Do B2B enterprises need experience management?

The following is the Do B2B enterprises need experience management? recommended by recordtrend.com. And this article belongs to the classification: B2B.

With the maturity of the overall economic environment, in recent years, more and more industries have changed from incremental market to stock market, and the homogeneous competition among products has intensified; In order to break the situation, enterprises have begun to cultivate their internal skills and do fine operation in business. Their attention to customer experience is also increasing day by day. Many enterprises hope that customer experience will become a new engine for the next growth curve.

However, in the past, the growth of B2B enterprises was often driven by strong sales, the management paid insufficient attention to experience management, and the development of experience management lagged far behind B2C enterprises; According to the customer experience maturity survey of beibituo in 2022, nearly 70% of B2B practitioners believe that their enterprises are still in the initial and development stage of experience management; Compared with B2C, the enterprise has entered the fourth stage of excellence.

The maturity of experience management is also reflected in the internal management mechanism of the enterprise. B2B enterprises significantly lag behind B2C enterprises in terms of experience specific departments, executive participation, experience management process and assessment mechanism.

The deepening of the public’s attention and understanding of experience has gradually penetrated into the B2B procurement decision-making, and “forced” enterprises to strengthen the ability of customer experience management. At present, many B2B enterprises have realized this gap and began to invest more resources in experience management. Based on beibituo’s past project experience, this paper makes further thinking and summary on B2B experience management, and launches according to the characteristics of B2B customer experience management, the composition of experience model, solution suggestions and so on.

Three characteristics of B2B experience management

B2B purchase behavior is quite different from individual purchase in terms of participants, decision logic and demand concerns. If enterprises want to do a good job in B2B experience management, they must first understand its three characteristics different from B2C experience management.

01. More roles

B2B procurement decision-making is related to many stakeholders. A procurement behavior may involve multiple roles such as company managers, procurement principals and users, and these roles have different effects on decision-making in different types of enterprises.

According to the data in the report of B2B buyers in 2021, the vast majority of B2B buyers will have 2-4 people involved in procurement decisions, and more than 20% of buyers will have 5 or more people involved. It is unrealistic to always provide excellent customer experience for all stakeholders, which requires B2B enterprises to formulate specific strategies and make trade-offs.

The premise of trade-off is to clearly judge the influence of different roles in procurement decisions. For example, when purchasing precision electronic components, engineers as users have the strongest voice and can veto their dissatisfied suppliers with one vote; However, when an enterprise purchases holiday benefits for employees, the core decision-maker may be the trade union chairman in charge of procurement, while employees as actual users have little influence on procurement decisions. Therefore, when doing experience management, B2B enterprises must do a good job in identifying key roles, achieve a targeted goal, and do not spend limited resources on unimportant roles.

02. The decision-making process is more complex

The decision-making chain of C-end customers is shorter and more emotional and subjective. In contrast, the decision-making process of b-end buyers is more complex, usually with a longer cycle and involving multiple processes. When evaluating products or services, purchasers must consider more specific requirements at the company level, such as internal compliance considerations, financial and payment terms, service level, logistics requirements, etc; The procurement with large amount is often carried out in the form of internal evaluation meeting or public bidding, with strict process control and scoring standards, which also makes B2B procurement decisions tend to be rational.

However, if someone participates, there will inevitably be perceptual factors. Even in a more rational B2B procurement, the subjective emotions of the participants will also have a certain impact on the decision-making. For example, the purchase preference of individual consumers, the trust of customer managers, the good impression of brands, etc. will urge them to give a judgment more conducive to suppliers. According to the data reported by B2B buyers in 2021, more than 80% of B2B decision makers said they would prefer to purchase a brand if they had a positive impression of the brand before conducting supplier research.

03. Customized demand is more rigid

Customized service is a common means to create unexpected experience for B2C business, but it is a common rigid demand for B2B business. The personalized services provided by enterprises are likely to be taken for granted by b-end customers, which will directly affect their choice of suppliers. If the enterprise can’t meet, it may greatly affect the wallet share and even lead to the loss of competition.

