by Tom Shackleton
As digital becomes more and more important for B2B, you’ll want to start thinking about how digital tools and platforms can enhance the customer service that you provide. The modern B2B buyer has different expectations when it comes to their experience, so your business needs to adapt.
Digital can give your business the ability to engage with your customers and prospects, build strong relationships and provide a personal level of service. Here’s our guide to using digital to improve your B2B customer service:
Engage with Multiple Touch Points
Your customers now expect to be able to interact with your business through multiple touch points. They will engage with you on social media, communicate through email and submit questions through live chat.
Using digital touch points such as social can bring great benefits for your customer service, allowing you to respond more quickly, strike up conversations and direct customers to useful information.
Digital allows conversations to start with one platform, and continue across various different mediums, giving your customers an easy, reliable method of contact, whatever their situation. Every customer is different, and providing multiple touch points through digital can help you cater to all of their needs.
Inform The Research Process
B2B buyers increasingly prefer to conduct a large percentage of their product research independently. This makes providing the necessary information to inform their research essential. Digital offers fantastic methods for doing just that.
You can create content that informs and shapes the views of your customer, enhancing the image of your brand and positioning you as a thought leader. The modern buyer expects less face to face contact, so providing important information in this way becomes an important part of the customer service that you offer.
Digital lets you enable your customers to discover solutions to their problems independently, reducing the need for direct contact and streamlining the customer service process.
Providing content that informs your customers can also help reduce the strain on your customer service staff and allows them to focus attention elsewhere.
Add Business Value
An important aspect of modern customer service for B2B businesses is the ability of your business to add value, above just selling products and services.
Digital allows you to add additional value to the customer service process by providing content that benefits your customers’ businesses. You can create informative guides and blog posts that help your customers improve business processes, win new business and take note of trends.
Your customer service staff can use this content to enhance the customer experience and add value for your clients.
Build Customer Profiles
Combining digital tools such as CRM systems and active, intelligent websites allows you to collect data and build detailed profiles on your customers. You can then use this data to inform your communication with customers.
Collecting all of your communication from different sources all in one place allows any of your customer service staff to access the information and be kept up to date on a customer’s case.
This allows staff to easily pick up a customer’s case, streamlining your customer service and presenting an informed professional image to your customers.
Personalise Interaction
The data that having an active website allows you to collect can be incredibly powerful for improving your interactions with customers.
You’ll have profiles for each customer, as mentioned above. These can be used to identify each customer’s areas of interest, concerns and value. You can then personalise your correspondence with each customer based on the information you have collected.
You could send personalised emails with relevant content, approach them with useful products or invite them to a valuable event, seminar or meetup.
Create an Interactive, Self-Service Experience
Your modern B2B customers are more independent, and this extends all of the way through the purchasing process. Having a B2B eCommerce site allows your customers to interact with the selling process in their own time and at their own pace.
They can research and complete the sale without any direct interaction with your staff. A B2B eCommerce site creates a self-service experience that allows your staff to focus on the details, solving complex customer problems, rather than handling simple sales.
It also allows you to interact with customers, only when they absolutely need it, rather than adopting intrusive sales techniques that can create a bad customer service experience.
Key Takeaways
Digital tools from social media to B2B eCommerce and active websites can help your business provide the high level of customer service that modern customers demand. It allows you to:
- Develop more personalised interaction;
- Help customers to solve problems without direct customer service contact;
- Build detailed profiles of your customers’ needs and concerns;
- Provide customer service wherever it’s most convenient for your customers.
Interested in finding out more about how Statement can help you improve customer service in your B2B business to generate more leads and improve customer retention? Just get in touch and we’d be happy to help.
