The B2B Customer Experience Blueprint: Reaping the Benefits of a Tailored Customer Experience

Providing a great customer experience has long been understood as a driver of competitive differentiation and, ultimately, high performance.

However, until now, business-to-business (B2B) companies have lagged in this area owing to a number of challenges. Accenture explores the issues and shows how to go about overcoming them to create a customer experience blueprint that delivers a differentiated customer experience that is effective, affordable and delivers real business benefits.

Business-to-consumer companies have long understood that a positive service experience provides a competitive advantage on the road to high performance. Only now, however, are B2B companies making the same connection.

Research shows that only 20 percent of B2B companies have implemented customer experience management as a formal business process, while only 28 percent base strategic decisions on customer experience or customer lifetime value.

However, half of B2B organizations have increased their investment in customer experience management over the past five years—and with good reason. Accenture consumer research indicates clearly that consumers’ service expectations are constantly rising.¹

¹First Annual ClearAction Business-to-Business Customer Experience Management Benchmarking Study, ClearAction, 2010; Accenture 2010 Global Consumer Research.

Despite the importance of the customer experience, B2B companies continue to apply a uniform approach to service across markets, customer segments and types of customer interaction. This means that a $1,000 order costs as much to service as a $1 million order, and a valuable (or potentially valuable) customer gets the same treatment as a less valuable one.

In addition, most B2B companies provide a disaggregated experience across the company. For example, customers would have to traverse several service organizations for each product or service to make up what had been sold to them as a bundle.

These problems arise because service is regarded as a cost rather than differentiator.

Companies tend not have tailored and optimized service to meet the needs and value of customers because doing so is challenging:

• Companies cannot determine the current and future value of customers.
  
  
• Service is typically an afterthought, so no customer experience has been developed.
  
  
• Mergers have complicated the issue because it is faster and cheaper to unify around a single approach.
  
  
• Most customer service executives are swamped by day-to-day issues and simply do not have the bandwidth to develop a customer segmentation and treatment strategy.

Despite these challenges, some leading B2B enterprises are moving aggressively toward providing a tailored customer experience. Through holistic customer experience design, these companies are tailoring and optimizing the service experience to mirror the needs of customers and the value of customers to their organization. Several of these companies share a common characteristic: they utilized a well-established, customer-centric approach to customer experience design and implementation. The foundation for such a design is a customer experience blueprint that:

• Considers premium service opportunities based on lifecycle management, capabilities and customer value.
  
  
• Meets the customer needs throughout the lifecycle.
  
  
• Optimizes the experience through appropriate channel management and workforce management.
  
  
• When implemented, allows the company to deliver a premium service where appropriate while managing, and keeping affordable, the overall cost to serve.

The approach used to create such a design consists of three primary components: global operating model review, understanding customer needs and intentions, and creation of a blueprint and road map for implementation.