From the perspective of the company’s operation, it is not advisable to blindly meet the overly personalized needs of customers. On the one hand, it will bring additional costs, on the other hand, it will aggravate the management difficulty of the company’s products and services, and it is difficult to realize the scale advantage. How to achieve the balance between operation efficiency and customized demand is also a difficult problem in B2B experience management. A good way is to segment customers from the customer base, so that the company can create a more customized experience for the core group.

However, compared with the mature user portrait research methods in the B2C industry, the customer clustering in the B2B industry started late. Most enterprises have no unified rules at the headquarters level, and the satisfaction of specific customized needs is left to the front-line personnel to respond flexibly. It is often difficult for front-line personnel to make simple judgments based on their own experience and maximize their own value.

Composition of B2B experience model

On the basis of the three characteristics of B2B experience management, beibituo further explored many factors affecting customer experience, synthesized the commonness of past cases, and summarized the B2B customer experience model including three forces and three senses.

Among them, product power, price power and performance power, as the rational needs of customers, are more about the evaluation of the hard comprehensive strength of enterprises. At the same time, as the basic item of customer experience, they are the tickets for enterprises to enter the market competition;

As the perceptual needs of customers, the sense of worry, attention and trust is more about the perception of the soft service level of the enterprise. At the same time, as an additional item of the customer experience, it acts on the retention of customers and turns the one-time business into sustainable.

Rational demand:

Basic items, tickets to enter the market competition

01. Product strength

Ensure the quality and richness of products

Product power is the most intuitive source of customer experience, and its impact is mainly reflected in two aspects: one is the quality of products. For highly professional products such as precision instruments, B2B buyers usually have clear brand and parameter standards, while for less professional products such as labor protection products, they mainly rely on the feedback of actual users.

On the other hand is the type of products. If customers don’t have many products they need, the customer experience will be significantly reduced. However, from the perspective of enterprise operation, blindly pursuing the richness of types will lead to the difficulty of SKU management and the inability to realize the advantages of large-scale. How to achieve the balance between the two? First, pay attention to the sorting of customers’ commonly used products. When a certain number of customers have needs, they should be introduced in time, so as not to leave the impression of “not even this”; Second, pursue the introduction of characteristic products or private brands, and create the impression of “no one has me” around different customer groups.

02. Price power

Meet the needs of customer cost control

The first important point of B2B procurement is cost control, which is particularly obvious in the manufacturing industry with relatively low profit margin. The purchasing personnel of many factories will reduce the cost by 3% – 5% every year. B2B enterprises must meet their customers’ demand for cost control, but it should be noted that sometimes the advantages brought by low prices are not as obvious as expected. On the one hand, procurement does not tend to use suppliers with low prices due to quality risk. On the other hand, a low price will increase the financial explanation cost of procurement personnel. It is necessary to show sufficient evidence to prove why the price rises next time.

03. Performance

Deliver the promised content on time and quality

In B2B business, suppliers provide customers with not only single products and services, but comprehensive solutions, which usually requires a longer delivery cycle, so the performance force has a greater impact in the process. In most enterprises, especially the units within the system, the impact of performance is even greater than the reduction of procurement costs.

B2B enterprises attach great importance to the construction of performance capacity, but the problem they face is that they don’t know where the performance problem is. In the past research of beibituo, it is found that due to the factors of KPI assessment, most of the problems are eliminated by the regional front-line personnel, and it is likely to be a beautified perfect performance rate index in the hands of the enterprise management. In order to solve this problem, B2B enterprises can start to increase digital contacts with customers, such as online applet confirmation, instant messaging after performance, etc. use scenario NPs to collect the feedback of each performance, and formulate the key improvement direction of performance in the future in combination with performance rate and other operation indicators.

Perceptual needs:

Add points to turn one-time business into sustainable business

04. Peace of mind

Simple and transparent, making daily procurement easier

Simpler communication: reduce the time spent in the coordination of procurement between different roles. The products and procurement process of B2B procurement are more complex. In the process, different personnel often complete the steps of demand collection, order placement, review, receipt and use. The procurement role undertakes a lot of coordination work. B2B enterprises should think about how to create direct communication contacts with different stakeholders of customers, so as to reduce the difficulty and energy consumption of the procurement role in mediation.

