Evgeny Grigul is the cofounder of Virto Commerce, a B2B-first e-commerce innovation platform for enterprises.
Back in 2021, Deloitte announced that CX entered the B2B battlefield. Since then, hardly a single business has denied that customer experience is crucial to B2B digital commerce. Moreover, most of them realize that companies with high-quality, innovative digital CX will likely be the first to win the competition and disrupt the market.
Nevertheless, many companies still need to understand how to build such a digital CX in B2B and how it differs from B2C.
Powerful B2B Application Instead Of A B2C Webshop
One of the critical mistakes leading to poor B2B CX is when the vendor lacks an understanding of what their buyers need and what they aim for. More than simply taking B2C features and applying them to B2B users is required. The B2C-like portal idea is not a webshop like the B2C one but a functional B2B web portal with the same level of convenience and simplicity as B2C webshops offer.
What B2B Users Really Need
Understanding end-user needs is crucial. While B2C users are primarily flexible regarding their time and money as they make decisions alone, B2B users simply aim to get their work done within a limited timeline and with a limited budget. All they often want is to do this task easily, quickly and with no mistakes.
Imagine what the procurement process, for example, looks like at a factory that produces custom-made instruments or machines. The purchase order is entirely determined by the product specification, changes to which are not possible without approval from the engineering department. One specification may include thousands of different components. Supply managers are focused on ensuring the delivery of components just in time, according to a production schedule, at the lowest price and with the best payment terms.
Imagine the complexity of the work described above, and you will see that such popular B2C practices as upsell and cross-sell recommendations, abandoned carts or large, beautiful images are not that relevant for this kind of user. Bringing a good-looking B2C-like webshop filled with traditional B2C functions like customer reviews, simplified checkout and quick cart management would likely fail since most of these functionalities are useless for the described kind of buyers.
What’s often missing are the B2B capabilities needed, like efficiently ordering hundreds of SKUs with one order, order approval workflow and the opportunity to check inventory in regional warehouses in real time. So, when designing a B2B portal, it is essential to rethink many customer experience aspects with real B2B customers in mind. Every aspect of customer experience should be challenged:
• What is the goal of product recommendations?
• Will targeting banners be useful?
• What is the role of client reviews? What should they look like?
• How would the cart look? Does the client need more than one?
• Should the product be reserved straight after adding to the order draft? How long will the reservation be?
With all these questions and a thorough analysis of customer needs, we can better reach the perfect view of the future B2B platform.
Creating a good B2B portal that customers love is about improving their business, beyond selling them the right products and services at the best price. It is also about making your portal an inevitable part of the customer’s business due to its contribution to the buyer’s effectiveness. McKinsey defines it as “a commitment to become indispensable to the customer through an exponentially deeper level of engagement online and offline.”
I would like to illustrate McKinsey’s statement with the following example related to serving fragmented retail as buyers. Fragmented retail is usually a low-margin business. They do a lot of operations manually and often don’t have the resources for any business process automation.
This way, customers allowed to partly automate their order processing can better see you as a partner as opposed to just a supplier. In other words, it’s a chance to jump out of the “cost fighting” paradigm, becoming a long-term partner that provides more value than just selling goods.
All in all, a B2B portal may add a lot of value, for example, due to recommendations on fine-tuning the order to reduce the price using actual promotions. AI services can help a small retailer better predict the demand for products. Integrated reporting may help make better-informed decisions, and so on.
Recommendations
Here are some ideas on how you can reach a perfect B2B digital customer experience:
1. Define your audience in detail, and understand business drivers, internal roles and their pain points.
2. Dive deeper into the business processes of your clients.
3. Remember that your solution must resolve the challenges and never create new ones.
4. Stop taking B2C scenarios as guidance. Throw yourself into B2C convenience and comfort.
5. Talk to future users as much as possible from the earliest stages.
A B2B portal is different from a webshop. It is deeper and must provide valuable capabilities that facilitate the business success of your customers.
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