How Are B2B Customers Different from Their B2C Counterparts?
Four Key Characteristics That Differentiate B2B Customers from Their B2C Peers
Customers expect more from companies today than they ever did before. But the best in business don’t make the mistake of considering these rising customer demands as a “problem.” Rather, they take them as signals to adapt the way they conduct their business, which includes evolving their treatment of customers. Let’s look at five ways your company can use technology to improve customer service.
A lot of times when a customer contacts a company, they need some kind of information. At that point in time they really need the fastest and simplest way to get that information. A mobile app can be the perfect solution in this scenario. Customers expect, even if on a sub-conscious level, to have a mobile app to interact with your company based on their needs at that time.
While sometimes the best thing a customer needs is a smart customer service representative on the other line, today’s customer has been “trained” to get a lot of things done on a mobile app. So empower them with a well-designed app to deal with as many customer service-related tasks as feasible.
It happens in every company – mistakes are made at all levels from a single employee slip-up to bigger gaffes across your organization. In any case, you need to take responsibility for them publicly and quickly. One of the best places to do that is on social media.
This is a great platform in today’s digital age to resolve customer complaints. People are not as much bothered by a mistake as a company’s inability to admit it and openly try to solve the problem for the customer. Pizza Hut, for instance, routinely responds to customer complaints on social media almost instantly. They have also been known to conduct 140-second interviews for their social media manager positions. It shows how serious you need need to be about staying on top of the tech game when it comes to customer service.
Consider the case of Samsung’s Galaxy Note smartphones catching fire. Samsung explained the problem on all social media platforms, apologized, and then replaced the affected phones. This is an excellent example of how technology helped this company handled what was, among other things, a customer service crisis.
This goes a long way in reassuring customers that they can trust your business to make things right because there’s no company that doesn’t run into problems. It’s the ability to come back that matters, in many cases, with excellent customer service.
An exceptional tech service helps you survive the inevitable complications with your service or product. When a problem occurs with your service or product, the customer just wants you to fix it, which isn’t always simple. The best in business realize this as two problems: solving the problem itself, and designing the most efficient way to deliver over-the-phone/internet support services to guide the customer. As Micah Solomon (author and a subject matter expert on customer service) notes, Apple and Google do this very well –providing customer support on their customers’ schedules.
As clichéd as this may sound, this is how the best companies use technology to continuously improve their customer service. According to ZDNet, here are 5 technologies that are poised to impact customer service till the end of this decade:
In the wake of the evolving customer needs, businesses and brands across the world today need to step up and meet the challenge of improving their customer service forever. As with so many other aspects of business, technology provides an amazing opportunity for improving the customer service experience. You need to maintain a proactive approach to translate the latest technology into superior customer service.
Fatima Mansoor is a writer at Aepiphanni, a small business operations and strategy consultancy that exists to help small business owners CREATE | DESIGN | BUILD extraordinary businesses. She specializes in business & entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and health & fitness. Her focus is on creating compelling web content for small and medium businesses form diverse industries. She mostly writes for entrepreneurs and marketing agencies across the US, Australia and UK.
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