I was having a conversation recently with another Founder about how to perform superior customer engagement in a B2B environment. What slipped off my tongue without really thinking a great deal about it was that a key way to build a strong relationship with your customer and get repeat business is to make your customer look good in their own organization. (I added, it’s probably something you want to do for your boss too, but that’s for another conversation)
Use Social to Bring People to your Site (Not to Send Them Away)
You’ve succeeded in the hard work of getting them to come to your site, why throw this away. To decrease the bounce rate and increase conversions on your site, you want to use social to bring people to your website, not to use social on your websites to draw people away.
Mapping CX – Charting the real journey of your engagement with Customers
Experience Mapping – whether on behave of the user or customer – is a relatively new concept . So there aren’t a lot of automated tools out there to do this. What you do find is that this is often offered as a consulting service or done as an occasional exercise by internal teams.
The New Paradigm – B2B and B2C learning from each other
While in general I believe this to be true, I see it as more of a shift in paradigm in how companies engage with their customers and scale their business. I believe its occurring because customer requirements for engagement are changing. I also think that the blurring occurs differently in the various layers of the engagement, such as marketing, sales, procurement and customer service. Rather than a blending of styles, I believe that the traditional forms of business are learning from each other. I will expand on these ideas in future related posts.
Publish, Search, Fulfill, Converse – Apps for the Customer Centric Enterprise
A report on the keynote conversation with JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist @ Salesforce.com, at Mesh 13 in Toronto.
Business organization by customer focused layers
The traditional business model of separated teams, or silos, for marketing, sales, development and support simply is no longer working for B2B companies. This business model is prone to a waste in resources, duplication of efforts and poor internal communication. On the other hand, a product focused business model can lead to not recognizing opportunities for additional sales opportunities to an existing customer base. So what is the alternative? To borrow and adapt a quote from the 90’s – it’s about the customer stupid. Though these independent functions are still necessary, the best organization is to align business operations and teams with a focus on a customer segment.
