How can you make a B2B customer relationship thrive? Pricing obviously figures in, but brands are increasingly realizing that customer experience is a big factor as well. For example, in one 2018 survey, 60 percent of B2B businesses polled said they were striving to improve the client experience in an effort to boost loyalty.
Just as in B2C, a good customer relationship is increasingly dependent on a single concept: Trust. This concept gains even more relevance in the B2B world.
Build better relationships with privacy and trust
Consider all the moving parts for a typical business account: Multiple users in one account that require separate access levels; established pricing and other private business information that needs to be kept secure; inventory and availability data that needs to be accurate; and so on.
When these elements feel seamless, consistent, and secure, business partners feel trust in the brand. When they feel confusing, or unsafe, that trust can be broken, along with the relationship.
New global data protection and consumer privacy rules – such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – compound the issue. The ground rules for engaging digitally with customers – be they business partners or end-user consumers – are evolving dramatically. For B2B brands that depend on e-mail campaigns and personalized content to drive demand, this makes an already difficult job even more complex.
To retain customers and win more market share, B2B businesses need a strategy for delivering trusted customer experiences.
3 ways B2B businesses can build customer trust
Step 1: Put the customer first
The convergence of the B2C and B2B spaces is well-documented. For B2B brands, adopting some B2C tactics can directly boost trust with business partners. For example, a mobile app that provides specific functionality for particular business personae.
But, under GDPR and other new regulations, personalized platforms and channels must be fueled by secure, consent-based data. The data management systems feeding this personalization need access to multiple sources from across the organization, and users must be able to control the experience at every touch point.
To deliver a true “Me2B” experience, brands need a holistic data management strategy that honors users’ data, preferences, and consent at each engagement.
Step 2: Insist on better data
B2B marketers are constantly developing and refining engagement strategies, channels, content, and nurturing tactics to drive sales pipeline. In the past, many treated a prospect’s consent as an afterthought, prizing database volume over the value of individual leads. GDPR is ending this practice.
Lori Wizdo, VP and Principal Analyst for Forrester, says, “The GDPR will eventually obliterate the ‘volume = value’ equation with many specific regulations about the collection and storage of data.”
The days of collecting data first and deciding how to use it later are gone. Now, marketers must decide what data they need to collect, work with the broader organization to collect it, secure consent from customers, and use it only in ways that are necessary for the original purpose of its collection.
Collecting and maintaining consent should not be seen as a burden. It’s an important chance to reconnect with prospects, partners, and clients while offering them control of their experiences. By doing this, the quality of existing leads is bound to increase. In other words, instead of shouting into the void, marketers are preaching to the choir. It’s a win-win.
Step 3: Act now
The EU began enforcing the GDPR on May 25, 2018, and will begin enforcing an updated ePrivacy Directive soon. California’s legislature recently passed its own comprehensive data privacy law, and the US Chamber of Commerce is asking Congress to push for federal data privacy legislation. The Brazilian government also announced a new Data Protection Bill of Law in July.
These regulations have common DNA. All of them seek to protect consumers and put them in control by ensuring businesses are more transparent about how and why they collect their data. Requests for consent for terms of service, privacy policies, and marketing communications must be explicit, unambiguous, and kept up to date. Also, organizations must give customers self-service access to, and control of, the information they collect.
Despite the risk of massive fines for being out of compliance, the B2B market has been slow to respond. In the weeks leading up to GDPR enforcement, Wizdo said only 15% B2B marketers were fully compliant with the requirements of the GDPR. The majority said they were only partially ready, and 18% were still considering what to do.
Why? Many B2B marketers thought GDPR didn’t apply to them. Others assumed they didn’t collect or process the data covered under the regulation. Neither of these assumptions proved correct.
The GDPR does apply to B2B brands and does apply to the personal data of business users, including their work email addresses and phone numbers. The reality is, businesses who haven’t mapped personal data stored in their databases to explicit consent agreements now face serious legal and financial risk.
Vanguard B2B brands are using this moment to re-focus their customer data strategies. They’re improving data governance, enticing users to share their data in exchange for real value, making terms and policies clearer, and enabling entirely new classes of services with permission-based, first-party customer data.
In short, they’re turning compliance into a genuine market advantage.
