This is both a challenge and an opportunity to enact a digital transformation that will lift your entire business. Here’s our view on how to get there, and why Salesforce has been such a compelling all-in-one solution for many companies.
They want the same ease and flexibility that B2C customers have. They want an Amazon-like experience. Make no mistake: They’re going to get that experience somewhere. You need to make sure it’s from you.
By solving customer issues, you can solve your own issues. Sales, service, marketing, inventory—chances are these functions in your organization require tedious and time-consuming manual processes, and rely on institutional memory. It doesn’t have to be this way. Salesforce offers integrated solutions that drastically improve the customer experience, while making life better for your own people as well.
Modernizing is not just essential for your organization’s survival in changing times. These integrated tools will free you to pursue ever-more ambitious business goals with confidence. To shed the baggage that’s slowing you down and re-focus on your core business, with your customer at the center.
If you already use Salesforce for some operations or not, you can take advantage of the complete end-to-end solutions Salesforce offers--with absolute integration of all business operations, with your customer, not your systems, at the core:
• Customer 360 perspective • Unified product and price information • Integrated subscription model • Unified billing models
• Customer 360 perspective
• Unified product and price information
• Integrated subscription model
• Unified billing models
Before we get to that integrated business model of your dreams, let’s take a moment to look at what customers really want.
Slalom recently asked our partners that very question. First, these customers confirmed the B2B trend toward online sales. 77% said they expect the number of product categories they purchase online to increase in the coming year.
We also asked what was most important to them when choosing a B2B website. They want fundamentals. At the top of the list, not surprisingly, is price. Next is ease of finding products via site search and navigation—i.e., web design elements that go back to the earliest days of online commerce. And even today, 92% of B2B purchases start with search. The top five desired features is rounded out by brand trust, the richness of product information, and ease of purchase. In other words, as we said in the beginning, all the things any B2C customer wants.
When we take the “make it more like B2C” premise seriously, it has other implications—one of the top ones being the flexibility of omni-channel fulfillment. Buyers expect such fundamentals across any and all purchasing channels they choose to use, including mobile devices, social media channels, and of course directly with sales reps, who, by the way, are likely equipped with their own mobile devices connected to the digital commerce platform. And as this blog from Amware points out, B2B customers want what any Target customer expects: To be able to order on a website, have products available for physical pick-up or delivery, and to return via any channel, regardless of where they made their purchase.
As for how customers prefer to engage with service reps, e-mail tops the list. But live chat and call centers are also very popular. The relatively old-school nature of these methods shouldn’t obscure the need for integrated operations. An effective digital platform and ecosystem is crucial to support multiple customer service channels. All that data needs to flow reliably, in real-time, to everyone who needs it. All of your customer service reps need automated tools to deliver accurate, timely information your customers need.
Providing these fundamentals and flexibility to meet customers wherever they require a digital platform designed to share accurate and up-to-date product information between the back-end business operations software systems and the customer-facing front-end.
There are still plenty of customer service teams chained to their ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning software and systems used to plan and manage supply chain, manufacturing, services, financial and other processes), manually keying in what the customer just e-mailed in. A huge percent of the trillions of dollars of B2B transactions go like this: the customer types their order into system one, e-mails it to a merchant, then someone types this into system two, and then ultimately a product appears somewhere.
To be fair, this isn’t only because companies are living in the past. B2B has some inherent complexity that B2C does not. That same complexity also offers opportunity.
Check out the next slide to learn how Avigilon, a Motorola Solution Company, did it!
