What is B2B customer service?
B2B (business to business) are companies that sell products or services to other companies instead of selling them to individual customers, which is B2C (business to customers). For example, the SaaS (software as a service) conglomerate, Zoho Corp, falls under the B2B sector, as it provides cloud software like SalesIQ to businesses who want to remove complexities in their customer service functions and streamline them.
B2B customer service is the assistance businesses provide to their consumer. While customer service exists in the B2C sector, there are differences between the two despite the same end-goal of providing the best customer experience with faster resolutions.
- How B2B and B2C customer services are different?
- Why it’s vital to provide effective customer service for B2B
- How to do B2B customer service: 10 best practices you should follow
- Zoho SalesIQ, the best B2B customer service platform
How B2B and B2C customer services are different?
For a better understanding, let's take two entities: Amazon, a B2C company, and Zoho SalesIQ.
Individuals vs organizations
Those who reach out to Amazon are individual customers. Most of their inquiries will be simple and can be resolved instantly as they'd be about delivery tracking, delays, payments, and the like.
In a B2B company, the product or service they sell helps their customers run their businesses. Using the example, Zoho SalesIQ is important to businesses because it helps them provide service to their customers. If the product malfunctions, businesses using SalesIQ will not be able to address their customers' inquiries and provide resolutions. They might lose their credibility, earned loyalty, cultivated relationships, and ultimately their revenue.
Transactional relationship vs long-term reliability
In B2C, it's mostly a transactional relationship between businesses and their customers as the buying cycle and the purchase cost would be minimal. The consumers themselves wouldn't care about forging a long-term relationship as they'd approach support for a quick resolution.
In B2B, it goes beyond transactional and develops into a long-term relationship. No business would want to switch vendors frequently as it would affect their business operations.
Careful evaluation goes into selecting a vendor. Since the purchase cost is huge, this process can take a long time. Only when they feel comfortable and confident about the vendor will businesses go ahead with them.
Simple vs complex queries
B2C wouldn't require fancy customer service software to address customer issues as their inquiries would be simple and, most of the time, resolvable. Countless businesses are running their support operations via social media platforms like WhatsApp or Instagram. Even if their customers get a delayed response or resolution, it's not going to cost them anything.
For B2B, it could be a mix of simple inquiries, which can be resolved instantly, and complex issues, that'd require a couple of days or even weeks to resolve. For this, B2Bs require a solution that'd help them productively carry out support operations and provide faster resolutions.
Why it’s vital to provide effective customer service for B2B
Since B2B is built differently and caters to a different set of audiences, it's essential to provide effective customer service because the outcomes have larger effects on the company.
Losing a customer would cost the business more
As the purchase cost and the buying cycle are high and lengthy, businesses spend a lot of time, money, and resources to attract leads, educate them on why they should buy their product or service, and convert them. The acquisition cost in B2B is comparatively high.
If they don't provide the best customer service after conversion, customers will leave them, affecting their revenue. Businesses could sink if they don't keep an eye on their churn rate.
Personalized assistance is required as they'd have unique requirements
Though the product or service is designed with a different set of users and multiple personas in mind, it'll never be an out-of-the-box fit for every customer. Since each of their operational processes and requirements vary, customizations have to be provided based on the individuals. They cannot make the customizations themselves, so personalized assistance is required to provide customer service to such businesses.
Loyalty, reputation, revenue, and even survival are on the line
When providing a product or service that caters only to a fellow business, the total addressable market (TAM) would be less compared to a B2C product or service. Since the consumers' livelihood is on the line, even a small mistake cannot be tolerated in such cases. Messing up customer service could lead to businesses losing their brand loyalty from their clients.
It'd, in turn, affect their reputation and reflect on their revenue. For some businesses, it'd even put their survival on the line, so it's crucial to provide timely and effective customer service to their clients.
Gives a competitive edge
As customers are aware of how good service is vital to them, it gives those businesses that excel in this aspect a competitive edge. Businesses even charge a premium when they have an excellent customer service process in place. It easily becomes your distinctive factor and can nudge your prospects to choose you over your alternatives, making a direct impact on your revenue.
How to do B2B customer service: 10 best practices you should follow
1. Enrich your self-service resources
Nowadays, customers expect businesses to be proactive in providing resolutions. Businesses cannot monitor every action of their customers, the way they interact with their product, and call them when they're facing any issues, so being proactive isn't as easy as one would think.
Businesses can anticipate possible customer issues or inquiries during onboarding or using the product or at other specific stages of the customer journey. With that information, they can build their resource and knowledge base sections. These will allow their customers to seek out resources and fix the issues themselves or get clarification on things that might not need a representative's intervention.
2. Instant availability
While businesses can't predict all the possible scenarios to enrich their resources or anticipate what every different client would need, businesses have to provide options to reach out to their customer service team instantly. While resolving the issue is the most important part of customer service, being available quickly increases the confidence and loyalty of business clients.
3. Your support agents should go above and beyond
Once they connect to your support agent, it's up to your agents if the client will be happy or not. It's crucial to provide faster resolutions to the consumers who trust your business to run their business.
