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Improving B2B customer experience through automation

Every B2B customer is also a B2C customer. So it follows that their experiences with their best consumer-facing brands will influence their expectations when it comes to interaction with businesses. Automation plays a key role in improving that experience.

Automation helps marketers make sense of their customer data and use it to provide a more meaningful and customer-centric service. It can improve nearly every section of your strategy, from generating content to lead generation and measuring performance.

Marketing automation software at a glance

Marketing automation software can take many forms, but these are some of the most popular:

  • CRM/sales automation
  • Campaign tracking
  • Dynamic landing pages
  • Social marketing automation
  • Chatbots
  • Dynamic form builders
  • Reporting and analytics

The impact of automation on customer experience

When these tools are applied correctly, they help to deliver a much-improved customer experience.

In addition, according to the Service Profit chain, the companies that are more successful at delivering an excellent customer experience are those who also understand what satisfies and motivates employees. Regardless of industry, teams feel demotivated by having to constantly focus on boring, repetitive tasks. By freeing time and resources for more creative and strategic work through automation, marketing teams get more job satisfaction and customers get a better experience.

Research from Infosys and Accenture shows that 74% of customers are frustrated when content is not personalised and 81% want brands to get to know them and understand the correct time to approach them. Time is also your customer’s most valuable possession. Above all else, your CX must be quick.

Applications of automation in marketing

While there are lots of applications where automation can help, here we'll focus on CRM, analytics, dynamic landing pages and chatbots. These tools can deliver extraordinary benefits to the customer experience by helping to provide an improved understanding of a business’s ideal customer and enabling the implementation of complex strategies more easily, giving customers a more personalised, tailored experience. 

CRM and analytics

You can, and should, use CRM and analytics to recognise your customers’ behaviour and the best time to contact them. Then you can create personalised content, based on their preferences and known behaviour. When you interact with your customer this way, it will resonate better and mean they are more likely to engage.

Dynamic landing pages

You can further personalise this content with dynamic landing pages. These pages will automatically adapt to each customer, based on their preferences and behaviours on your website.  This allows your team to create content that engages your customers with deep, personalised experiences – ones that they’re far more likely to engage with, and ones that they’ll remember. A dynamic landing page is also a very efficient way to create content, as it means a single page or email template can connect with various audiences.

Chatbots

One of the simplest and most effective tools to implement is a chatbot. A well-designed chatbot can be a game-changer for your team and your customers. It means your customers can receive responses 24/7. Research from Sana shows that 60% of B2B buyers prefer accessing product information, delivery details and paying invoices online – all of which a chatbot can do. The research also shows that 40% of B2B customers considered speed the most important KPI of the customer experience – utilising a chatbot is one of the most efficient ways to improve this metric. 

How to start implementing automation

When you start to effectively implement automation tools, you will see your customer experience improve dramatically. So if you haven’t starting implementing automation yet, naturally your next question is most likely how to start.

  1. Establish your goals. To help you decide which elements of automation to employ, you will need to first decide on your goals and how you will measure success.
  2. Choose and segment your audience. Without segmentation, automation runs the risk of depersonalising the customer experience. So do any segmentation carefully and correctly, not quickly. This is the core of your strategy. The better its foundations, the better it can help you grow and evolve. As the system runs, it will collect more data, refining your audience further.
  3. Decide which tools you will implement. It is very important to consider that while employing one or two separate programs may suit your needs at the beginning, employing multiple programs on one system can get very complicated, time-consuming and expensive. With this in mind, it’s worth considering an all-in-one platform.

What does good automation look like?

Now that you know what you want your automation to achieve, here are some best practice examples.

Amazon often provides excellent customer service. Their speed of response is extremely high and their content is always tailored to the customer, from the content on the homepage to their purchasing suggestions that arrive in the customer’s inbox. This is based on the customer data they collect to personalise the customer experience as much as possible.

Thomas Reuters implemented a CRM strategy with great success, after growing rapidly but failing to align sales and marketing. They had no segmentation and leads were sent without being qualified. CRM consolidated this. It then implemented a lead scoring system and customer profiles were created. They subsequently saw a 23% increase in leads passed to the sales team and a 175% increase in revenue attributed to marketing generated leads.

HubSpot’s chatbot combines human and artificial intelligence to provide a great customer experience. Their chatbot has the initial conversation and when a live person becomes available they take over the conversation. This moves leads through the funnel while giving customers excellent service.

Automation in B2B: it’s a win-win

Automation in B2B is a powerful tool and can help you provide not just great customer experience, but a consistently great customer experience where customers feel listened to and are only provided with information based on their needs and preferences. Increasing productivity and conversion for you, improved for your customer.

If you utilise these strategies successfully, you will have freed your team of tasks they likely find demotivating and, dare we say it, 'time-wasting', and created an experience that is tailored to each of your customers.

If you'd like to explore the marketing automation strategies that could improve your B2B customer experiences, then get in touch with our team who is always happy to help.