As customers are increasingly moving toward digital transactions, creating a relevant, easy-to-use customer experience is at the forefront for businesses. But how do you know when your digital experience is impactful, satisfying customer needs, and meeting business objectives? What metrics do you use to analyze your customer feedback? Do you have strategies in place to iterate on the buying process to improve experience quality?
If you don’t have the answers to these questions, you’re not alone. Troubleshooting the current state of your digital customer experience strategy has become the key challenge for global brands, and you’ll need to drive and execute a set of best practices to help you accurately assess how you’re doing.
To define what these best practices should be, let’s start by looking at the current state of B2B buyer behavior data.
What Do Brands Need to Evolve Digitally?
B2B buyers expect easy-to-use, convenient systems where they can find information and get their products without hassle or roadblocks. Yet 97% of online B2B buyers have experienced pain points in the purchasing process that turned them away from completing their transaction.
Brands that see these trends and work to understand the underlying causes are the ones that will continue to evolve and thrive in the digital age. These forward-thinking organizations are prioritizing customer experience technology and working to blend IT strategies with overall business goals. In doing so, they’re creating improved customer feedback, stronger customer data analysis, and a pain-free B2B buying experience.
Even the largest, most sophisticated brands experience hurdles when it comes to implementing customer experience technology. Global supply chain challenges and economic instability are certainly inhibiting progress, but the brands that come out on top during this tumultuous time will be the ones that put digital innovation at the center of their customer experience efforts despite what’s going on around them.
How to Implement a Self-Assessment of the Digital Customer Experience
There’s a gap between what most customers expect from their digital experience and what most organizations can deliver. Today’s world — including the past two years of pandemic- and politics-induced chaos — has turned the dial on consumer needs way up. The brands that can understand their buyers and respond to their developing needs will continue to offer a digital experience that reassures rather than frustrates.
The following are three questions you can ask to ensure your business’s digital experience is measuring up to today’s B2B buyer demands:
1. Are you prioritizing continuous evolution?
The state of affairs in the B2B world necessitates continuous digital evolution because there is so much to adapt to. The most successful brands have mitigation strategies, options, and ideas that they can quickly turn to if the need arises. This can be seen by the whopping 94% of B2B buyers who say they prefer to work with suppliers that continuously evolve their digital capabilities and experiment with offerings. Even amid economic unrest, it’s important to keep trying new capabilities and carrying the customer experience forward, even if little by little.
2. Do you understand the voice of the customer and their journey?
Customer data is a mine of information, and you can use it to predict and plan for a brighter future strategy. Focusing on customer surveys, holding customer focus groups, and understanding their pain points are all exceptional places to start. Ask data-driven questions like these: Are customers unable to find product information? Can they reach a live person to talk to? What gaps in understanding need to be bridged to help alleviate B2B buyer pain points?
Understanding these issues and working to solve them will help to create a more effective and memorable experience. As for analytics, time spent on site and bounce rates are good indications of what’s working and what’s not. You can mine your data back into your own success by understanding what customers want and ensuring your digital customer experience is meeting those needs.
3. Is your strategy forward-thinking?
To move quickly and assess the digital customer experience strategy before B2B buyer behavior changes, brands need to create forward-thinking, scalable solutions. Digital capabilities should be built for evolving in the long term by focusing on business goals and objectives. To do this, brands will need to reorganize their strategy around developing customer relationships and learning everything they can about what motivates the B2B buyer behavior they’re seeing, and then they can use that understanding to plot further offerings that begin to shape customer desires rather than retroactively respond to them.
Keep your digital customer experience strategy fresh and consistently evolving by checking in quarterly and determining whether success metrics are being met. If they are, that’s good. Then, continue to innovate in the same spirit. If they are not, remember there is a lot to be learned by failing forward. You tried something and it didn’t work, you can still take your newfound knowledge and apply it to a fresh strategy. After all, when optimizing your digital customer experience strategy for future business success, the only risk is inaction.