‘Business-to-business customers are people too.’
A logical start to this referenced article about UX for B2B use cases, in particular, the growing preference for digital channels by corporate buyers in search of both direct and indirect goods. The piece appears in the MITSloan Management Review and provides a nice overview of the challenges that corporate vendors need to overcome if they wish to capitalize on the highly skewed trends towards B2B e-commerce.
‘For most B2B companies, meeting these customer expectations for consumer-level experiences will be difficult. Few business websites offer features that simplify transactions, create deep customer relationships, and drive sales growth. To succeed, they need to personalize and customize their online selling process through high-performance technology and customer-centered business models.’
The posting echos many of the points we made in a recent November ‘18 report titled B2B Marketplaces: Disruption Presents Opportunity, where the challenges and opportunities are reviewed in detail. In our report we point out (using different sources than cited in this referenced article) that 50% of corporate buyers are buying online and only about 11% report what would be described as an ‘excellent’ UX. This customer centricity is really the main point of the authors’ article, which we agree is a major challenge for industry in general, and corporate banking as well, as we pointed out in our Viewpoint titled 2019 Outlook: Commercial & Enterprise Payments.
‘In the long view, superior customer experience capabilities transform the basic dynamics of B2B markets. By making it easier for buyers to communicate their needs and make purchases, digitization transforms the seller-driven “push” commerce model into a customer-initiated “pull” model and takes the guesswork out of operational functions, from product design to procurement and production planning. As technology draws buyers and sellers closer, they discover new opportunities to create value by working together.’
The piece goes on to cover the more complicated B2B buying experience, making the use of advanced tech very important to creating a better experience. The demographic reality of younger generational preferences is also covered, which we pointed out in our report as well, showing that there is a roughly inverse relationship between millennials and boomers in the use of marketplaces versus traditional RFPs. A good way to spend a few minutes for getting more familiar with the current business realities.
‘B2B customers have watched these possibilities come to fruition in consumer markets. Now, these customers are primed for and seeking a similar transformation of the commercial experience. In the end, the reward will go to those suppliers who deliver the personalized, frictionless, human-centered digital service customers have come to expect.’
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group