Your support agents should be trained properly to understand the possible cause of a malfunction or to answer a question quickly when possible.
In some cases, the resolutions cannot be provided instantly, as customizations may take time, or the features they're requesting are not on your current roadmap. This is where your support agents should go above and beyond. Instead of just relaying that information, agents should empathize with the customers, showing they understand. This helps clients feel they're heard and valued.
4. Defined SLAs in place
Of course, it goes without saying that any organization that is providing customer service should have well-defined SLAs in place, especially when catering to businesses. These should be conveyed upfront clearly so everyone knows what they can expect from your customer service teams. Once defined and shared, it should be followed without delays to maintain credibility.
5. Available on multiple channels
Unlike a decade ago, when customers had only one way to contact customer service, now, the mode of communication has changed thanks to social media and instant messaging channels. Businesses have to offer multiple channels for clients to reach them.
Since everyone has their preferred mode of communication, B2B customer service teams not only need to be available, but they should focus on being available across popular communication channels including WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, and the like, to be accessible to their customers.
6. Customer service via multiple formats
Similar to the last point, when connected with the customer for an issue, B2B customer service should provide different options like live chat, audio calls, and video calls. Instead of asking them to stick to one format, give them a few options. Situations might also arise where the support agent feels the customer is not satisfied with the live chat help, so the agent immediately offers to switch to an audio/video call to help in a better way.
B2B customer service should have options like remote access and screen share support that'll help provide faster resolutions for more detailed issues.
7. Overall customer experience
In B2B, because of the complexities of the organization, there'll be a lot of touchpoints involved. Hence, they should make sure that when customers want to contact them, they'll be able to reach the right person easily. Even if situations arise where a representative needs to transfer the customer to another team, they shouldn't operate in silos and should be interconnected to provide a uniform customer experience at every touchpoint.
8. Form a community to help your customer service teams
As the B2B space is getting crowded and competitive, businesses are forming their community by uniting loyal users to keep them close. It helps businesses understand how their customers feel about them and get insights on what they're looking for to plan their roadmap accordingly.
Creating a community forum can help customers resolve their issues among themselves, as someone might've encountered what another customer is currently facing. It helps offload some of the work from your support team, and at the same time, provides customers with instant resolutions.
9. Get feedback and act upon it
While you might think you have everything covered in your initial process, there's always room for improvement. Creating an open feedback loop where customers can provide notes from improvement can help enhance the customer service experience. It doesn't stop with collecting. Businesses should analyze feedback and act upon suggestions that can drastically improve customers' experiences.
10. Have a capable customer service tool
To provide personalized, instant customer service and a flawless customer experience, a B2B needs to have a capable customer service tool. The tool should have features to manage all types of inquiries and should be scalable.
B2B customer service examples
LambdaTest
LambdaTest is a continuous quality testing cloud platform that helps enterprises ship code faster. Over 2 million users across 130+ countries, including major enterprises, rely on LambdaTest for their testing needs.
Since its start in 2017, LamdaTest has envisioned responding to customer queries in less than 60 seconds as part of its customer-first approach. Since its platform's user persona is quite technical in nature, if organizations get stuck in a process, they need instant support, as it'd be a make-or-break moment.
To deliver the best customer service to such enterprises, LambdaTest has been using Zoho SalesIQ. Now, they're able to handle more queries, provide instant replies, and resolve faster without increasing their headcount, as they've leveraged SalesIQ's bots.
They've automated their incoming chats to route to specific departments, which eliminates the delay that used to happen when they were routing them manually. Ultimately, this has increased their engagement rate, and they're consistently achieving under a minute response time.
Zoho SalesIQ, the best B2B customer service platform
Zoho SalesIQ, an engagement intelligence platform with extensive support functionalities, fits the bill for B2B organizations looking to provide the best customer service experience.
Answer Bot, powered by Zia, Zoho's own NLP, has a near-zero first response rate. With the help of your resources and knowledge base, Answer Bot will answer questions and resolve issues to improve your resolution rate and CSAT scores. If they're not able to, it'll immediately route the conversation to a human representative.
If your business is catering to other businesses across the globe, multi-lingual bot support will come in handy. The bot will be able to converse with customers in their language, making the conversation personable and adding immense value.
When customers are facing product issues, they might not have the time or patience to initiate a chat. SalesIQ, by default, provides audio call support without the need for an extension. If businesses don't want to give audio support to all, they can enable the option to their top customers.
When a complex issue can't be resolved over chat or call, initiate a remote session where teams can either ask the customer to screen share or even take control of their screen to help resolve the problem.
SalesIQ seamlessly integrates with your CRM and help desk irrespective of which platforms you're using. Especially for B2B, it comes in handy for your support team as the information and the past interactions with your visitors will be available within the SalesIQ dashboard to provide quick resolutions and offer an overall better customer experience.
With our advanced and live reporting functionalities, admins can have a constant view of how the team is performing. It'll give them a complete overview of all the vital metrics to help them provide the best service experience to their customers.
Want to see how SalesIQ performs live? Sign up now and test it out yourself.
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