Your customer’s experience begins with the first interaction with your company. While CSMs are in a unique position that allows them to directly impact the customer’s experience the most and for the longest. An effective CX strategy is a company-wide affair that spreads across the entire customer’s journey. So, in this guide, we’ll cover seven foundational principles of B2B customer experience.

Reasons that make customer experience strategy a must-have for B2B SaaS businesses 

Gone are the days when customers only stayed with a company because of their product’s features. Nowadays, businesses need much more to keep, let alone attract customers. This is why customer experience is becoming the new marketing. Now, brands invest in customer experience to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Customers now have various mediums to share their experiences about a brand or a product, and this user-generated content can travel worldwide. So, businesses cannot ignore customer experience at any cost.

Any B2B SaaS business must have a well-defined customer experience strategy. The key focus of this strategy should be to continually improve CX to strengthen customer retention and thus increase revenues.   

Foundational principles of B2B customer experience 

Today customers are in control of the entire buying process. They are spoilt for choices, and they can get feedback about each vendor in just a few clicks. Customers base their decisions on even a minute touchpoint, from comparing prices and offers to looking for reviews and post-purchase service. To be truly competitive, you need to focus on improving customer experience. But, the whole discussion around customer experience may seem intimidating if you are not already into it.

To make things easier for you, let’s look at the foundational principles to strategize your customer experience.

1. Focus on your customers’ needs

The customers are the focal and the starting point of any customer experience. So, the first thing you need to do is focus intensively on your customers’ needs. Unless you understand your customers and their needs, you cannot segment them or map their journey, which is important for developing a customer experience journey. To track it, you need to identify how they buy and what they think, feel, and do while on their customer journey.  You can track these through engagement, retention, and advocacy.

2. Have an integrated customer experience platform to engage with your customers in a seamless manner 

It’s essential to engage with customers through the right platform. As the customer moves across different channels and devices, businesses need to deliver content and experiences wherever the customer wants. Businesses that fail to do this fail to keep their customer hooked.

CMS, Marketing Automation, Social Media, CRM, and Analytics – each component must work in symphony to keep the customers engaged. Each of these is a significant component of customer experience, so when you place them together, you get a robust customer experience strategy that keeps your customers engaged, plus gives you a 360° view of them.  

3. Capture a single view of your customers through cross-channel insights 

To provide a personalized experience to your customer, you need data-driven insights. Without an adequate amount of data, it may not be possible for you to build a strong personalized customer experience strategy. Remember: Your business needs to collect data by understanding every activity of your prospective customer across different channels. There is better scope for providing contextual content to the customers to keep them engaged.

An integrated marketing technology ecosystem can capture an all-in-one view of customers through cross-channel insights. This ecosystem captures data from email platforms, websites, and different social platforms into a single view and enables the identification of users across channels and devices. There are many ways to store an all-in-one view. It doesn’t matter what method you choose, but you need it to leverage customer experience benefits for your business.

4. Focus on providing contextual experiences by leveraging customer data and insight 

Contextual experience means meeting your customer with a solution exactly when they need it and where they are, which is possible only through customer data and derived insights. To provide your customers with a contextual experience, you need to go through four critical steps:

• Know your customers
• Categorize your customers
• Personalize their engagement
• Reach them wherever they are

5. Utilize a multi-channel content marketing strategy 

A personalization approach and contextual content can only provide you the desired result when you can reach your customers. In today’s time, you cannot expect all your customers to be in a one place. So, you have to use multi-channels to get to your customers.

The best strategy is to use the COPE methodology; you Create Once and Publish Everywhere. This methodology helps you get to your customers through multi-channel without putting much effort into creating content. You need an integrated technology to publish your content to every platform with just a click.

6. Reduce friction 

You need to simplify every process so that a customer can reach you without friction. Even a single glitch in a process can make you lose a customer and many future opportunities. If you want to attract customers and provide them with a good customer experience, you must reduce friction for your customers. For CSMs, this can look like creating a seamless sales handoff or collecting important data on the kickoff call to ensure your customer has a strong starting point to reach their goal.

7. Define your priorities and create a product roadmap 

You must define your priorities while creating any strategy. If you don’t have them, you don’t know where you are headed and what result you expect from your efforts. So, a vital aspect of creating a customer experience strategy is defining your priorities and creating a product roadmap for your business.

Creating a product roadmap means you have to understand the needs of each department of your business as well as the needs of customers and see how they intersect with and affect each other. Once you understand this, you have to identify the resources and services you have to fulfill these needs and efficiently utilize them. You need to think and plan for every minute detail. 

Conclusion 

While providing a B2B customer experience, the key is to place the customer at the forefront of what your company does, how it does it, and why. 

Providing an outstanding customer experience is extremely challenging if you do not please your customers. 

You can start by introducing a customer-centric approach to each and every department in your organization. This is only possible if your team can access the necessary customer data from a centralized point.

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