Optimize the B2B eCommerce Digital  Experience

With growing customer expectations and more decision-making processes occurring online, B2B companies that want to remain successful need to better understand customer behavior and implement business process improvements. Digital customer experience (CX) analytics plays an important role in this effort by providing visibility into the customer journey that can help reduce customer struggles and eliminate obstacles that prevent conversions to offer seamless and personalized experiences. Let’s examine some of the benefits, mistakes, and challenges B2B organizations realize in optimizing the digital experience.

Benefits of embracing digital experience analytics in B2B ecommerce

In the past, B2B organizations were slow to implement digital experience analytics as the solutions available were expensive and essentially targeted high-end B2C and financial organizations. Today, however, these technologies have become more affordable, accessible and widely used by many B2B companies. B2B organizations that have embraced digital experience analytics have quickly realized the benefits of converting their customer behavior data into actionable insight to help:

• Identify process steps that may require enhancements and recognize unique segments that may be underperforming
• Understand engagements and struggles across product pages and tools, and compare different data sets
• Quickly detect and analyze user struggle, allowing you to swiftly rectify issues to improve support applications
• Gain advanced insights into search terms and click through behaviors to assist in optimizing search terms
• Create unique and personalized experiences to meet the needs of all customers and effectively provide compelling content across the customer journey

Common B2B ecommerce customer experience mistake

One common B2B ecommerce customer experience issue centers around onsite search. Many B2B sites have a vast amount of products and supporting information along with a variety of user roles they need to support—technical, development, procurement and business. Separately, users need different information, and they expect to be able to find it through onsite search. If they can’t, this typically results in user frustration and ultimately site abandonment. Therefore, onsite search is a critical function on B2B websites and portals, as it can drive – or deter – online purchases.

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

Challenges B2B Organizations face trying to improve the ecommerce customer experience

A key challenge B2B organizations face in improving customer experience is the ability to isolate customer needs and then find the site inhibitors and struggle points based on data. The two approaches that can help—testing and digital experience analytics—rely on data. For instance, if B2B ecommerce organization launches a new product finder on their site:

1. Do they assess the need and value based on instinct?
   or
2. Do they have data that tells them exactly how users are using this new tool on their site and what features they like and don’t like?
   

Testing and digital experience analytics are two technologies that enable B2B ecommerce companies to address these challenges. Robust testing programs enable data-based decision-making to improve the customer experience. Whereas digital experience analytics leverages experience and behavioral data to understand the user experience.

Implementing digital experience strategies and technologies within B2B ecommerce

The secret to enhancing the customer experience and improving ecommerce conversion rates in B2B ecommerce is having the digital experience data to know what is working and what is not. You can deploy a number of technologies to enable digital engagement with your B2B customers, but you also need the data and insights to know what is working and where customers may be struggling. This valuable insight can be used to not only help B2B organizations improve their online customer experience, but it can be used to enhance B2B marketing efforts to more effectively target customers and increase conversion and retention rates.

Click here to for a consultation with us to discuss how we can help your B2B eCommerce business leverage data and digital customer experience analytics to gain the insights you need to improve business processes and optimize the digital experience for your customers.