How Providing Value Along the B2B Customer Journey Impacts Customer Loyalty and Success

At its core, any B2B business’s goal is to provide value to its clients. Fortunately, the product or service being sold isn’t the only way for a company to demonstrate or provide value. There are countless opportunities for B2B sellers to act less like a supplier, and more like a partner before, during, and after the sale.

That is why we will review the B2B customer journey and how businesses can optimize using proven frameworks and analytics from their operations. Businesses that can do this effectively see an average 30% increase in upsells and cross-sales.

To better explain, we are going to cover three vital questions:

• What is the customer journey?
• How important is it?
• How can a business simply and effectively improve theirs?

What is the B2B Customer Journey?

The B2B customer journey is the path a client takes after making initial contact with a seller. This includes the sales process, their own post-sale experience with the product or service, and the customer service experience that takes place afterward. While many think of this journey as an A-B pathway from the sale to a satisfied customer, Vivantio prefers to look at it as a cycle:

This is because, if optimized correctly, the customer journey doesn’t have to end. Instead, it can feed into a cross-sale or upsell opportunity, effectively looping into itself and creating a loyal, repeat customer.

How Important is the B2B Customer Journey?

In order to illustrate the vital importance of creating an efficient, personalized, and courteous customer journey, let’s go over some hard numbers.Improving customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25-95%

Changing the customer journey from a linear one to a cyclical one has a massive impact on profitability.

Nearly 3 out of 5 buyers say that customer service is vital for developing a sense of loyalty to a brand.

Customer service is one of the most important selling points for continued business relationships as opposed to one-off purchases.

78% of buyers have backed out of a purchase due to a bad customer service experience.

One of the easiest ways to break this cycle, and lose out on the resulting ROI, is to get complacent regarding the client experience.

80% of buyers say the experience a company provides is as important as their product or service.

B2B clients are almost as focused on the experience of partnering with a seller as they are on whatever it is they are buying from them.

59% of buyers believe that companies need to provide cutting-edge digital experiences to keep their business.

Clients want their customer journey to be made more efficient and user-friendly through software modernization and are willing to take their money elsewhere to get that.

Now that we have covered the importance of the B2B customer journey, it is time to explain the easiest and most effective way to improve it.

Improve the B2B Customer Journey with Vivantio

The best way to improve the customer journey is to lean on proven frameworks like ITIL4, inform it with quality analytics, and increase customer service associates’ capacity to help clients in a timely manner. In the case of ITIL 4 this means facilitating the co-creation of value between vendor and customer. However, the only way to tackle all of these focal points at once is to adopt a quality, high-level CSM or ITSM software.

Vivantio offers a cutting-edge Service Management Platform that offers everything listed and more, including:

• Endless integrations to make implementation easy
• Automatic ticket routing to ensure every ticket gets to the proper agent
• Workflow designer tool that allows managers to customize the framework of their CS operations without any technical knowledge required
• White label service portals so businesses can maintain a cohesive brand throughout the service process
• A holistic view of each client to ensure that no agent is left without vital information

For businesses looking to bring their customer experience into the modern age, Vivantio is a no-brainer option.