The Covid-19 pandemic left many lasting changes in its wake, one of them being customer care. In times of crisis, businesses had to rethink what customer service really means because interactions can easily influence trust and loyalty.
Customers today expect businesses to meet their new needs and deliver experiences with care and empathy. At the same time, customer behaviour has been moving towards long-term shifts. Staying on top of your customers’ changing preferences is the key to innovating and redesigning the customer experience.
By reimagining the customer experience, you can build resilience and agility for quick responses while strengthening your capabilities to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
What B2B Customers Today Need
B2B has always been a relationship-driven industry. Because of the higher transaction value, businesses prioritise relationships – and are heavily built on trust. Pre-Covid, those relationships included face-to-face meetings and in-person sales.
But once the pandemic hit, B2B sellers had to recreate the same personalised experience remotely. More companies started to go digital as a way to respond to the crisis, be it by building their own online channel or joining marketplaces. However, many still see digital solutions as a temporary fix instead of the new normal post-Covid.
Safety was the main reason for going digital but there’s no denying that self-serve systems and remote interactions allowed buyers to easily get information, find products and place orders in no time. Even after the lockdowns have lifted, 70% of B2B enterprise buyers prefer self-serve or remote purchases for their speed and convenience.
B2B customers are now accustomed to doing sales digitally and you have to increase your capabilities to facilitate that. It’s not enough to just set up an online channel, you have to meet their needs for quick and easy self-serve purchases while still maintaining the personalisation element.
How to Meet the Different Needs of B2B Customers
As B2B business owners, you’d know all about dealing with different customers to whom you offer custom products, pricing tiers and payment terms.
Previously, sellers would have to manually send catalogues and customise pricing for individual customers. Not only is this method time-consuming, but it is also prone to errors because of how fragmented the sales model is.
Here’s how you can overcome that.
#1 Build a One-Stop E-commerce Platform for Your Buyers
The traditional B2B sales model is highly fragmented and prone to human error. Buyers have to go through different sales agents to find products, place orders and track fulfilment.
With so many different touchpoints, information can easily slip through the cracks, leading to costly mistakes. But with a one-stop platform to perform these transactions, all the data can be better managed as it is stored in a single source.
A customised branded store is the best option that will allow you to address the different pain points of your customer base – and you can build one with Dropee Direct. By subscribing to Dropee Direct, you will have access to features like a centralised order management system, inventory tracking, robust analytics and custom pricing or catalogues.
#2 Offer Personalised & Customer-centric Pricing
Personalisation is a huge part of the B2B customer experience. Customer A may receive different pricing than Customer B based on the deal size, customer type and other negotiations.
Traditionally, you would create different catalogues and send them to the customers or inform them about the special price through phone calls or Whatsapp. Aside from pricing tiers, B2B customers are also given different payment terms and some may be offered credit terms.
But this isn’t a scalable option, traditional methods are time-consuming, and eats into time you could have spent on more important matters.
With the Special Retailers feature on Dropee Direct, you can create personalised sales catalogues and tiered pricing for your customers.
Put simply, you will be able to set custom settings for each user group and decide what they see when they interact with your products. So when your customers log in to the platform, they will only see what you want them to see, the prices, products and catalogues you’ve set specifically for them.
Aside from custom pricing, you can also offer unique discounts, customised promotions or free shipping for different customers – and they will reflect in your online store immediately.
This allows you to:
- Show the right price points for each buyer
- Keep track of buyers on credit terms
- Identify when payments are due
- Allow buyers to track when payments are due
- Create unique discounts
- Offer customised promotions or free shipping
- Automate price changes
One thing a closed-loop portal like Dropee Direct offers that platforms like marketplaces don’t is privacy. Business pricing must be kept confidential to protect all parties involved and Dropee Direct ensures that your customers will only see their custom products and pricing with their unique login IDs – and no one else’s.
#3 Facilitate Seamless Order Configuration
Much like custom pricing, your e-commerce store must also be able to support different order management rules. B2B buyers often purchase in bulk and are typically given better discounts if they buy more. Setting minimum order quantities (MOQ) is another common practice, which means the ability to configure order requirements is a must.
Sellers that operate offline have to manually manage orders by answering phone calls and filling out paperwork. But by going digital, you can transform this tedious process into a self-serve system.
Order configuration is customisable and can be automated on Dropee Direct! For every product you upload, you can determine the minimum order quantity and set the wholesale pricing for orders that meet the required amount. Wholesale pricing can also be automated – when buyers purchase the required amount, it will trigger the discount.
When your customers can place orders on your platform without speaking to any salesperson, you save valuable time that could be spent addressing more difficult matters.
Dropee Direct’s order management system allows you to:
- Consolidate all of your orders in one place
- Keep track of which orders have been paid for, and which haven’t
- Minimise human errors such as order duplication
- Easily view order and payment history.
Adapt the Customer Experience to New Needs
The B2B industry is transitioning towards self-serve systems and remote purchases as you can get more done in less time.
But after you’ve moved online, your B2B customers still want a personalised experience. You have to be able to not just recreate but improve on the service offered offline and the right online platform can help you achieve that.
Click here to book a demo with us and learn more about how Dropee can help supercharge your digitisation efforts!
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