A large number of B2B companies have recently begun to spend large sums on plans to improve customer experiences, but they may not be getting their money’s worth out of it. A BulldogReporter article, “B2B Companies are Spending More to Improve Their Customers’ Experience,” examines a study by Accenture suggesting 76 percent of these companies may be wasting up to half of their investment on ineffective initiatives. The BulldogReporter article also examines the study’s findings regarding the significance, scale and success of B2B companies’ initiatives to provide customers with a positive experience across all business touch points.

Below are the most important takeaways from the Accenture study:

  • The B2B organizations spending more money on customer experience programs claim their business customers are increasingly acting with the habits and knowledge of consumers, based on their interactions with suppliers and market knowledge.
  • Eighty-five percent of the study’s B2B supplier executives think that customer experience is important to their strategies, yet fifty-five percent of the respondents also say that their programs have achieved little to nothing.
  • The study shows that B2B suppliers can be typically divided into three groups based on the ability to plan a customer program that gives annual revenue growth: the masters, the strivers and the laggards.
  • The “masters” group prioritizes customer experience, excels at both defining and executing a customer service strategy and can make an average thirteen percent annual revenue growth, but only about twenty-four percent of the respondents in this survey would qualify for this category according to Accenture. Masters aggressively invest time and money in customer experience and firmly embed these programs in the formal business process.
  • Nearly half the companies surveyed in this study are “strivers,” able to strategize and execute moderate customer experience plans, and are able to achieve an estimated six percent revenue growth annually.
  • The final twenty-eight percent of companies in the survey are designated “laggards,” gaining a negative annual revenue growth from customer experience efforts due to large performance failures in strategy and execution. Less than half of those surveyed, that are laggards, make customer experience a day-to-day central planning element, and laggards are less likely than masters to make centralized functions for dealing directly with customer experiences.

Based on the study’s findings, B2B companies are now spending significantly to improve customers’ experiences but few are seeing the ROI they had hoped for, due to lack of clarity and execution in strategy. B2B companies needs to foster collaboration across internal and external sales, marketing, service stakeholders and external partners in order to develop effective strategies aimed at improving the customer experience.

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.

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