B2B companies are experiencing a significant shift in their customers’ expectations. In order to stay competitive, most B2B companies started investing in online channels, opting for maintaining their existing customer bases while expanding their reach. However, investments in online initiatives and launching complementary e-commerce sites might not be sufficient to successfully meet B2B buyers’ expectations. Your company main focus should be to deliver a customer experience based on consistency, convenience, flexibility, and personalization. In order to delight your buyers throughout their purchasing journey, establishing meaningful relationships and interactions with them, cross-channel consistency is crucial, as it would positively affect customers’ loyalty, future purchases, and engagement.
A seamless, frictionless, and top-quality customer experience heavily relies on keeping channels in synchronous, ensuring your customers’ journeys are cohesive. Therefore, B2B companies are recommended to build up and design a B2C-like customer experience, by adopting an omnichannel strategic approach.
5 steps towards increasing your customer engagement through Omnichannel tactics
The key to attaining consistent and compelling customer engagement relies on an effective omnichannel strategy, in order to deliver a superior customer-centric experience, through a cohesive and integrated journey, teeing several touchpoints across channels. B2B companies mastering these practices, supported by efficient processes and tools, are most likely to respond to customers’ expectations in real-time across every stage of their purchasing paths, anticipating their needs and serving them better than competitors. Creating a personalized omnichannel approach to reach superior customer engagement entails five main steps:
1.Technologies supporting complex customers’ journeys
B2B companies are recommended to adopt the right technologies and tools mix to be fully responsive to customers’ expectations. By mapping customers’ journeys, your company would cast light over their purchasing behaviours, determining which capabilities are required to fulfil their needs, and comparing those capabilities to your existing ones, in order to understand strengths and limitation of your current strategy, and orienting your future investments.
2.Agile processes for analysis and implementations
With a competitive landscape and customers’ needs continuously evolving and changing at a fast pace, embracing agile business processes is mandatory in order to master omnichannel tactics. It is crucial to adopt a flexible and iterative approach, which solutions can be rapidly adapted, developed, tested and prototyped. Processes should be structured based on the goal of designing a comprehensive journey, increasing engagement through delivering seamless experiences, and then analyzing results to improve constantly.
3.Skills-holders and partners invested in omnichannel efforts
Commitment to delivering customer experience excellence does not only imply some processes and organizational restructuring, but it entails skills-holders collaborating across departments and teams, sharing various strategic, technical, and data insights. Moreover, B2B companies are recommended to establish partnerships with third parties to support them in nurturing new initiatives and increasing time-to-market speed.
4.Personalization capabilities for delivering market-leading experiences
As B2C customers, B2B buyers are expecting more and more personalization at every stage of their purchasing journeys. Missing out on delivering a B2C-like personalized experience would be extremely detrimental to your company. Furthermore, your customers expect to be engaged at any time regardless of the channel they select to interact with your company. Therefore, integrate all touchpoints into a unique personalized, seamless, and frictionless experience is no longer optional, but mandatory.
5.Proven and efficient platforms and tools to iterate processes
To deliver on the promise of superior experiences and customer engagement across channels, your company should adopt different systems which at the same time are constantly interacting with each other. By adopting and aggregating the right technologies mixes and platforms, your company will more rapidly share data across channels, take on informed decisions, connecting your various process-levels to create seamless experiences, ultimately increasing customer engagement.
In nutshell, B2B companies should embrace the omnichannel strategic approach in order to design a cohesive and comprehensive experience that would drive results especially in terms of customer engagement, customer loyalty, and ultimately business performance. Consequentially, to attain these results, which secures your business with outstanding competitive advantages, your company should also consider improving its efforts in terms of customer centricity, that will be discussed in the next issue.