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Brick and mortar and internet retailers have laser-focused on improving customer experiences and creating omnichannel customer experiences for years. Amazon taught everyone to expect a smooth, frictionless buying experience online. Whether manufacturers like it or not, that expectation spilled over into the B2B space as well.
In the age of digital transformation, the customer experience in the manufacturing industry is increasingly important. As customers expect more efficient and consistent interactions, manufacturers must think beyond product quality and focus on providing customers with a better overall experience.
Successful manufacturers focus on anticipating customer needs and creating great multichannel customer experiences. But they face customer experience challenges B2C retailers don’t need to tackle. For example, manufacturers often sell highly complex and configurable products and support is almost as important as the product. It takes more than just a simple, self-service portal to create a great manufacturing customer experience.
Instead, makers seeking to offer a better customer experience in manufacturing need a variety of customer experience improvement tools in their toolbox. Keep reading to find out how customer experience affects the bottom line and how you can improve your B2B customer experience.
Ways Customer Experience Impacts Profit: Two Real-World Examples
It isn’t always easy to see the ROI impact of customer experience initiatives. As more and more products become commodities, customer experience becomes a reliable key differentiator for buyers. So, as manufacturers seek ways to improve customer experience, they end up streamlining their sales operations, becoming more efficient and improving their profitability as a result.
Self-Serve Customer Experience Reduces Sales Cycle Length
Manufacturers that create a web presence rich with customer-centric assets free their sales and customer service staff from responding to requests for specification sheets, user guides, installation images, and other frequently requested items. By creating libraries filled with digital assets where customers and leads can self-serve, they use employee time better. By making the research process easier, they speed up the discovery phase of the sales cycle.
Azelis, a worldwide leader in specialty chemicals and ingredients for the food processing industry understood that the changing demographics of their buyers meant they needed to change how they did business. Since their leads spend much of the sales cycle in the product exploration stage, Azelis created a website that offered informational articles, formulation guides, product sample requests, technical information, and detailed catalogs as easy-to-download assets. By providing more self-serve education, Azelis decreases the length of the sales cycle and increases profitability.
Inventory Visibility Increases Conversions
The more deals you convert, the more profit you make. For Dunlop Protective Footwear, a global manufacturer of protective footwear, order management and responding to inquiries regarding availability was time-consuming. Sales reps juggled orders by email, fax, and phone all while constantly responding to product availability questions. Customers and sales staff faced friction on every front.
By creating a webstore that provided visibility into stock levels, both customers and sales reps always know the amount of product on hand and ready to ship. The improved customer experience for this manufacturer of footwear led to a 40% increase in conversions and about a 10% increase in the average order value.
Improving the Manufacturing Customer Experience
When developing your B2B customer experience strategy, don’t confuse manufacturing customer experience with manufacturing customer service. The digital customer experience in the manufacturing industry embodies every touchpoint the customer has with the brand. It’s the entire journey, from first becoming aware of the brand to requesting help after the sale. Manufacturing customer service refers only to the experience after the sale.
So, focus on the entire experience and begin improvement by centering the customer in all efforts. During B2B customer journey mapping, identify all sources of friction and eliminate them to the extent possible. The best customer experiences are the smoothest!
Start with a customer-centric approach
When assessing the components of the total customer experience, it pays to take a customer-centric approach. According to Deloitte and Touche, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable.
From designing the initial experiences to reacting to feedback, keep the customer front and center. This means making sure front-line employees are empowered to resolve problems, leadership remains customer-focused, and the KPIs you measure resolve around customer experience.
Remove friction from product search
Are your products readily searchable? Search isn’t limited to finding your product on the internet. What happens once a visitor arrives on your page?
Can they easily search for your products by category, SKU, description, or even by the problem they solve? The larger your manufacturing product database, the more imperative it is to remove friction from the search process.
Make sure search boxes are located prominently at the top of the page. A search auto-complete function reduces the number of keystrokes the searcher makes while fuzzy search helps when words aren’t spelled correctly. Smoothing search gets the customer experience off to a good start.
Offer complete product information
Once a product is located, does the website supply accurate and complete product information? Integrating your manufacturing eCommerce website with a product information management (PIM) solution or your enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution reduces the chances of incorrect information being displayed. If your products are configurable, can this be done online? The more you allow the customer to self-serve, the better their impression of the experience.
In addition, potential customers appreciate transparency in stock levels and ERP integration makes this possible. By reducing backorders, you reduce the frustration a buyer feels when they finally find a product and place an order only to discover the item is on backorder.
In addition to product quantities, make product data sheets, specifications, user and installation guides, MSDSs, and other frequently requested manufacturing information available online. If customers or leads call or email asking for information, make sure that information is available online going forward.
Automate processes
How hard is it to get a quote from your company? Once a potential customer has a quote, is it difficult for them to place an order?
Improve the customer experience related to the RFQ and QTC processes by automating them. Allow customers to request quotes online. An eCommerce platform built for B2B should be able to combine a pricing engine and a workflow automation tool to create quotes automatically. The same goes for the QTC conversion process.
Automate your onboarding and remove another source of friction to improve the overall customer experience. The more you automate, the smoother the process, and the better the customer experience.
Personalize every interaction
With the digitalization technology for manufacturing readily available today, there is no excuse not to personalize every customer experience. Customer experience management 101 recognizes that buyers want to feel valued.
