State of Digital Customer Experience
Focus on B2B
Focus on B2B
B2B companies face a unique challenge: their end customer is not just one person, but an array of decision-makers with differing needs and objectives. These buyers are demanding more relevant interactions with vendors, which means B2B companies must understand the dynamic preferences of their buyers throughout the entire customer journey to stand out from the competition.
Our 2023 State of Digital Customer Experience research found that while B2B companies have many of the tools in place to support their marketing efforts, they are missing key capabilities necessary for delivering the experiences their buyers prefer.
In partnership with Adobe, Oxford Economics surveyed 1,500 executives and 4,000 customers around the world to better understand the current state of customer experience. Nearly half (45%) of our executive survey was made up of companies that earn a majority of their revenue from B2B sales—and close to one-fifth of these companies operate in the high-tech industry. Our customer survey asked 1,000 business buyers from a number of industries about their experiences interacting with B2B companies. To augment our survey findings, we conducted several in-depth interviews with executives who are responsible for B2B customer experience strategies.
Our findings primarily reflect the perspectives of top-level C-suite members, including CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and CTOs—but our sample includes those directly involved in their organization’s customer experience strategies, like Chief Experience or Customer Officers, Chief Marketing Officers, and Chief Product Officers.
less than $1 billion
between $1 billion and $10 billion
$10 billion or more
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.
Figure 1. B2B companies must establish the right strategies to improve buyers’ experiences.
Q. Which of the following elements does your organization have in place to support the customer experience (CX) today? Select all that apply; responses from B2B executives.
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.
Figure 2. Buyers’ preferences shift throughout their customer journey.
Q. For each of the following stages of your B2B customer experience journey, please select which channel you most prefer to learn about a product or service. Select one channel per stage; responses from B2B buyers.
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:
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.
B2B organizations can elevate their buyers’ experiences by investing in specific tools and technologies that offer more customization and adaptability. Currently, only 40% report achieving personalization across their customer base — and less than half have ongoing or full deployment of predictive analytics (39%) and machine learning (39%). Building out these capabilities may help provide more accurate information to customers when and where they need it.
Buyers are optimistic about the improvements generative AI will bring to their personal experiences, suggesting more openness to using the technology in their work lives. They are far more likely than consumers to believe generative AI will lead to more personalized digital experiences, quicker customer support, and more relevant advertisements and marketing content. Most B2B companies are working to meet these expectations: 76% plan to use generative AI in the customer support stage in the next 12 months.
While only 14% of B2B companies in our executive survey have piloted or deployed generative AI so far, 52% are planning to integrate the technology into their customer experience efforts soon. The excitement is palpable: 77% expect it to increase the quality of insights extracted from customer data, which could make content more relevant and alleviate buyer frustrations.
But generative AI is still in its early days, which means companies must find ways to overcome a number of roadblocks before deployment. For one, talent can be hard to come by: more than half of B2B companies say the availability of skills necessary for implementing generative AI is lacking. Yet just 12% have established relationships with technology partners or consulting firms to guide their journey, and even fewer (8%) are looking to upskill current workers to run generative AI initiatives.
B2B companies must create a strategy to ensure a safe and trustworthy rollout of generative AI, as 54% of buyers fear the technology will collect too much information about their behaviors and preferences. Yet close to half of executives say they have not started developing an AI "code of ethics" or protocols that minimize bias and discrimination in AI decision-making. Executives would be wise to develop AI guardrails that deepen customer trust.
Figure 3. Generative AI deployment must be safe, secure, and strategic.
Q. Which of the following steps has your organization taken to prepare for its potential or current use of generative AI? Responses from B2B executives.
B2B companies can take key steps to improve the personalization, relevance, and security of their interactions with buyers.