6 Best Practices for B2B Customer Experience

Customer experience used to be something only the B2C sector considered; B2B companies focused on the quality of their products and services. That was enough to differentiate themselves in the market then, but times have changed.

Today, B2B customer experience encompasses every interaction a customer has with your brand, whether digital or in-person. However, unlike B2C where the customer is typically one person, B2B customers are made up of multiple stakeholders, each with different needs and expectations throughout their journey.

Enjoying efficient, fast, and personalized experiences as consumers is something people expect within the B2B sector. According to the B2B Buying Process Report, almost 40% of B2B buyers want to buy, track and manage orders online. Although more than half are not ready to increase their CX budget, most B2B organizations believe that customer experience is a competitive advantage.

In fact, research shows that improving a customer experience from average to exceptional can lead to a 30 to 50 percent increase in key performance indicators such as likelihood to renew or purchase another product. This demonstrates the tangible business value of investing in B2B customer experience excellence.

Despite this reluctancy, B2B organizations have a wide range of advantages over their B2C counterparts in developing memorable customer experiences. However, only 14% of large B2B companies are truly customer centric, where the customer experience is deeply ingrained in the company culture. This indicates that B2B organizations have significant work to do to become more customer-focused, but it also highlights an opportunity for B2B firms to differentiate their brands and improve profitability by delivering a superior customer experience.

Advantages of B2B Over B2C Customer Experience

Maturity

When B2B companies start thinking about CX strategies, they are often at a more mature stage than those in B2C. This means they have a solid, established framework to build CX initiatives without needing to start from scratch.

Take personalization, which requires a deep understanding of your customers.

As a B2B, you often have a long sales cycle that contributes to years of engagement and, as a result, a stable business relationship. By adopting technology, you can offer proactive aftermarket services with hyper-personalization in messaging. This extended relationship timeline allows B2B companies to gather deep customer insights over time, enabling more sophisticated personalization than is typically possible in B2C transactions. You can track customer preferences, usage patterns, and pain points across multiple touchpoints to create truly tailored experiences.

Simplicity

To quote Harvard Business Review,

“Most B2B sellers think their customers are in the driver’s seat—empowered, armed to the teeth with information. So clear about their needs that they don’t bother to engage with suppliers until late in the process, when their purchase decision is all but complete.”

While customers prefer straightforward solutions, you can make a significant impact with the slightest change, like eliminating inflated language or sending proactive support messages on product pages.

Deeper Customer Knowledge

B2B companies are often qualified for personalization. Companies that employ pragmatic marketing or ABM strategies tend to dig deeper into customer personas and segmentation. Understanding that your customer comprises multiple stakeholders with different roles, goals, and pain points is critical. For example, the IT department might prioritize technical integration and security, while the finance team focuses on ROI and cost savings, and end users care most about ease of use. Successful B2B customer experience strategies account for these diverse needs within a single account.

And they do it well before even starting to reach out to the audience with marketing messages.

B2B CX Strategies To Implement

Define Your Service-Level Agreements

Service-level agreements (SLAs) are the statements that define what level of service customers can expect from a company. Companies use SLAs to provide a better consumer experience by determining what exactly needs to be addressed, in what way, and how quickly. They set boundaries for the staff, set and measure the efficiency of client-company communication. SLAs are particularly important in B2B relationships because they establish clear expectations across multiple stakeholders and departments, reducing misunderstandings and building trust through transparency about service commitments.

With SLAs in place, it’s easier for your team to prioritize their client services to ensure no customer gets overlooked. They also communicate to customers about company limitations, lowering the chances of souring the relationship in the future.

Some standard SLA settings that can help meet customer expectations and support agents’ workflow are:

Build A Self-Service Portal

A study from McKinsey shows that 30% of B2B customers have in-person interactions with company representatives. This means that most clients are ready to help themselves. In fact, research shows that almost half of B2B customers would prefer not to interact with a sales representative at all. This shift toward digital, self-service experiences reflects changing buyer behaviors and expectations, making it essential for B2B companies to invest in robust self-service capabilities.

In a self-service B2B business, you have a few options here:

• Knowledge bases with searchable articles, video tutorials, and step-by-step guides
• Chatbots that can answer common questions and direct users to relevant resources
• Remote interactions through video conferencing and screen sharing
• Distance training including webinars, online courses, and certification programs
• Customer portals for account management, order tracking, and real-time reporting

When customers get company products and services through self-service, support agents can nurture relationships with existing clients.

To set up a self-service, decide what products and services will work best. Standardized products that have minimal variations and are easily adjusted are recommended. Next, compose a knowledge base to let customers find supporting materials along their journey.

Personalize Your Customer Service

B2B success is all about building a relationship with your target audience. High satisfaction scores alone do not equate to high loyalty. A customer could be highly satisfied with your products and services but still be lured away by a competitor with a more attractive value proposition. Conversely, a customer may not be completely satisfied but display loyalty due to switching costs or integration complexity. This is why focusing on the complete customer experience, not just satisfaction with individual transactions, is so critical in B2B relationships.

To thrive, you should know your customer inside out and provide them with the most relevant personalized service. That means you have to know each customer's history, individual preferences, and recent activity. Remember that in B2B, understanding your customer means understanding the entire account, not just one contact. You need visibility into how different departments and stakeholders within the organization interact with your brand, what their specific pain points are, and how your solution impacts their individual roles and the broader business objectives.

The first thing you should focus on to elevate your personalized support experience is arming your team with the right tools. Your support reps should have access to a primary database to lookup data about each customer. Centralized data will allow your support to provide context that customers expect without any micromanagement or supervision.

