Today’s article is on an interesting posting at The Paypers, which was written by an exec at Payer, a Swedish startup from 2007 specializing in e-commerce payments. Most readers know by now that consumer payments (and generally all app-related experiences) are more advanced than B2B transaction navigation.
The business side of the ledger has been trying to catch up in recent years and is gradually getting there. Most people refer to this as the consumerization of B2B experiences, since we have personal and business experiences for which people would like to see some technology equivalence. So the author sets up a clever narrative using a ‘persona’ to compare the two scenarios.
‘What we have discovered at Payer is that ‘Lisa the consumer’ has been treated much better than ‘Lisa the IT manager’ for a very long time. Lisa is the same person, but she’s got a private side and a professional side…..Lisa the consumer is used to very slick user interfaces in the apps and websites she is using. If she buys something, she will make a real-time payment and will receive the goods within an hour in an urban area. She is quite pleased with her digital life….Lisa the IT manager hates her life to put it mildly. She can’t make any purchases from her vendors without having to fill out internal purchase requisitions and form after form to complete a purchase. And after the purchase, she is concerned that invoices aren’t paid in time by her finance department.’
So the piece goes on to describe a typical e-commerce transaction experience from the buyer and back office perspective. The piece walks through how the persona wants to get some supplies without using a cumbersome P.O. process; then the communication between buyer and supplier can be enhanced; then back office reconciliation has a chance to be straight-through, reducing costs and solidifying relations in the supply chain.
‘Let’s go back to the importance of great user experience in modern B2B ecommerce. It’s important to remember that Lisa’s professional expectations on digital experiences mirrors her personal life. Anything less will likely result in quite poor NPS scores from her….What we have found is that successful B2B ecommerce merchants have a strong pursuit of customer happiness and the answer lies in between the front-end and back-end….I believe that those companies which are busy developing B2B payment experiences on-par with consumer facing interfaces are the ones that will win big in the future. In fact, this is such a crucial topic that we will see a shake-out of the companies that don’t.’
I would have to agree with this point. Overall, the piece is worth a quick read.
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
