Customer loyalty through B2B eCommerce
Justin King October 18th, 2009
In the retail world, eCommerce is driven by conversion and sales and is up front in the marketing funnel. For the B2B company, the main intent of eCommerce is often to build customer loyalty and to retain customers. eCommerce is really a tool to build deeper relationships with your customers, isn’t it? Yeah, there are many other side effects of eCommerce:
- Sales people can start to focus on selling instead of being glorified order takers (especially for companies that have large catalogs)
- Operational costs are reduced by lowering call volume in customer service centers
- Increased frequency and size of transactions
B2B organizations are starting to get pressure from their customers to rethink their online channel. Most of this pressure is being built by the fact that your customers have expectations online as a result of their personal buying experiences. We all know that businesses use the web to research products and services, but they also have expectations as a result of recent experiences buying something from a retail store online or using social media for personal reasons. If you are considering creating an eCommerce site for your B2B company, here is a place to start:
- How will you get your customers to actually use the site (Customer adoption) – crazy as it seems, most B2B companies get their biggest ROI from having their customers actually use the site.
- What tools beyond simple navigate, search, and shopping carts will strengthen and deepen your relationships with your customers
- Quick Order
- Previous order and product searches
- Open A/R – from all of your channels
- Ability to pay all open A/R online
- Consider public access to your catalog (SEO will love you for it) – even if you make the user login to see “their” price
- Don’t under estimate the value of a unique customer experience built with your customers needs in mind. BTW – that means actually talking to customers not just the sales staff
- Create a model by which to measure the success of your site – you have to measure this channel, so start off by picking something to measure against. For example – % decreased customer service calls, % customer adoption or increase in transaction size. And please – give it time.
