Customer service technologies for B2B companies are having a moment. B2B customer service organizations need more than artificial intelligence-driven omnichannel engagement and simple ticketing. They must also holistically manage post-sale customer processes spanning onboarding and training, customer success, and customer service as a source of competitive differentiator and customer growth. Why is this important? B2B companies have fewer customers than B2C companies, yet each customer or account is more valuable, so more is at stake.
There are three ways that B2B customer service is different:
- The customer or account. Each B2B customer is a team, and turnover is inevitable. In addition, many organizations within the company might use your product or service and will need customer service. This means that relationship management is complicated: relationships must be managed at the individual team member level, across departments, and at the account level.
- The customer team supporting the account. Customer service is not the only department with which B2B companies interface. B2B customers engage with their customer success teams, their account managers, and their professional services teams, often more frequently than they interact with customer service. This means that customer-facing teams supporting B2B organizations must have a shared understanding of the customer: their business goals, their contract status, deployment and usage details, customer health, and ongoing and past service issues.
- Customer service issues. Sure, there are simple customer issues, like information requests, and straightforward tickets that are one-and-done, but there are also much more complex issues that require offline troubleshooting, subject matter expertise, and a knowledge of customers' broader ecosystems. This is a much higher level of support than what B2C customers typically require.
What does this mean for customer service software for B2B organizations?
- Great outcomes rest on getting problems solved. Great CX is important. However this is more than just offering best-in-class self-service, chatbots, and omnichannel engagement. B2B customer service must also manage complex relationships, case workflows, and resolutions to service-level agreements and service contracts to guaranteed outcomes.
- Collaboration is key. Customer service technologies must embed collaboration tools within the agent desktop. This is because many cases are complex and require swarming of resources to resolve cases or reaching out to subject matter experts for help.
- Back-office integration must be supported. Depending on the industry and the case, customer service agents will require information about invoice status, supply chain data, the product's deployment and use, and the health of assets. This information is housed in back-office enterprise resource planning and supply chain applications that must be pulled into agents' desktops.
- Unified customer data for all customer-facing roles. Customer data must be uniformly accessible to all customer-facing personnel, even though the user experience for customer service agents will differ from what success managers require. Agents should have access to customer health scores to understand the status of the account relationship.
As you select your customer service technology, look beyond the shiny objects like AI and AI agents that get all the spotlight today and consider what value you want to deliver to your customers. For B2B organizations it's about accountability, reliability, and managing service issues to predefined quality targets.
Kate Leggett is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.