Customer Experience(CX) for the new B2B Buyer

In a recent article I looked at the modern B2B buyer and how they engage with suppliers. In summary the Customer Experience (CX) is critical for business success in meeting the needs of the new buyer.

Just to recap, in “Are you ready for the new B2B Buyer” I looked at some recent research on marketing from Salesforce.com. This was a global survey of marketers and how they were looking to engage with customers, what tools were used and where they were with regards to maturity.

In this article I am reviewing "Customer Experience Technology in Australia & New Zealand" by Oracle/Fifth Quadrant.

Both pieces of research drive down the CX channel. The salesforce.com research identified four key elements to being successful:

• Personalisation and tailored messages is the secret sauce
• That this messaging needs to go across many if not all communications channels
• The result of increased personalisation and more marketing channels is increased complexity
• The root cause of the complexity is data – lots of it and from disparate and sometimes immature service platforms

Then salesforce.com outlined a how to four step process on how to achieve CX leadership

1.      Deploy a Data Management Platform (DMP)

2.      Overlay some Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) over the data

3.      Develop a range of content for a range of marketing channels

4.      Take the outputs of steps 2 and 3 - deliver the right content and to the right people

This article on the Oracle report looks at the successes that companies have had with deploying market leading CX. The key messages were:

• CX leaders generate more revenue and are better performing than their peers
• The CX leaders handle data better – particularly customer ‘feedback streams’
• More advanced companies are very focused on providing a good experience on a range of devices
• More mature companies have moved to trialing new technologies for new applications

Revenue Performance

The CX leaders believe that their companies are outperforming their industry peers – 62% of leaders believed that they are outperforming peers, with only 26% of the CX laggards believing the same.

Leaders are combining data from multiple sources and touch-points to enable personalised experiences relevant to each customer. CX leaders clearly outperform on data management and analytics and hence have a significant competitive advantage.

Finally, CX leaders are expecting technology to drive acquisition, whereas CX laggards are focused on retention.

The majority of leader organisations acknowledge the importance of accurate behaviour based data to enable a predictive, personalised experience on the users device of choice.

Data Personalisation

The customer is in charge and has many more choices than in the past. The expectation is high and loyalty will decline if personalisation is compromised by data and optimisation issues.

It is critical for success to segment and profile customers and prospects. The more traditional data sources still remain the most important to build customer profiles. However, more than one third of organisations are placing increased importance on user generated data created online, on a device or on social media

CX leaders place a higher level of importance on customer feedback streams, as they are actively embedding feedback, not just behavioural data when profiling. They invest in enterprise feedback management technologies to tap into this customer feedback and voice of customer(VOC) data.

With higher importance on customer feedback, CX leaders are most likely to acknowledge the difficulty of compiling customer feedback streams to build customer profiles. It’s clear that they are quite realistic on the challenges they face.

Experiences

The CX Leaders appear to have moved through self-service initiatives and are now focused on creating emotional connections with customers. This is underpinned by the technology and the data profiling work noted above. Focus appears to be upon:

• Optimising the supply chain to speed up product delivery ( particularly with the high expectation set by the like of Zara and Amazon – my thoughts)
• Placing a much higher level of importance on device optimisation – particularly mobile
• Increasing customer engagement over the entire life cycle, and not just at purchase time

While customer engagement is a key focus, technology is recognised as an enabler of culture change, skill-sets, sales, marketing and innovation.

Emerging Technology

This Oracle/Fifth Quadrant focused on technology. The main outcomes businesses are expecting from technology investments in 2017 are:

• Optimising the customer experience
• Increasing revenue
• Improving operational efficiency

CX leaders are more likely to acknowledge the potential of connected devices and artificial intelligence* to enable new customer experiences. They are therefore more advanced in their trial and implementation of emerging technologies and hence are more likely to recognise the benefits.

The emerging technologies believed to significantly improve the customer experience are:

• Intelligent Personal Assistants / Chatbots
• IOT Products that communicate directly with manufacturers and customers
• Video assistance
• Service or sales through MSN Messenger, WeChat or WhatsApp

Summary

From a supplier or vendors perspective the traditional way of engaging with a buyer has changed:

• There are more decision makers
• They all expect to be engaged with on a personal level and technology plays an important part in this
• That the customer experience from a sales and marketing perspective goes past the point of sales contract - and deep into the post-sale. Hence the focus of many companies that have employed "Customer Success" executives

Possibly, the most important lesson is that vendors need to align their marketing, sales and support to be a continuous, self-reinforcing process - with no gaps or blame shifting!

Action Points

1. Download your own copy of the Salesforce.com report
2. Download a copy of the Oracle/Fifth Quadrant CX report
3. Share your thoughts and views by commenting below or via any channel you like.
4. Connect via LinkedIn or via twitter @1stLeighton

* Oracle and salesforce.com have both announced AI platforms for Marketing. Interestingly, Gartner have forecast that these are only early moves, and that it may take 10 years to become mainstream. "AI For Marketing On The Hype Cycle: A Long Journey To The Plateau?"