B2B and B2C Customer Experience – Is it personal or is it just business?

From where I am sitting series....Written by Cynthia Nolan - CX specialist

I spend many hours of my day analysing the Customer Experience in various industries and in the land of B2C it is relatively straight forward – It is a little like a romance – but instead of boy meets girl, it is customer meets company. The meeting has come from some sort of need – and the journey begins. It could be online, it could be phone or face to face, dating begins, many promises are made (my favourite is – I love to dance), and then it is time to commit. This is where the customer experience starts to potentially dip, each party taking each other for granted – a crack in the relationship starts to form and that crack can become a chasm if not addressed effectively. Enter stage left – an Intervention. In the personal world – counselling is always a good option, in companies, the difficult customer is given to a Customer Service person, or Account Manager who has people skills. But maybe the damage has already been done. 

An alternative is to understand the expectations from one another at an early stage and under promise and over deliver. Depending on the intervention, the relationship may get back on track, or it may not, let’s be optimistic – the relationship is better but not at the dizzy heights of the dating stage, now it is time to meet the parents, or in company terms, you are being handed over to another department. They do not understand you nor the commitments made to you, so you feel frustrated and further still, no one can even remember your name and they keep asking you the same validation questions.

 Next comes the daily grind – living and breathing the relationships in good times when everything is going well and in bad – when the service fails, and you contact the provider in frustration. Here the experience is on a potential rapid decline, “emotions and self-talk starts with phrases like – here I go again, nothing will change, I am wasting my time etc” doubting your original decision, and wondering if someone else is having a better experience. For the service provider – this is the time to shine, and take control of the experience, and truly remind the customer (in an experiential way) why they chose you and that it was a great decision. This is a hard one to do, as you will be shouted at and the vase of flowers will be thrown at you (metaphorically speaking). But be strong, and take positive action. You may win them back or you may not, there may be enough foundation in the relationship to get over the blimp or there may not. If it ends well the relationship will be stronger than ever and your customer will be a true advocate – if not, well they are gone and they will tell anyone who will listen about their experience with you and could be millions.

Now let’s think about the individual interactions from a B2B perspective. You are still interacting with an individual person – but now you are representing a company and so are they. The thing is you are still you and whether you like it or not, your behaviours are not going to change just because you put on a suit. How many of us recite the company values while brushing our teeth in the morning?!.... Exactly, so in fact B2B from a relationship perspective is like a B2C relationship in many ways. Possibly with the added complexity of both parties having an escalation process and systems and procedures to hide behind. But then I have used a virtual hierarchy in my personal life when not happy with service, threatening to report a service provider to the ombudsmen etc. 

So where does this leave us with CX B2B and B2C – at the end of the day it is a person we are dealing with (even if it is via a digital interface). And the more you understand the person and anticipate their likely experience at certain stages of the journey; the better you can enhance the customer experience and create advocates.  So it is actually P2P !

So how do we make it personal? Stay tuned for further insight in upcoming articles.

I welcome any of your thoughts and observations. [email protected]