The prolific use of digital technologies is not only transforming the way your B2B customers interact with your business, but it is revolutionizing customer expectations. Today’s B2B customers expect you to better understand their needs and to offer the highest level of customer service possible across all channels. But, how can you be sure that your B2B portal is optimized to foster engagements, deliver enriched customer experiences and develop loyal customers?

In this article, we outline the important steps you can take using Digital Customer Experience Analytics to improve your customer insights and optimize the customer experiences on your B2B portal.  Thus, allowing you to deliver the personalized and frictionless experiences that your customers have come to expect.

While there are various components to consider for improving customer experiences, the top 5 success factors on our check list provide a strong foundation for developing a data-driven strategy that offers you valuable customer insight and increased visibility to opportunities that you can use to optimize your customers’ digital experiences and boost the business value of your B2B portal.  Let take a closer look at 5 of the B2B digital success factors that we have outlined:

#1 Role-based buyer behavior

Your ability to segment your customers by role and user behavior data you are collecting inside your B2B portal allows you to isolate and examine subsets of your customer data to understand who your buyers are – their responsibilities, needs and pain points. By moving beyond demographic segmentation and segmenting on roles and behavior, you can maximize your opportunity to analyze your B2B audiences and gain insight into actual buying behavior and the decision process. You can segment users on the items, categories or brands purchased or browsed in your portal, for example, that can offer you a better understanding of the financial value or complexity of the buyer’s decision.

• • • Understand when, how and why purchasing decisions are made by buyers
    • Create more personalized and differentiating content to drive deeper engagements and higher conversion rates using insight into your B2B audiences.
    • Tie this data to your Account Based Marketing approach

#2 On Site Search Optimization

Many B2B sites have a vast amount of products and supporting information, therefore On Site Search is a critical function on B2B portals, as it can drive – or hinder – online purchases.  So, as a B2B organization, it is essential to monitor search functions on your portal to recognize how your clients search on your site and to understand if your customers find what they are searching for. You can evaluate search activity in various ways: capture how long customers stay on a product page after a search and correlate the time with the search term used, track and assess search terms used on your portal, evaluate click through rates (CTRs) on search functions, or analyze user behavior after search to observe if they convert or abandon or repeat search activity.

• • • Gain insight to assist you with optimizing search terms and processes on your portal
    • Understand if search is supporting clients and contributing to positive business results  

#3 Content Engagement

With the rising expectations of customers to enjoy optimal B2B online experiences, it is important to identify content areas on your pages that are engaging customers and recognize areas that may be causing confusion or struggles on your B2B portal. To understand how and when clients are engaging with specific content, you can track click thru rates (CTRs), monitor call to action (CTA) performance, and administer path analysis to help you identify the paths that are the most engaging and successfully lead to conversions. Applying usability analysis like heat maps can also allow you to easily see areas of high and low interest on your pages by identifying the intensity of customer interactions, offering you the insight to implement important design changes – like repositioning links on a page, redesigning a link button or modifying content placement -- that can directly improve brand engagement on your site.

• • • Optimize content to improve engagements and maximize conversions.
    • Segment users to customize and make your pages more personal for your customers
    • Integrate A/B testing with more extensive analytics on user success

#4 Business Process Improvements

To continually monitor the performance of your business and the overall efficiency of your B2B portal, create business process and key performance indicator (KPI) scorecards to track your critical B2B processes.  Set benchmarks and goals for your KPIs to analyze high-level metrics about your users including percentage of buyer conversions, bounce rates, abandonment rates, acquisition rates and retention rates.   Monitor your B2B processes by tracking average order value, managing inventory levels for crucial products, observing total sales for specific timeframes, viewing percentages of confirmed orders and auditing the submission/processing of quotes.   Examine the standard business practices and behaviors on your B2B portal to readily identify potential areas of struggle and to assess the opportunity for design or business process improvements.

• • • Understand and improve account management processes for primary stakeholders across sales, marketing, fulfillment, procurement and customer service.
    • Identify and fix customer struggle points
    • Create custom views to compare date ranges and different segments of users on a recurring basis to quickly identify problems or concerns with changes and behaviors.

#5 Customer Data Integration

With optimal customer experience serving as a key driver of B2B online business, it is important to quickly recognize any barriers to exceptional customer service on your B2B portal.

While there are various ways you can collect customer feedback – call centers, survey forms, support agents or bots, and more – the next important objective is to apply session analysis to realize the customer perspective.  Based on customer satisfaction feedback, investigate sessions to better understand the customer experience at an individual level and link it to the identified customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.  Similarly, if you observe users abandoning transactions or reporting similar scenarios, search the relative sessions and explore commonalities to pinpoint and rectify issues and ultimately optimize B2B customer experiences..

• • • Increase customer support satisfaction and deliver optimized experiences
    • Improve your B2B business and build brand loyalty with increased insight

With increased customer expectations, successful B2B companies must develop a detailed understanding of their customers and implement business process improvements based on data-driven insight in order to optimize the B2B customer experience and build loyal customers.   Segmenting to individual users inside your B2B portal and observing user behavior allows you to analyze your audiences and apply valuable insight to increase engagements and enrich customer experiences.   Click here to request a consult with Pereion to discuss ways in which we can help you improve and optimize your B2B portal.

On-Demand Webinar - Using CX Analytics to Accelerate B2B Digital Transformation

• Identifying ecommerce conversion blockers including root cause
• Optimizing onsite search for B2B site navigation
• Role based buyer behavior analysis to enable Account Based Marketing

This webinar will also take take a look at several B2B use cases and best practices for CX Analytics.  Click the tile below to view,  Using CX Analytics to Accelerate Digital Transformation, webinar on-demand.

Have questions regarding the material covered in our B2B webinar?  Click here we are here to answer them!