to succeed with B2B Customer Experience!

Customer Experience Measurement:

1.?Treat your Voice of the Customer data as business data. Not as survey data. How to do it? Instead of showing another NPS improvement graph, hide the number next time. Show how much ?? you have behind those detractor and passive accounts. When shown euros / dollars, you have the full attention of the room.

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2.?If you want to increase your customer loyalty, wallet share, profitability and reduce churn talk with your customers. You don't need to talk with all of them. Start with your high-value customers. Those 20% who bring in 80% of your revenue. Why talk? Because email surveys will never reveal similar insights as a deep-dive interview / sit-down with a customer. And these are your high-value customers. You absolutely need to understand what drivers their loyalty.

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3.?Net Promoter Score (NPS). Love it or not, nearly two third of Fortune 1000 companies use NPS to measure customer loyalty. It is the most widespread CX measurement globally, but in my experience also the most misunderstood one. Especially in B2B, where everything is about the relationship, the power of NPS is tremendous. NPS captures both the head and the heart through two simple questions: Likelihood to recommend and reasons why (the so called "moments of truth"). It's important to note that NPS, by itself, doesn't resolve anything. Rather, it serves as a guiding metric that points the way - when done right.

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4.?Leading vs. lagging? Most customer experience KPIs such as customer satisfaction and customer retention rate are lagging indicators. Telling about the past. Leading indicators predict the future. Both types of indicators are needed. But what would be an example of a leading CX indicator? Take a look at what your customers are saying - what makes them systematically dissatisfied? What if it is the long response times to queries? Having a leading indicator of responding to every customer query within 24 hours (instead of previous 3-4 days), could already result in increased customer satisfaction. Here you have a leading indicator.

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5.??Inform your customers why their feedback matters. The low-hanging fruit for many B2B companies. Are you informing your customers why you are asking their feedback, what you have learned so far and how you will improve? You can start by a simple thank you email sent to all your customers who you have approached with surveys in the past 12 months. Let them know you have heard them and their feedback is taken seriously. You might find a good boost in the next response rate as a result.

Customer Experience Vision and Strategy:

6.?Superior Customer Experience is not a vision statement. A good CX vision goes deeper than that, specifying what kind of experience a company aims to deliver. "Superior" tells very little, but a specific target such as "proactive" has a lot more to offer to the organisation.

7.??How to create a Customer Experience vision? My advise: Don't do it alone or with selected individuals in C-level. When creating CX vision work with your employees in various levels and parts of the organisation. Your customers will tell you about the present and past - the good and the bad. Your employees are an excellent source of information in defining the future. Given the opportunity your employees can tell you what kind of customer experience they would like to deliver. Working with your organisation ensures better insights and commitment to the next steps (= deploying the vision).

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8.?How to position your Customer Experience successfully? Start by thinking long-term. A project has a beginning and an end and is about the short-term. A program is a strategic change with 2-3+ years objectives. Please do not limit your CX as a one off project. Plan the big picture and next 2-3 years, what it requires and how you will get there.

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9.?Future-proof CX. The more I have talked with B2B decision makers over the years, the more I have come into conclusion a B2B decision maker wants to be prepared for the future. This is about how you guide your customers through the changes and trends taking place in your industry. How you advise, offer support and guidance proactively. How you build your customers' competences and skills. How you grow together. In my view, this is where that trusted partnership is formed.

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10.?Do you need governance for Customer Experience? Governance sounds.. well, very corporate and not that exciting. But the hard truth is that this is how every business initiative is managed. So why should CX make an exception? But instead of inventing yet another steering group, I recommend aligning customer experience in the existing management structures: Sales team meetings, R&D meetings, HR meetings, Executive Board meetings etc. you name it. CX should be present in every single table.?

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Customer Journeys:

11.?In B2B, customer goals are not about the purchase of your product or solution. Customer goals always relate to personal success and business outcomes. Every single time.

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12.?"Nobody gets fired for buying IBM". Do you know what is one of the biggest drivers for B2B decision making? It is not product performance or price – it is the fear of failure. B2B buyers increasingly wonder how a purchase will make them look or how it will impact their reputation at the company. To be successful, we need do recognise the full range of both rational and emotional factors behind B2B decision making.

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13.?Who is a B2B customer? There is no ”one customer” in B2B similarly as in the consumer world. In fact it’s very rare the same customer would experience the entire customer journey. B2B customers are a various bunch of different actors from C-level to middle management, influencers, outsourced partners, even the end customer. Mapping the customer journey should start from the question whose journey we want to understand and why - a CEO journey or a technical project manager journey? What are the goals, needs, challenges of this customer type / role? Why do we need to improve their experience?