Do this by creating a personalized experience that starts by communicating in their preferred language and currency. Then, display a personalized product catalog for your manufacturing business clients. This may be the products they purchase most frequently or products pre-configured to their specifications. Prices should reflect any pre-negotiated discounts and at checkout, preferred shipping and payment terms should automatically be displayed.
Take personalization in the manufacturing industry to a higher level, by allowing your customers to create accounts that reflect their own internal hierarchy and purchasing processes. By giving users the ability to set the permissions and authorities for their own accounts, you personalize at the highest levels.
OroCommerce Features That Improve Customer Experience
Improving the customer experience in manufacturing requires a customer-centric focus and tools that remove friction at every turn. OroCommerce was designed from the ground up to smooth interactions between B2B buyers and sellers. It comes with tools to improve customer experience right out of the box.
Personalization at the customer level
ADDEV Materials is a French chemical company that creates value-added solutions on a per-customer basis. It leveraged the native capabilities of OroCommerce to offer different sites and different experiences according to the type of customer and their expectations. They used automation and workflow engines to customize the experience, digitize the RFQ process, and simplify reordering. All in all, each customer gets an experience tailored to their needs and expectations. The result? Turnover increased by 7 times!
Multi-site support
Saltworks is a leader in industrial and gourmet salts manufacturing in the United States. They sell salt by the ton to commercial customers and by the shaker to retail customers. Two very different customers with two very different customer experience expectations. OroCommerce allows Saltworks to serve both business models and customers with a single backend. Each customer sees the products, sizes, prices, and shipping that is appropriate for their use case. A retail customer buying an 8-ounce bag of Dead Sea salts for soaking gets a frictionless experience. The purchasing agent that needs 2000 pounds of pretzel salt gets the frictionless experience they expect as well.
Digital transformation tools
Manufacturing companies around the world use OroCommerce as part of their digital transformation. It’s no wonder OroCommerce was recognized by Gartner in its 2022 Capabilities for Digital Commerce Platforms Report.
Groupe Tini operates 4 brands serving over 33,000 customers and they needed to bring their business online. They selected their BBA Emballages brand to test the impact of a digital transformation. With OroCommerce they were able to quickly set up a web presence that used Oro native functionality to automatically display pricing according to website price, customer price, and group price.
Customers have insight into inventory levels by location and even see a delivery ETA based on their delivery location. They even set up eProcurement websites specifically for key customers. Everyone benefits from the automated request for quote process and sales reps are now free to concentrate their efforts on high-value customers. Based on the success of their test, this year they will expand their digital footprint to additional brands.
eCommerce and more
OroCommerce offers more than just another B2B eCommerce platform for the manufacturing industry. It provides a native CRM for enhanced marketing and customer relations and RAD tools for developing quick web apps. You don’t need to be a coding expert to create landing pages for marketing campaigns or cross-sell and up-sell offers. There are even tools to help with SEO optimization. It’s everything you need to enter the world of eCommerce in manufacuring.
Working with Oro to Improve Your Customer Experience
Start a conversation with Oro about improving your customer experience. We’ll listen carefully and help you chart a path to success. All Oro code is open-source, so you’ll have access to a large partner and integrator pool to scope, design, test, and implement your project. And Oro will be with you every step of the way. We measure our success by the success of our customers. Together, let’s improve your customer experience.
Keeping Customers Pleased
In 2023, keeping customers pleased requires more than manufacturing a product that meets their needs. You must also craft an entire customer experience around the product. From the aesthetics, ergonomics, and design of the product to how it is packaged and sold on the internet, customer experience matters. A customer-centric approach that focuses all departments on delivering the best customer experience possible is now a necessary component of manufacturing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is CX in manufacturing?
The customer experience (CX) in manufacturing refers to how a manufacturer engages with its customers and leads. It covers all marketing and sales touchpoints on every channel and includes interactions after the product is sold and delivered.
Why Customer Experience is Important for Manufacturers?
The customer experience in manufacturing is now the key differentiator between brands. B2B buyers will pay more for a better experience. By smoothing the buying journey, and removing friction, the faster the customer will complete their purchases.
What are the 5 parts of the customer experience cycle in manufacturing?
The process begins when the customer starts their search for a solution to a problem or a product. First, they become aware of your brand or product. This may be through social media, formal marketing, or searching the internet. Next, the buyer enters the acquisition stage when they interact with a salesperson or visit a showroom.
Once they make a purchase, they complete the conversion stage. As an existing customer, they enter the retention stage. Here, your efforts are focused on keeping them pleased with your products so they will purchase again. Finally, if you provide a great experience and a product that meets their needs, the customer enters the loyalty or advocacy phase. As brand ambassadors, they recommend your products in person, through reviews, and on social media.
What is the place of customer experience management in an organization?
Managing customer experience should be at the center of the manufacturing organization. Each new process or product should center on how to make things better for your customers.
How does B2B customer experience differ from B2C customer experience?
The lines between B2B and B2C customer experience are beginning to blur. Both want a frictionless, easy buying experience they can perform anywhere and anytime. However, the B2B buyer in the manufacturing industry is more concerned with establishing an ongoing relationship. For B2B buyers, inventory availability and visibility into supply chains play a greater role in the experience.
