State of Digital Customer Experience

B2B companies have invested in key capabilities around customer data management, outbound marketing, audience segmentation, and lead management — all of which contribute to enhanced experiences for buyers. Other tech stack tools, like marketing automation and personalization engines, are currently less widespread but offer significant opportunities to those aiming to provide the level of relevance their customers expect.

Buyers are noticing these flaws: nearly two-thirds point out inconsistencies in their experiences with an organization depending on the specific product or service they interact with.

B2B companies are striving for better customer experience capabilities: 84% say this is a top or significant priority compared to other business goals. For Eran Levy, Director of Customer Success and CX Operations at Cisco, creating a customer success function after the COVID-19 pandemic was crucial for the company’s transformation efforts. “This function leads the customer experience,” he says. “It is where we’re going to hire the more senior people — people who can be more holistic — to look at the entire journey and provide direction to course correct around services.” Now, he adds, Cisco has established metrics, goals, and expectations that are standardized across its business functions and customer tiers.

Losing buyers to competitors with better experiences may bring serious consequences for B2B companies, which deal with a more limited and specialized customer base than other types of businesses. But delivering the right marketing in the right way is easier said than done.

B2B companies are falling short. Buyers are more likely to interact with content that is personalized to their role or organization, but this is not always what they experience: 44% find it rare to come across relevant B2B marketing, and half say their experiences with products and services in their personal lives are more positive than those at work.

Yet most executives do not consider this irrelevance to be particularly troubling, as less than one-third think unsolicited or extraneous communications can be a primary cause of customer attrition. They may want to reconsider how successful their campaigns are in certain channels, however.  For example, buyers say they often encounter relevant content via in-person events, company websites, calls with representatives, and webinars — but this is less true for other channels like email, social media, and SMS.

If personalization is the vehicle that drives buyer satisfaction for B2B companies, then data is the engine. Yet fewer than half of the B2B companies in our survey say they have improved how they collect and manage account and contact data, from partnering with technology firms to restructuring data governance policies. These initiatives are key to boosting internal data-sharing, scaling data management, and meeting regulatory mandates — but only 15% say improving how they apply data insights to their customer experience efforts is their primary focus today.

Making sure customers feel their data is secure is critical to creating more relevant experiences. But B2B companies run into a number of barriers in their efforts to foster this trust:

• 62% say providing a high level of security is challenging.
• 61% say the risk of data breaches and attacks is of greater concern for their company than ever before.
• 52% say their customers are increasingly concerned about how they collect and manage data.
• 39% say a lack of customer willingness to share data is a top barrier to personalization.

Security and privacy matter, but executives must understand when customers are most interested in hearing about it. For example, buyers indicate that data security is less influential on their impression of a company during the searching and exploratory stages of the purchasing process. However, discussing security jumps in significance at the moment of purchase.