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14.?What is the role of influencers in B2B sales?? Influencers such as technical consultants and architects are often involved in the very early parts of customer journey, long before any sales process begins. ‘It seems the tender was already tailored according to our competitor’s offering.’ Sounds familiar??If you want to succeed with B2B sales, it is not enough to target your key decision makers. You should also identify and work with the influencers in your customer journey. In the best case scenario, they are the ones who will generate demand and increase awareness on your solutions.

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15.?Customer journeys; valuable development tools – if put into action. But how to know where to start? Typical B2B customer journey pain points can be found in the gaps between different parts of the journey. Such as the handover from sales to delivery or delivery to maintenance. This is where the shifts in responsibility take place - not just in our own organisation but at the customers side as well. So instead of developing a "sales journey" separately from the "delivery journey" have a look at the gaps - how could you tie these journeys together and make customers life easier?

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16.?"The peak-end rule". As humans we do not remember much. Actually we remember very little. And more time passes the less we remember. What we do remember are the moments that provoke strongest emotional response - whether positive or negative, and the last experience. When we survey our customers - it is very likely they no longer remember every detail. Especially if some time has passed since that project delivery / contract etc. But they will tell about their strongest positive and negative feelings - and the last encounter. They may not use the word feeling, but what they reveal is very much driven by emotions.

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Customer Centricity in Action:

17.?Is there still place for humans in Customer Experience? The opportunities generative AI and digital solutions bring are immersive. We are talking about all of the interactions where customers are mainly looking for speed, easiness and low effort (I would estimate this covers roughly 70% of a B2B customer journey).?But when digital solutions become part of our everyday, they also become a commodity. As we enter 2024 it will be increasingly difficult to differentiate with digital capabilities alone. So differentiation needs to be found elsewhere. Businesses that go beyond just meeting the functional customer needs and address the emotional part of customer experience will stand out in a crowded market.

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18.?Closing the Loop with customer. The most important thing you should do in your NPS / CX initiative!? Closing the Loop happens in 2 levels: Inner Loop - immediate actions and Outer Loop - structural improvements you take as an organisation. Outer Loop is the more challenging one. It requires that we engage various parts of the organisation in root-cause analysis and action planning. But when Outer Loop is done right it has a tremendous power. You will start to see how customer insight changes business processes and culture. Voice of the Customer no longer is seen as a "survey data". It becomes the leading indicator for change.

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19.? Collecting data but not circulating findings. How many of us have been in that situation?? It is more common than we may think. Most companies collect customer feedback with different methods, but do not share the insight widely in the organisation. But who should have access to customer feedback? The people who can put the feedback into action -whether it is improving or appraising, through own actions or through team effort. Share the learnings, even you may think some departments are "too far from the customer." In customer experience, everyone has a role to play.

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Cultural change:

20.?How to influence people? Customer Experience development starts with vision, metrics, processes but you will not likely get lasting results if you don't have the people behind your initiative. Change management requires working with all levels of the organisation. Not just the C-suite and the frontline, but also the middle layer - the Business Lines, Functions, Countries (depending on the structure and size of your organisation). One of the best ways to get people behind your initiative is to work with them from early on. It is more effective that way (than communicating the results and plans later) - and more productive and fun as well!

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21.? Actions speak louder than words. This year I attended the international Customer Experience Awards. I do not remember every single detail of roadmaps, governance models, measurement practices etc. seen. They were all world-class. But I will always remember vividly a video of a global B2B company's CEO who jumped behind a driving wheel and took part in delivering products to their customers. He looked pleased to serve and experience what it is like in the frontline. His team looked very proud presenting the case. This is what "walking the talk" means in practice. Words are important but actions always speak louder.

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22.? How to communicate about CX change? ? My 5 point list looks like this: 1. Define the "why" - why do we need to change? 2. Make sure "what" is clear - what will change in the short term and in the long term? 3. Show the "how" - where are we now and where do we want to go? 4. Make it about "you" - what's in it for me? 5. Clarify "when" - communicate about the plans and how one can be involved And keep it consistent - change takes time.

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23.? Power of thank you. I cannot recall the annual bonuses of my 8 years working in the corporate. But I still recall very vividly a pink "Anna-Maija made a difference" card, once handed out by a colleague, specifying how much they appreciated my work towards a better customer experience. Your organisation has a lot of people who make a difference to customers life on a daily basis. The effort to say thank you is minimal. The power of doing so is enormous. Who could you thank today?

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And last but not least: Do What is Right

24.? Thank you for reading through! A final thought: why customer experience is the most important thing for companies? Because it is, and has always been, about doing what is right - putting customers in the center of everything we do. We can have the best products in the market, the best people and the team, but if we don't have customers - we don't have anything.

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Thank you for subscribing to B2B CX Insights Newsletter! I wish you a wonderful end of 2023 and all the best for 2024!