For business owners, ensuring a top-notch customer experience is always top of mind. From the moment you approach a potential client, to processing their first order, to taking feedback from them and building their loyalty, every step in the process requires service that exceeds their expectations. For companies with a growing customer base, achieving perfect service in every step of the process may feel impossible. Allocating enough people to customer service can be expensive and time consuming to manage. Eventually, a step will be missed in the process, leaving the customer disappointed in their experience with your company.
In this blog, we’ll explore the challenges most business owners feel when providing a top level of service to their customers, and how to automate many of the small menial tasks with a customer portal, allowing your team to focus on providing the perfect human touch where necessary. Overall, this reduces mistakes, costs, and allows you as the business owner to sleep better at night.
Challenge #1: Providing Customers With Real-Time Updates
The Challenge
According to Track-Pod, one of the most popular trends in the B2B Distribution market is real-time delivery updates. Customers of B2B distribution companies want to know exactly what date and time their delivery will arrive. For the customer, this allows them to schedule their employees in a cost-effective manner where employees are not being paid to wait for the delivery. This also allows customers to communicate to their customers when an item they may not have inventory of will be available again. Finally, for the distribution companies, it will decrease the likelihood of shipments going missing due to rogue delivery operators or breakdowns.
The Fix
By having an automated customer portal with a live tracking feature embedded within the application, companies can save time spent on the phone answering simple questions regarding customer order shipping status, and exact delivery dates and times to the customer. This will not only reduce costs but will increase customer satisfaction in two major ways. First, customers will feel at ease knowing they can track their orders instantly without waiting on hold any time. Secondly, customers will feel more valued as your employees will be able to dedicate their time to creating a more meaningful customer experience in impactful ways.
Challenge #2: Gathering Customer Feedback Post Experience
The Challenge
According to Maurice Fitzgerald of OX Cognition, the positive or negative impact an experience has on a review will start to fade as early as a week after the experience. Therefore it is imperative to capture feedback immediately following the customer experience. Having a customer contact you to leave feedback, or find the feedback section on your website themselves, or email their feedback means additional steps the customer has to take. This reduces the likelihood of receiving a response within the first week, let alone any response at all.
The Fix
An automated customer portal will allow you to collect feedback instantly after the experience is complete. Notifying the customer to complete a survey within a portal will ensure feedback is collected immediately and in a way that is convenient to the customer.
Challenge #3: Viewing Pricing & Inventory in Real Time
The Challenge
According to B2B Wave, Efficient inventory and order management features are essential for your B2B customer portal. We couldn’t agree more with this statement. Providing this information via phone presents a challenge for customers when they are curious about the inventory available and or pricing or discounts they may qualify for. Customers will have to wait on hold for a representative to find answers, and this information may only be up to date for a short period of time, forcing customers to contact the same service center again in a short period of time. Overall, this outdated process is time consuming, inefficient and frustrating for customers who do not have time to always be on hold.
The Fix
A B2B customer portal equipped with real-time pricing and inventory information means your customers will always be armed with the information they need to order their products confidently and not waste time on hold with a service representative. For your company, this means more orders as customers will be able to make decisions easier when they always know inventory levels and accurate pricing. It will additionally reduce cost in two major ways. Firstly, you will be able to reduce your spend on a customer service team that is dedicated to answering these simple questions. Secondly, when customers are speaking to representatives via phone, the likelihood of misinformation increases due to human error.
Summary
In a world where the B2B customer is converging more to the B2C customer concerning expectations of efficiency in service, it is imperative to adapt your customer experience to become more instantaneous and convenient.
Let us know below what some of your biggest challenges are with regard to managing customer concerns.
