In a rapidly shifting and highly competitive business scenario, every company is talking about taking their customer experience into the next level. Although customer experience sounds like a buzzword, in reality, it is the key growth driver for any organization. This blog will specifically talk about the role and significance of CX in B2B SaaS and how it can be successfully persuaded.
When it comes to evaluating Customer Experience in a B2B SaaS scenario, companies generally get serious with finding answers to questions like who should be owning the various aspects of customer experience and who is specifically going to take care of the revenue spent on CX activities like renewals and expansion. Companies also raise concerns about the key performance indicators that would help them measure the CX results and gains, and what technologies can be leveraged to accelerate the progress of the CX, and so on.
What is Customer Experience in a B2B SaaS World?
While every company is trying to embrace a customer-centric approach in their business strategy, not everyone can optimize their CX game and some even fail to understand what customer experience truly encompasses.
In certain cases, the term customer experience is interchangeably used to define terms like customer service, customer support, customer success, customer satisfaction, or customer interactions. In reality, CX involves all those concepts and beyond. To summarise customer experience precisely, it can be said that it is a sum-total of all the perceptions your customer has built about your company, its products, and its brand.
Now, these perceptions or based on their collective interactions with your company owners, leaders, employees, brand messages, and product performance across all interactions, engagements, and touch-points. Ideally, every tangible and intangible element that your business owns holds power to shift your customers’ perceptions and shape their overall experience.
Moreover, it helps with your other strategies regarding B2B lead generation and retention.” Customer perception is formed when they compare their original expectations with the actual brand/product/service experiences. Customer perception is formed when they compare their original expectations with the actual brand/product/service experiences.
How can companies elevate the game of their CX?
Start with thoroughly understanding and evaluating your customers, their core challenges, their expectations from your products, their business needs, their paying power, and most important the places where they can be found! (on the net mostly).
Build impactful customer touch-points, fruitful customer interactions and successful customer engagements:
As said earlier, your customers build brand and company perceptions based on their experiences across touchpoints, interactions, and engagements. This requires you as a company to ensure having a strategic and fulfilling process where you need to use impactful and positive brand messaging along with a seamless way to communicate with the brand or the company’s point of contact and constructive ways to engage them with a successful agenda.
Make sure your customers find all these 3 stages of communication valuable, seamless and promising, which will ultimately build trust and confidence in them for the brand.
Understand their business issues and challenges as well as their strengths and competitive edge:
It is tempting to boast about your own product or company, especially when you have so much information to share to pursue your customers to purchase your product. Once you understand your customers, you can set about creating content that elevates their experiences. For example, if you discover there’s an aspect of your product or service that causes confusion, you could address this using a commercial video maker to produce a set of quickfire tutorials. This won’t just improve things client-side; it’ll also reduce the burden on your support staff by allowing your customers to find information themselves.
However, start with being all ears to your customers and their business challenges and issues they want to eliminate with a solution. Be a patient listener, ask all the right questions, and clear your doubts and queries about their business challenges.
Additionally, take time to learn about their strengths, appreciate their lead generation growth and expansion, and get the hang of their competitors. This will make them feel you are genuinely involved in solving their troubles. Interacting with your customers can significantly help you gather these insights through questionnaires or sentiment surveys, reviews… Another option to collect data at a larger scale and scope is web scraping.
This can still allow data to be collected manually with intent, but it is made easier with tools and solutions like proxy browser extensions. To go around any data collection restrictions that may arise.
Focus on the business values your product aims to create for the customers to help them achieve their KPIs:
At every point, while communicating with your customers, talk to them about the business values they can expect from using your product/solution. Do less bragging about your product feature and capabilities and do more talking about what business benefits and values they will drive for the customers.
In fact, companies should unite all their teams, including sales, pre-sales, post-sales, marketing, and customer and tech support, to initiate and carve out meaningful customer conversations around adding value to their businesses while helping them to become successful by using the product. This will help create an honest and influential perception of the product that will be capable enough to sell itself. Also, consider using a B2B SEO rank tracker to ensure marketing campaigns will reach the audience, and you can increase organic visibility with the help of the rank tracking tools.
Try to resolve customer issues even before they feel them and make sure to be responsive with real-time response, delivery and support:
To create an excellent CX, one must be proactive and intuitive in solving their troubles even before one feels them. It is imperative to anticipate what issues your customers might face while using your product and take measures to resolve them beforehand. This takes an in-depth understanding of your customer’s pain points and challenges and alterations that can be made in your product to ease those problems.
At the same time, standardized practices like timely responses, speedy delivery processes, and faster problem-resolution systems. Real-time responses that solve customer queries and troubles make a lot of positive difference in their experience with the brand. Teams can use dedicated tools for customer service, which helps them ensure timely resolution and outstanding support.
Make your customers feel valued, listened to and engaged with consistent communication, discussions and instant gratification:
Delighting and satisfying customers across all touch-points through all sorts of interactions and engagements is a must to start building the foundation of a strong CX. Set up a QR code and use them at different touch points of customer interaction. Link the QR Code to a contact form where customers can fill up a form to reach out to you if they face any challenges or has any feedback.
Let this be followed by a streamlined system of consistent and fulfilling communications with your customers regularly by discussing their current requirements. One of the most effective methods of keeping in good touch with customers is integrating a landline service which will leave more room for security and faster responses. This often makes them feel you value their needs and are always there to resolve their challenges. The central focus of the communication should be ‘our product is here to make your life and business easier’.
Customer-centricity should be taken as an underlying philosophy across your company, wherein every employee should work towards creating value for the customers and reciprocating the same in their communications.
To put it all together, the foundation of customer experience depends on how strongly you bond with your customers while facilitating their purchase decision journey through a seamless, transparent, and impactful communication strategy.
Customer experience is a key part of trending marketing techniques, demand generation, and effective B2B marketing strategies such as Account-based Marketing. It is most necessary to ensure that whoever your customer comes across from your company (irrespective of the medium and channel) should turn out to be a pleasant experience.
