5 years ago Gartner research unveiled their thesis that Customer Experience (commonly referred to as CX) would soon become the “new battlefield” for brands.
Now, in 2019, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Gartner was correct, with numerous follow-up studies confirming the importance of customer experience and its direct effect on customer loyalty and advocacy.
In fact, a study by Walker found that by as early as next year, “customer experience will overtake price and product to become the key brand differentiator”.
With CX being one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd and build a loyal customer base, let’s examine some simple CX innovation projects B2B tech firms can implement to create a stellar experience for their customers.
1. Use Storytelling to Communicate Your Value Proposition
It’s easy to forget that a great customer experience often begins before a prospect actually decides to become a paying customer.
If your marketing materials don’t create an emotional bond with your prospects, you’ll never have the chance to take the relationship further. Data and statistics are often forgettable, so this is where great storytelling comes into play.
If you want a customer to feel emotionally connected to your brand, and therefore make your business stand out, they need to be aware of your company’s mission, values and the benefits of doing business with you.
So how can brands use storytelling to do this? Video is the perfect medium, as it increases the retention of your message and is often a customer’s most preferred way to consume content.
Within each video you produce, you want prospective customers to see themselves at the heart of the story you’re telling - by putting themselves in the shoes of your current happy customers, or seeing themselves as going through the same pain points that your business so clearly understands. This paints a picture in the prospects mind that they, too, will have a positive experience with your company.
2. Implement an Engaging Onboarding Campaign
When a business acquires a new customer they have a small, yet significant window of opportunity to set the context for a positive and lasting customer relationship straight off the bat.
In our experience, designing and implementing an engaging onboarding campaign for new customers is a simple way B2B brands can “set the tone” and improve customer retention.
One of the easiest ways to do this is via a simple email campaign, which walks customers through a series of steps they need to take (or information they need to know) to get the most out of the product or service.
For businesses with larger budgets, a dedicated online e-learning hub is a more interactive way of achieving the same objective. One really creative way of ensuring customers actually complete the onboarding process is to “gamify” the process with specific setup milestones customers must achieve or a series of “quick start” lessons they can complete to win badges or certifications.
3. Help Customers to Help Themselves
In today’s digital world, customers are becoming increasingly self-sufficient. This is evidenced by the fact that the majority of customers now prefer dealing with businesses who allow them to help themselves first before reaching out to customer support.
As studies have shown that 70% of customers feel that a brand’s website should include some form of self-service support, this is an easy focal point for brands who wish to improve their customer experience.
A simple way to do this would be to create a dedicated area of your website for self-service support, such as a well-organised FAQ bank. There, customers could search for answers to their most pressing questions and find solutions in a matter of minutes.
When you consider the traditional approaches businesses have in place, where customers call a hotline and end up sitting on hold for 5 minutes, or have to wait 24 hours for a response to an email or support ticket, it’s easy to see why this approach will win you brownie points with your customers.
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Do you want to transform your B2B customer experience into one which will surprise and delight your customers, inspiring loyalty for years to come? Get in touch with Philip Martin to discover how DMA Partners can help: philip.martin@dma-partners.com.
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