I just read an article passed on by Erin Eschen Moloney. It’s a great article by Paul Hagen of Forrester. In the article, he notes his belief that the customer experience is just as important to insurance companies and others whose customers are businesses as for the likes of Disney. It’s important enough to translate into some serious extra revenue if they get it right.
I believe Paul correctly highlights that in some ways these B2B Customer sites are more complex than a typical consumer site. Take a Health Insurance site for example. They have to worry about employers, doctors offices, employees, students, and others. In many cases, these are completely different experiences. Every interaction can impact the continued use of their product by their real customers or the acceptance of their insurance by doctors and other medical professionals.
Improving the B2B customer experience from its dismal state is more than a marketing effort. After all, marketing only “owns” as small portion of all the interactions with customers. Companies such as John Deere, Maersk Lines, Fidelity, Philips Electronics, and Intuit understand this and as a result have significant B2B customer experience efforts underway. While in some respects the B2B experience is more complex than the B2C environment (e.g., diverse stakeholders within a “client”), other issues with partners, resellers, agents and other intermediaries that impact or even deliver the experience is very similar. In fact, the best practices that the best B2C firms use apply to B2B firms.
See the whole article for more interesting tidbits.
Dead on. B2B user experience is in many cases more of a must. Many sites require mass ordering very easy and in many cases just dead simple, like them knowing all of their common SKU’s by heart. Quick order entry for instance is a must, not too mention many other subtle things specific to B2B.
Pingback: B2b Website Development Company
very useful!!!