Consider the B2B customer experience if you don’t believe the Amazon effect applies to it.
Assume you run a manufacturing business with all the complications that come with sales, channels, and services. Alternately, a company that deals with logistics and pricing might be a wholesale distributor or a manufacturer of consumer goods.
If your products are highly specialized and necessitate complex quotes and sales commissions, are you still relying on your sales and account management teams to generate revenue through business relationships?
Even the most established business procedures in your sector are now being inescapably dragged into the digital world.
The Amazon effect: the expansion of e-commerce into the B2B market.
How has the digital age impacted your B2B clients and business?
Every customer who makes a purchase on Amazon or another similar platform is a consumer as well. The expectations of how business should operate have changed as a result of their private digital interactions.
This does not imply that you should use point-and-click shopping with home delivery or that Instagram should be your primary social media platform. To find new business models and generate more revenue, you can however translate the changes in the business environment and improve your customer experience.
What if you could take over your industry as the Amazon of it?
In the B2B sector, there are three forces that define transformation.
Every lead or prospect starts with a Search, often on different devices, not on your website or in an RFP. For this reason, it is crucial that you have a presence on external industry websites.
If they haven’t already been, all the industry reports and lists in use today are being digitalized. Because customers are already halfway through the sales and discovery process when they visit your website, you don’t even have control over the initial prospect. All they need to do is quickly FIND what they’re looking for. This means that your product catalog should be simple to find and that any inquiries about the products should be promptly answered via a thorough FAQ section.
Speed: In a society that values instant gratification, customers demand quick responses. Chatbots can handle any customer query, at any time, on a global scale. Remember, the average millennial attention span is only 10 seconds. They can aid in generating the initial interest and make sure that leads produced by your digital properties get to sales teams as soon as possible. The lengthy list of leads won’t simply be sent to sales without classification, ranking, or scoring; rather, these metrics will let sales know which deals to prioritize. Complex products can have their orders processed or have service-related questions answered by sophisticated chatbots. The speed with which you respond can greatly influence how quickly you can close a deal.
Transparency: You can now track your pizza delivery, from the driver’s location to the estimated arrival time at your door. In a B2B environment, customers and their intricate bill of materials depend on visibility along the entire process, including data on product availability, pricing, delivery, and service.
The supply chain’s digital transformation, which enabled businesses to maximize cost and efficiency, can also be used to provide customers with real-time access to information about pricing, contracts, product catalogs, or inventory. This links the supply and demand chains, fundamentally altering the B2B customer experience.
You can now tell your wholesaler or distributor which farm harvested the produce and when thanks to the development of blockchain technology, making products almost as trackable as that pizza order. The truck on which the steel or other manufacturing-related components were loaded and their delivery date can be tracked.
(The Amazon effect) B2B + B2C = B2B2C.
The B2B sector needs to concentrate on assisting clients in keeping their eyes on the ball while the B2C sector competes for consumers’ attention and eyes.
Enabling your customers with trustworthy, real-time information and service is a valuable currency in a globally interconnected digital supply chain. You’ve reached the region where B2B meets Amazon if that information can be conveniently delivered through chatbots or mobile apps.
85 per cent of the relationships your customers manage are done so online.
Everything they need and more can be provided by omnichannel CX.
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