Читать книгу A Customer-oriented Manager for B2B Services - Valerie Mathieu - Страница 55

Service is often defined from the customer’s point of view as a lived experience. This experience is built from the observations that customers make voluntarily or involuntarily during the service, from the actions that they are led to perform, from the human or material interactions in which they participate or from the emotions or feelings that are generated within them. This notion of customer experience has been widely addressed in the B2C field but seems to be breaking through more timidly in the B2B field. This can be explained on the one hand by a culture naturally focused on service, results and technical and business aspects. On the other hand, the belief in the rationality of B2B markets makes the notions of emotions, feelings and, more broadly, customer experience suspect. However, the simple question asked to the customer about the service clearly shows the importance of the experience. We should not neglect the fact that B2B customers are also B2C customers who appreciate positive experiences in the context of their personal consumption and who will tend to translate this performance into expectations in their professional sphere. B2B customers are also Amazon or Apple customers who offer a fluid, simple and responsive experience.

A study of a large sample of B2B and B2C customers conducted by Salesforce Research in 2019 sheds light on the importance placed on experience by B2B customers¹¹:

 – 89% of B2B respondents confirm that the experience a company delivers is as important as its products and services; the rate is 84% for B2C respondents;

 – 82% of B2B respondents say they are willing to pay more for a better experience; only 59% of B2C customers are willing to do so;

 – 82% of B2B respondents say that a great experience with one company increases expectations of other companies; 69% of B2C respondents make the same claim.

However, it must be admitted that the understanding of the experience is much more complex in a B2B environment than in a B2C one. If the B2C customer experience is that of an individual, the B2B customer experience is that of a company. First of all, the customer experience takes place over a long cycle. It begins with the first contact between the service provider and the customer in a pre-purchase phase, the duration of which increases with the complexity of the service. Then, many services are provided on the basis of multi-year contracts with a high level of interaction between the service provider and its client. To this temporal dimension, we must add that the experience is the result of a face-to-face meeting between a large number of actors on the client and provider sides.

While the manager cannot be responsible for the entire customer experience, he or she must nevertheless be careful to deliver the elements that he or she and his or her team control, in order to contribute to a positive experience for the customer. This includes the interaction between the customer and the front-line employees, who by their customer orientation will contribute to the creation of a positive service experience.