Is your business-to-business (B2B) company spinning its wheels on bettering its customer experiences? Are your customer experience investments going down the drain?
If you’re nodding in agreement, you are not alone! (Sounds like a pharma ad? But, it’s true.)
According to new research from Accenture, most B2Bs (76%) may be wasting up to half of their investment on ineffective customer experience initiatives! Ouch.
First, let’s define what Accenture calls the ‘customer experience’ (CX).
Customer Experience: how business customers and their stakeholders perceive the entirety of interactions they have with a supplier company across all marketing, sales and service touch points. “
The report drills down on the definition:
“The customer experience includes areas such as: marketing and sales campaigns, lead follow-up, account management, quote/order management, solution shaping, contracting, customer support, preventive maintenance, SLA [service-level agreement] definition and monitoring, planning and performance management, sales effectiveness, and multi-channel customer interaction.”
Even though 85% of B2B supplier executives consider the overall customer experience they provide in sales and service to be ‘very important’ to their strategic priorities, and 70% recognize that, over the next two years, customer-experience related considerations will play an even larger role in the overall corporate strategy, more than half the respondents admit that their customer experience programs had achieved little, flat or negative return in terms of retaining customers.
So, why the increased focus on CX?
Between 70-75% of executives agree that business customers’ higher expectations, desire for customized solutions, increasing price sensitivity, and greater knowledge and self-direction are having a significant impact on their company’s customer experience strategy for sales and service. In other words, businesses are acting like consumers!
PLUS…
When companies excel at defining and executing a customer service strategy, they can generate revenue growth!
The report segments companies into three groups:
- Masters: Companies “playing to win”
- Strivers: Companies “playing not to lose”
- Laggards: Companies not “even in the game”
Masters prioritize customer experience and achieve strongest financial growth. These organizations generally excel in both customer experience strategy and execution capabilities. Fewer than one quarter of B2B companies are Masters.
Strivers consider the customer experience a priority, yet yield more modest results. Less than half (48%) of respondent companies are Strivers.
Laggards yield low to negative financial results despite believing the customer experience is critical. These companies have large performance gaps in both customer experience strategy and execution capabilities. Only 28% of respondent companies are Laggards.
Read the full report for more details.
(Although the research did not include small to medium businesses, there’s always something to take away from these types of reports.)
So, which category does YOUR B2B company fall into? What is it doing to improve its customer experiences?
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