More transparent process: make the price, inventory, performance standards, order or problem handling progress transparent and traceable. The process is more transparent. First, it ensures the information equivalence between the buyer and the seller. Second, it can enhance the fine control of the purchasing role over its work, so as to make the purchasing heart more bottom-up.

More efficient response: respond to customer demands quickly and stably, and give an accurate reply even if it cannot be solved in a short time. The response speed of suppliers is directly related to the maintenance of customer relations. In the research of beibituo, many procurement principals said that their popularity will increase significantly when their temporary order addition needs can be responded in time or their improvement suggestions can be quickly fed back to the supplier management.

Sense of existence

Help me show the results of my work in the company

The sense of existence is a deeper emotional appeal than the sense of ease. Purchasers’ work is usually not easy to understand, and they will not be praised for their good work. When there are problems, they will be questioned by many parties. Most purchasers spend their time and energy on not making mistakes, but they also hope that their work performance can be seen by leaders and recognized by employees. If the supplier can help the procurement to create its “sense of presence” in the company, it will greatly increase customer stickiness.

This approach has been applied in different industries. For example, some companies that pay attention to customer experience will help purchasers sort out cost reduction data, or share the excellent experience of other companies in the same industry, so as to help purchasers better report to leaders and show their work results.

06. Sense of trust

The customer manager is professional and reliable, and the long-term cooperation is more assured

In B2B business, customer managers usually play an important role of interpersonal ties, undertaking daily communication with customers and problem solving. The relationship between customer managers and customers often affects the overall experience from products to services, and even further determines the retention of customers.

Many B2B managers are willing to work with customers in a long-term way, but they are not willing to keep the best price for their products, although they are willing to work with customers in a long-term way. Therefore, B2B enterprises need to spend more energy on the training of service personnel to meet customers’ expectations of service personnel and establish a sense of trust.

How to build B2B customer experience

1. Starting from rational needs, highlight the core competitiveness of enterprises. We can better focus on the rational needs such as product power, price power and performance power, and find out the links that can form core advantages. For example, in the enterprise welfare and gift industry, JD has created differentiated advantages with its own logistics, which makes the performance link more rapid and stable, and even can provide customized logistics services. In the field of industrial products, Mismi focuses on product power and is famous for the precision and customization of products. Many customers complain about its long delivery cycle, high price and cumbersome service process, but they still continue to purchase. The reason is that Mismi is more confident in the quality of its products and cannot be bought in other companies.

2. Position key roles and create a “worry free feeling” targeted. With the help of multi role customer journey tool, identify the key decision-makers and users in the enterprise procurement journey, focusing on meeting their “worry free” needs. It should be noted that the key roles may change in the two different stages of initial cooperation and daily continuous cooperation. Taking the procurement of industrial products as an example, in the stage of establishing cooperation, the decision of the procurement director has the greatest influence and can directly decide whether to enter the supplier cooperation list; However, in the daily continuous cooperation stage, the voice of workshop engineers can not be ignored. It is not only directly related to the wallet share of each supplier, but also affects the renewal after the expiration of the contract.

3. Accurately carry out value-added services with the help of customer segmentation. Providing customers with value-added services beyond expectations helps to enhance their sense of being valued, but this process has high cost investment and great differences in the needs of different customers. On the basis of customer segmentation, enterprises should carry out differentiated value-added services for different key customer groups in order to maximize the value within the controllable cost. Taking the procurement of industrial products as an example, the products purchased by large-scale central enterprise customers are more complex. I hope someone can help them communicate their product needs; Small scale private enterprise customers are more streamlined, and it is hoped that the delivery personnel can help them complete the tallying and shelves.

4. Balance the relationship between digital contacts and interpersonal contacts. Most B2B companies are also fully promoting digitization, hoping to reduce human investment and improve the customer experience. However, different from B2C digitization, B2B digitization should not eliminate the contact between business personnel and customers. While providing digital tools, enterprises should consider whether the contact between original business personnel and customers will be damaged and whether it can bring significant improvement of service quality and human efficiency.

