Your business to business (B2B) ecommerce platform allows you to improve customer experiences and stand out in a competitive world.
Price and product quality are important but customer experience is a key differentiator for your B2B clients. As competition increases high quality service helps you attract and retain valuable customers.
Providing a seamless and intuitive online purchasing environment attracts new business and helps retain and impress your existing customers.
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Cloudfy is a powerful B2B ecommerce platform providing an intuitive and easy-to-use interface for complex sales. It streamlines the buying process to help your customers find and purchase your products. You can offer personalized recommendations and pricing, efficiently manage orders and maintain reliable fulfillment.
You can create custom category menus and restrict sales of certain products or combinations to meet your compliance obligations. With unique homepages and dashboards, your Cloudfy site can deliver exactly what your customers need.
With near real time inventory status indicators B2B buyers know how much stock is available. For your stock-sensitive customers you’ll meet or exceed their needs and build long-term relationships.
Your B2B ecommerce site must certainly provide an easy online self-service channel but it’s so much more too.
Here are 12 examples of how to transform customer relationships with B2B ecommerce good practice.
Understand customer needs
To create high quality customer experiences, you must know what your customers are looking for and how you can help. They are unlikely to make impulse purchases, so you must give them good reasons to buy from you.
Your B2B buyers are responsible for obtaining the best value for their company’s spending. They must carry out extensive research to find the best options. Often they will be part of a buying group, so they will need evidence to support their recommendations. They will value your help when you provide easy discovery, simple site navigation, quality content and transparent pricing.
Invest in research to understand the challenges your customers face and help to overcome them. It’s your first step towards becoming their supplier of choice.
Be customer-centric
Your business makes a difference to your customer’s overall experience every time you interact with them. All your teams must understand your customers and collaborate to meet their needs. To do this successfully make sure your business systems are integrated, so everyone can see and use the same information. The insights into customer behavior you gain will allow you to provide tailored recommendations and personalized experiences. Customers will be happy to share information to help you provide what they need.
Provide dynamic desktops and marvellous mobile experiences
Your B2B ecommerce site must be clear and easy to use on desktop PCs. However, mobile devices aren’t only for personal online shopping so your B2B ecommerce platform must also provide seamless mobile experiences. This requires optimization for smartphones and tablets, providing easy navigation, fast page loading times, and streamlined checkouts. Your buyers won’t wait if pages load slowly and will soon lose interest in badly designed mobile purchasing journeys.
Streamline self-service
When your customers choose to make unassisted purchases, they must be as frictionless as possible. This reduces your administration and cuts back on manual data entry errors. From checkout to delivery your customers will feel in control when they can see near real time order status updates.
Make purchasing easy
The checkout process should be quick, easy, and secure, with multiple payment choices to suit your customers. This includes credit card payments, PayPal, and other digital options. To reduce cart abandonment, you should also consider offering a guest checkout alongside clear and transparent shipping and return policies.
Automate processes
Business system integration, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can automate, streamline and simplify processes for seamless customer experiences. Chatbots can answer questions at any time while your sales and customer services teams collaborate to find solutions. Simple workflows can predict when customers need to place new orders and send reminders. You can create triggers for automatic communications, promotions and tailored product recommendations.
Educate and advise your customers
Busy B2B buyers want reliable, accurate and unbiased information. Many carry out independent research to avoid unhelpful sales pitches. Proactively taking an advisory role will help them find the answers they’re looking for. Providing expert advice on key challenges and trends in your industry builds your reputation. Creating high quality and informative content in multiple formats and sharing it widely helps to build relationships. Resources like online knowledge bases, chatbots, and supported community forums help customers find solutions to problems without extra help.
Meet after sales needs
To build customer loyalty and increase lifetime value outstanding customer experiences mustn’t end once the purchase is complete. Excellent post-purchase support helps your customers work more efficiently. This might include regular reviews with customers to understand how their needs are changing as their businesses grow. You can provide online libraries of ‘how to’ advice and troubleshooting guidance as part of your role as an educator. You’ll minimize or even remove the risk they’ll move to another supplier.
Respond quickly
If your customers have a problem they’ll want a quick resolution. You’ll build much stronger customer relationships when they feel they can rely on you for support. Live chat accessed via your B2B ecommerce platform is ideal for real-time communication without around the clock on-call services. Whether they need to ask a question or make an urgent purchase they’ll value your assistance.
Monitoring your social media accounts for customer enquiries is also a good way to connect with clients and provide prompt responses.
Be proactive
You can solve your customers’ problems before they know they have them. This can include identifying and sharing ‘fixes’ when customers face unexpected issues. You can also anticipate your customers’ future needs and suggest solutions based on their changing profiles. This might include running online workshops or seminars on subjects that are emerging in your sector.
Take accessibility seriously
Some people might need extra assistance to access and use your B2B ecommerce site. However, making sure everything is as simple and clear as possible benefits everyone.
Following industry-standard web accessibility guidelines shows you take the issue seriously and are committed to providing good all-round customer experiences. This might include basics like alt text for images and captions for videos to using clear and concise website content and design.
Listen to your customers
Coming full circle from your customer research, it’s also important to listen to what they say to you. Delivering the ideal customer experience depends on their specific needs and they are best placed to explain how you can help.
Collecting, analyzing, and sharing customer feedback must be part of your continuous improvement practices. You’ll have first-hand explanations of how you can overcome barriers and bottlenecks in their purchasing journeys.
