B2B Online brought together a group of Vice Presidents and Directors of Departments from a variety of different companies, in order to discuss how businesses are building on and improving the customer experience they provide.

On the panel was Anthony McGregor Day who is the ECommerce Director of the Bluefish Group and Vice President of Aftermarket Care for Eaton's Vehicle Group, Tim Bauer. Joining them was Director of Product Development and Commercial Division for Ingersol Rand, Matthew Conrad and finally, Anne Vranicic, Vice President and EBuisness Evangelist at Valin Corporation.

What is Customer Experience?

In B2B ecommerce, customer experience is the product of an interaction between the customer and the organization throughout the course of their relationship.

This interaction is primarily made up of three parts - the customer journey being the first, the brand touchpoints that the customer interacts with, and the environments (including digital ones) the customer experiences as the final part of this journey. It's essential that at all points of contact the customer has with your brand, the service that they receive is consistent, meets their expectations, and the experience is seamless and simple.

Customer experience is nothing new, but what is new is how companies are doing it. B2B businesses are built on customer and supplier relationships, and so it's essential for these relationships to be transposed into the digital world. The focus is also now on brands owning these relationships rather than one single department. If companies have general control over them, it means strategies can be implemented across the board.

Improving Touchpoint Interactions Between Customers and Business

Much of the discussion which takes place regarding this topic revolves around how to have a team providing seamless and consistent customer experiences at each of the touchpoints a customer encounters.

This involves bringing together the numerous teams which work within the business and facilitating conversations between them. The more cross-functional your brand can be, the better. If you can get employees from different sectors, including the call centers, sales teams, customers themselves, and the pricing teams, effectively working together, the customer experience will be a far smoother and more pleasant experience.

Measuring Success

The question of how we measure the success of a company's customer experience is also something which is spoken about in this discussion. The main method of gaining feedback is to ask customers to take part in surveys once they have had an interaction with the company in some way. Many companies conduct surveys in order to help them see where they're falling short and what they can do in order to improve their services.

Looking at things such as customer engagement, repeat purchases, and chat logs from your customer service portal can also provide good insight into how your business is doing in terms of customer experience. An increase in customer satisfaction generally goes hand in hand with an increase in sales. It's an incredibly difficult variable to measure but if you're experiencing an increase in sales it's more than likely to be experiencing an increase in customer satisfaction.

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Exploring how to build a more sophisticated customer journey to improve customer experience is set to be a hot topic at B2B Online 2019, being held in November, at the JW Marriott Marquis Miami, FL.

Please download the agenda today for more information and insights.