5. Highlight the brand connotation and reject “big business and small brand”. Most B2B enterprises are sales driven and pay less attention to the brand. In this case, the flow of salespeople often represents the loss of customers. In terms of reducing the loss of customers, brand is not only an important starting point, but also the long-term asset of the enterprise. Therefore, while paying attention to hard power building, B2B enterprises should also carry out brand construction as soon as possible, solidify the rational competitive advantage and perceptual service characteristics of the enterprise into brand connotation, and highlight them in brand construction, so as to avoid the problem of “large business and small brand”, that is, the product sales or reputation of the enterprise is very good, but the customers are not impressed with the enterprise brand, Or run counter to the brand image that the enterprise wants to build.

Case – zhenkunhang industrial supermarket

Zhenkunhang industrial supermarket is a digital industrial supplies service platform, which provides customers with one-stop industrial supplies procurement and management services to realize the transparency, efficiency and cost reduction of industrial supplies supply chain. The company adheres to the orientation of achieving customers. From the CEO to front-line employees, the customer experience is put in the most important position.

For the rational demands of customers, Zhenkun bank pays attention to the construction of performance capacity. Set up regional service centers based on the national general warehouse to solve the service and distribution problems of the last kilometer, so as to ensure that the products can be delivered to customers on time and accurately; In order to create a more extreme customer experience, it configures a full-time delivery manager for customers in need to provide customers with 360 degree services such as classification, warehousing and shelves.

For the emotional demands of customers, Zhenkun bank is committed to creating a “worry free and transparent” service feeling. Explore the needs and concerns of different types of customers and different roles through the customer journey tool, and provide targeted value-added services, such as providing common SKU sorting for key customers of central enterprises with more types of purchases, so as to reduce the procurement workload; Provide product selection consultation for customers in more professional industries, and help engineers solve technical problems. On the other hand, adhere to the transparency of price, product information and order tracking, and enhance the control of purchasing personnel over orders, so as to save more worry.

Behind meeting customers’ rational and perceptual needs is the support of their organizational culture. In order to continuously optimize the customer experience, the CEO of each weekly meeting will work with the company’s management to listen to customers’ feedback and study customer experience problems. At the same time, he will promote the construction of “customer-centered” culture within the organization and set up a special experience department, hoping that the customer experience can become the DNA of the company.

epilogue

In the stock market with serious homogeneous competition, experience management has become a key link in the fine operation of B2B enterprises; Enterprises need to grasp two points when carrying out experience transformation: one is to recognize the essential difference between B2B and B2C experience management; Second, on the basis of continuously improving products, prices, performance and other hard strength, further grasp the perceptual needs of customers, find the most key people in procurement decision-making and provide effective services. Experience management not only pursues the improvement of NPs / satisfaction number, but also establishes a moat with the help of customer experience under limited resources, forms differentiated competitiveness, and turns one-time transactions into sustainable businesses.

From: bebit beibituo read more: Information Map: B2B enterprise social media marketing data CB insight: it is estimated that 80% of listed technology companies will do B2B new distribution in 2013: 2018-2019 FMCG retail store B2B Competitiveness Report (with download) full circle of goods: B2B e-commerce brand display report B2B e-commerce Guide: the tradition has gone, Digitalization has come, B2B transformation of domestic trade – Information Map How B2B companies will start using social media for marketing Lingying: white paper on global marketing of China’s B2B brand (with download) 2019 New Retail Research Series: FMCG B2B white paper (with download) Analysys International: transaction scale of China’s e-commerce B2B market reached 7.1 trillion yuan in 2013 Lingying: insight report on Digitalization prospect of China’s B2B marketing (with download) What are the common characteristics of Unicorn companies in the B2B field? B2B industry will face six important development trends. Current situation of agricultural B2B e-commerce development analysis on the business model of B2B pharmaceutical e-commerce in China

If you want to get the full report, you can contact us by leaving us the comment. If you think the information here might be helpful to others, please actively share it. If you want others to see your attitude towards this report, please actively comment and discuss it. Please stay tuned to us, we will keep updating as much as possible to record future development trends.

RecordTrend.com is a website that focuses on future technologies, markets and user trends. We are responsible for collecting the latest research data, authority data, industry research and analysis reports. We are committed to becoming a data and report sharing platform for professionals and decision makers. We look forward to working with you to record the development trends of today’s economy, technology, industrial chain and business model.Welcome to follow, comment and bookmark us, and hope to share the future with you, and look forward to your success with our help.