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Customer Experience and Design

3 B2C Support Trends & Lessons Learned

With hundreds of implementations under our collective belt, Perficient’s Service Cloud Practice has worked with an incredible range of companies, business models, and end customers.

Being data nerds at heart, we’re always on the lookout for trends and patterns among this diverse group. Clients like Activision, Minted, Kabam, and Twitter have taught us that much like the tech world at large, consumer focused companies tend to be ahead of the curve with customer support too.

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Today’s consumer – more power than ever.
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Today we ask, what are these companies doing so well and what can our other B2B clients learn from their unique approach to support?

Let’s start with some common data points and characteristics from our B2C clients, what do they have in common?

  • High volume of transactions (a large customer base means lots of cases!)
  • A larger percentage of usability/enablement questions vs technical issues/bugs
  • Product/market is growing rapidly, support org structure is changing and not afraid to experiment
  • Technology is at the core of their business and customer experience

In a challenging high-growth environment, how do these companies maintain a high quality support experience? Every company and industry has unique challenges but we’ve distilled our learnings into three key areas that almost always drive success and customer satisfaction.

1) Self-service is king

B2C companies are forced to make self-service a priority in order to scale but it’s really the best strategy no matter what your business is. Our B2B clients are investing more and more in features like peer to peer support, mobile support, in-app knowledge, and Google-style easy search, with great returns. With self-service in the B2C world, it’s not about deflection, it’s about creating empowered and invested customers who can help themselves.

2) High volume, high quality

Every support organization struggles with efficiency; the battle between headcount and customer satisfaction is probably as old as time. From a traditional B2B point of view, our B2C clients may seem “picky” about agent experience and productivity, but they know that every unnecessary click delays the moment of customer gratification. Companies like Activision and Twitter prove it’s possible to scale efficiently without sacrificing the quality.

3) Make evangelists, not enemies

Our B2C clients don’t have traditional sales teams – they understand that customer evangelists are a powerful sales tool.  The same holds true for B2B companies as well. So how do our clients grow these super customers?

  • Establish a foundation of trust and respect by offering quality self-help resources
  • Provide a positive support experience, even when there’s a problem or issue out of your control
  • Don’t be afraid open up about issues and share your roadmap plans – be flawsome!
  • Recognize customers who help others and are passionate about your product (start with retweets/reposts and start building an MVP program)

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B2C companies may have pioneered these concepts, but I think you’ll agree that these three areas are critical for almost any support organization, regardless of size, model, or industry. Thoughts, comments, something we missed? Follow @PRFTSalesforce or leave a comment to chat.

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