To identify what additional software you should invest in, sketch out a map of your customer support experience through every stage of their customer journey. Sit down with your support team agents and determine all the possible problems a customer might face.

With a customer journey map, you can find all the ways to reach a customer with timely assistance, rather than waiting for them to request assistance. At this stage, you'll see the areas that need more work in terms of predictive support and can search for solutions. Taking a more proactive approach is the foundation of building a customer experience people talk about. A typical B2B buyer journey follows three main stages: awareness (the buyer becomes aware they have a problem), consideration (the buyer defines their problem and considers solutions), and decision (the buyer evaluates and decides on the right provider). Creating content and support for each stage helps nurture prospects through to conversion and ensures existing customers continue to find value.

Finally, integrate the help desk software into your business software: CRM, marketing automation, call tracking analytics, accounting and referral program software. Syncing all your data will help reduce the chance of human error and smooth out operations as a whole. Breaking down silos between departments is essential for delivering a cohesive customer experience. When sales, marketing, customer success, and support teams all have access to the same customer data and insights, they can work together to provide seamless experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. This cross-functional collaboration ensures that no customer interaction happens in isolation.

Be Proactive

Microsoft has found that 68% of customers favor companies that contact them with proactive support. Proactive support necessitates addressing problems before they arise, in contrast to reacting to customer complaints. Being proactive means anticipating customer needs and desires, resolving issues before the customer feels pain. This is particularly valuable in B2B relationships where downtime or problems can have significant business impact across multiple departments and stakeholders.

For example, suppose a client calls you with an urgent issue:

They can’t sell any e-books on their website because their accounting software (your product) is returning an error. Assuring the client that your support team is already addressing the problem and giving them a tracking number would be a standard reactive approach.

To shift gears into a proactive approach, the support instructs the client where they should use the tracking number to see the status of their ticket, set alerts for the people in charge, and follow up within the next 30 minutes to assure the client their problem has the due attention.

Another way to be proactive is to post educational content on your website to help people find the information they need. This works well for both common issues and temporary workarounds. In the latter case, don't be afraid to be transparent about the existence of the problems that you're working to settle. Customers will appreciate this as it saves everyone's time in the long run. Consider implementing proactive communication strategies such as sending follow-up emails with tutorials after customers use certain features, or providing suggested next steps after they complete transactions. These small proactive touches can significantly reduce support calls and improve the overall customer experience.

For example, if your application is experiencing server issues and it’s a known problem your team is repairing, it would be a good idea to notify your users so they know what to expect. You should also notify them every step of the way so they feel their issues are being handled in a timely manner. Building a proactive customer experience like this makes your customers feel like their voice is heard. Customer needs, behaviors, and attitudes can change at any time, as can competitive threats and external factors like technology and legislation. Companies that already perform well on delivering excellent customer experiences cannot be complacent. The most successful organizations acknowledge that improvements must be made on an ongoing basis and remain agile in adapting to changing customer expectations.

Understand Your Clients

B2B companies tend to have less social media engagement and customer feedback compared to B2C. This makes it even more critical to establish structured feedback collection processes. Implement regular touchpoints for gathering customer input through surveys, interviews, and account reviews. Focus on quality over quantity by conducting in-depth conversations with key stakeholders to understand their evolving needs and pain points.

One common issue in B2B companies is that most feedback comes from decision makers who don't necessarily personally use the purchased products or services. To get a complete picture, you need to gather feedback from multiple stakeholders across different roles and departments within your customer's organization. This includes end users, technical teams, procurement, and executives. Each group will have different perspectives on your product or service, and understanding all of these viewpoints is essential for delivering a truly excellent B2B customer experience.

Rely on Simplicity

Customers don’t want complicated solutions. From navigating your website to check out and using your product or service should be a seamless experience. Seamlessness is about making life easier for the customer by reducing effort at every touchpoint. This means simple processes, convenient access, and hassle-free interactions. In B2B markets, ease of doing business is consistently one of the top drivers of customer loyalty, making seamlessness a critical competitive differentiator.

Make sure your website works with any device your clients might use and modifies its design for optimal usage. This way, you’ll ensure your customers get the same experience across multiple channels. If your website isn’t mobile optimized, this is a great place to start. Creating an omnichannel approach is essential in modern B2B customer experience. Your customers may interact with you through your website, email, phone, in-person meetings, customer portals, and mobile apps. Each channel should provide a consistent experience, and information should flow seamlessly between channels so customers never have to repeat themselves or start over.

It's also important to ensure your product fits well in your customer's workflow and doesn't require any extra technical support to set up and run. Consider how your solution integrates with the other tools and systems your customers already use. Seamless integration reduces friction and makes adoption easier across the organization. The goal is to create a friction-free experience where the cost of effort is low and the value of the interaction is high.

Implement Dynamic Content

Use automated tracking tools to identify new and repeat visitors to present them with the information relevant to their last visit. Using dynamic content can increase customer engagement and improve CX. Develop data-driven, automated strategies that transform customer data and feedback into actionable insights. As B2B customers often have multiple stakeholders with distinct needs, customer profiles need to be enriched with behavioral and preference data to ensure you deliver personalized experiences at scale. Automation enables you to respond quickly to customer signals and adapt your approach in real-time.

Key Takeaways

B2B customers can be challenging to please and the process of getting to know their needs can be tedious. Still, if done right, B2B customer service can give you a definitive competitive advantage, improve retention and build your reputation. The foundation of B2B customer experience excellence is commitment to putting the customer at the core of what your company does, how it does it, and why. This requires board-level buy-in and a cultural shift toward customer centricity. While this transformation doesn't happen overnight, the financial returns of customer experience excellence can be immediate and deliver sustainable competitive advantage.