Understandably, businesses focus a large amount of time and energy on seeking out new business, but not many spend as much time thinking about the experience of a client once they’ve purchased a service or been onboarded. Customer service experts Zendesk state that 62% of B2B customer buy more from a business after receiving good customer service, proving that strong repeat business can take a huge amount of pressure off your new sales machine and provide consistently repeating revenue. To help you understand the importance of good customer experience and help your business improve, this blog will be packed with our tips and tricks to ensure that you are best positioned to focus on the most vital aspect that your business has – its clients.
Back to basics
Let’s take it back to basics and remind ourselves what client experience is all about. In the B2B world, client experience is the relationship between the client and the company, which is built by the many interactions between the two throughout their journey together.
Client experience doesn’t just begin after the client has made a purchase from your company. It begins from the first interaction, everything from the start of the prospect journey to point of sale all contributes to the client’s experience with your company.
No matter how small the interaction whether that be direct via email or phone or indirect through your website or social media, it can all significantly contribute to the overall perception of your business for the client.
Why be better?
The list is endless when it comes to the benefits of having excellent client experience, but we believe these can be the most beneficial to your business:
1.Take the pressure off new sales
Taking our statistic from earlier, 62% of B2B clients buy more from a business after receiving good customer service. This means that if you concentrate on keeping your existing clients happy then there will be a steady stream of revenue from repeat customers, which will help relieve some pressure from new sales. Relieving your team of this pressure may not only generate repeat purchases from loyal customers, but it will also give your sales team more time to nurture those new sales which require a bit more time – a win-win!
2. Improve brand image
Through repeat business and loyal customers your brand will build up a reputable image. You will be keeping your existing clients happy which means they are more likely to recommend to a friend, talk well of your business and write positive reviews on influential platforms, such as Google and TrustPilot. All of which will be seen and heard by new and prospecting clients, which may persuade them to make a purchase. And with your excellent client experience in place, you can be hopeful they will remain happy and loyal customers for years to come.
3. Save resources
Arguably, there is no better marketing campaign than happy customers. Through the positive reviews, testimonials and word of mouth conversations your company can save on your marketing costs whilst hitting all your revenue targets! Through saving more of the marketing budget you have the opportunity to do all those amazing ideas you haven’t quite had the budget for. But thanks to happy customers showcasing how good your company is, you now have additional resources to take your company to the next level.
How do you do this?
Improving your client experience can seem like quite a daunting and large task, it takes employee dedication and a lot of time – but it is all worth it. Here are some starting steps from Bold CEO you can take to improve your client’s experience.
1. Know your customer
If you want to have great client experience, you must first understand and know who your clients are. This process should be implemented before making any contact with them – do your research.
Take into consideration things such as demographic, psychographics, pain points and what they are wanting from a business like yours, to truly paint a picture in your mind of who they are before you’ve met/contacted them.
When you understand who your clients are and their needs and wants, you will be able to provide them with a much more tailored client experience that suits them.
2. Make life easy
The clients you wish to target and buy into your business probably experience the same challenges you face, such as not having enough hours in the day! To better your client experience, you want to aim to make your sales process as easy as possible for the client and save their time.
Especially in the construction industry, clients have a lot on their plate and desire a simple and straightforward sales process. They want to know what your business can do for them and the cost, so be straightforward.
Tell the client all the information they wish to know and from there they can use that information to make an informed decision on whether to make a purchase from your company. Anything additional to what they want to know will only take up more of their time and decrease the odds of you landing that sale.
3. Be consistent
To ensure your client is happy and you are providing excellent client experience you must ensure communication between your business and the client is kept consistent. To keep communication both consistent and attentive you should implement 3 things:
A singular touchpoint. Usually this is an account manager at your company who has a relationship with the client’s primary decision maker. Having a singular point of contact to communicate with makes it easy for the client to know exactly who to go to when they have a concern.
Secondly, you should give your client an omnichannel experience with your company. Omnichannel means having multiple different means of communicating with clients. At a minimum aim to communicate with your clients through phone, email and LinkedIn.
Finally, on top of the casual real time contact you have with your clients via phone and email, you should also prioritise setting up regular formal meetings. For example on a monthly or quarterly basis, this then adds formality to the relationship and provides the client with a strong line of communication. It also ensures that your business and product won’t fall from your customer’s mind. If they forget your product exists, they will be much less likely to sign up again at renewal time. Keeping yourself front of mind is key to ensure a healthy customer renewal rate.
The Barbour ABI experience
At Barbour ABI we strive to have excellent customer experience. That is why we have a dedicated team of account managers and customer support staff, whose roles are to keep in regular contact with their customers to ensure that they are using our products to their full capability and getting maximum return on investment.
Each and every one of our customers are assigned their own account manager who they can contact if they have any queries or questions. Customer Success Managers can also hold regular meetings with their customers to review their experience, ensure they are having a smooth journey with us, and showcasing any new product development that may be beneficial.
On top of providing regular contact through our dedicated team, we also have an intercom feature which appears when a user logs into our platform. This allows clients to ask any questions and get an answer as quickly as possible from our dedicated team who monitor intercom throughout the working day, making the customer experience seamless and easy.
We are always looking for ways to improve our client experience and ask for feedback from our clients.
