B2B customer engagement is complex. Unlike in B2C industries, B2B customer engagement involves more people representing each company. You and your team are likely to interact with multiple people or teams rather than just one person. This means you’ll want a solid, well-rounded strategy to help you make consistent progress.
Software Isn’t Enough
You can’t rely on any one tool or action to make customer engagement happen. Excellent customer engagement comes from a combination of different inputs. Many excellent tools exist to help you, including software like Kapta, but they only work as part of a complete plan. Software alone cannot make customer engagement happen.
What else do you need to think about to improve engagement? A complete B2B customer engagement plan includes at least 4 other inputs:
1) Actions
The right software and tools will help you know when to act and what actions to take, but you still have to make it happen yourself. Customer engagement is easier when you’re actively involved with the account instead of operating with as few touches as possible.
Make your actions count. Don’t do busywork with your customers. Each touch should be effective and should have a distinct impact on the client. Too many actions without much to show for it means you’re operating very inefficiently, which could damage your relationship with the customer down the road. Use software to guide your actions and add more value to the customer.
2) Behaviors
Customer behaviors are changing. If you don’t keep up, you might be replaced by a company that will accurately meet the needs of the new customer. Your organization’s behaviors need to easily accommodate your customers and make it incredibly simple to engage with you.
Your customer-facing teams need to prioritize value. It’s not enough to just provide the product or service the customer is buying from you. Fantastic customer engagement happens when you habitually focus on going the extra mile for them. Create organizational behaviors that naturally add value to your customers.
3) Change Management
Change management isn’t just an internal practice. Any time you make changes, you will have to lead your customers through those changes as well. Some changes don’t result in a dramatic shift for the customer, while others do. Your customer engagement plan must include procedures on how to lead your customers through any organizational changes that come up.
Learn about the challenges they see from their perspective and respond accordingly. Analyze your customer interactions to understand every point at which they connect to your system, and how that’s likely to be affected by the change.
This part of your customer engagement plan can really benefit from complementary software. You can keep updated metrics, collect usage data, and get a clearer picture of how, when, and why your customers interact with your business.
4) Reinforcement
Positive reinforcement is a powerful tool to promote customer engagement. Having an immediate benefit for customers who are actively engaging with you can keep them coming back and encourage other customers to improve their engagement. The type of reinforcement you provide depends on your industry and business environment.
All of these pieces work together to make a more complete customer engagement plan. You need a strategy in place that considers actions, behaviors, change management, reinforcement, and software together. Focusing too much on one component, especially the software, will leave you with an incomplete plan.
Define Your Business Transformation
To make the step from where you are now to better customer engagement, you need to define what that looks like in your context. What are you hoping to achieve by transforming your business?
Know what you’re looking to achieve before you make any changes to your customer engagement plan. You need to be able to measure your progress in order to know if you’re making the right changes or not. Without defining what you want first, you’re gambling that you’ll be able to reach a goal you can’t clearly identify.
As a B2B company, your success is directly tied to the success of your customers. How you engage with customers and how you encourage customer engagement should tie into mutual success for both of you.
How to Reach Your Goal
Whatever you want to accomplish through improved customer engagement, the goal is to first kick that into high gear. There’s a balance that you need to get within your own team to make it happen. You need to have the right people with the right skills exhibiting the right set of behaviors.
Sounds vague, but you’ll fill in the blanks when you know what you’re trying to accomplish. The right team of people will look different in your organization than it would in another. But, picking the right people is an essential part of getting everything else right. If you don’t have a good team working with you, your efforts to refine your process will be fruitless.
Choosing your team takes time and decisive action on your part as the team leader. Prioritize the skills you need, remembering that your team will be directly customer-facing.
Crafting behaviors in your organization requires you to know what you want to accomplish and how you want to get there. Behaviors are made by reducing your goals and the paths to those goals down into actionable steps that you do all the time. The behaviors your team exhibits should be pushing towards greater customer engagement at all times.
Once you’ve got the basics build-blocking, you can add in software to give your performance and all your efforts a boost. It’s vital to build on a pre-existing foundation instead of counting on the software to do the heavy lifting for you. Create something scalable, then scale it exponentially with software that can help you improve customer engagement.
Conclusion
Kapta has helped B2B companies around the world to improve customer engagement and create lasting partnerships. But, no software can solve all your problems on its own. Without your efforts to put together all the other pieces of the puzzle, it can easily fall flat.
We recommend a more thorough approach to improve customer engagement. Take time to focus on improving each part of your customer engagement plan before introducing software that will elevate your entire effort.
