‘Service with a smile’ was always a popular slogan in retail, and even in the B2B realm, sales agents, channel partners and VARs prized personal interaction as a path to revenue growth and client retention.
Faced with competitive pressures – on the B2C side – retailers started to embrace technologies like self-checkout lanes, voice recognition customer support and self-service. B2B companies were quick to embrace these innovations with self-service web portals for customers, AI-driven sales solutions and a re-visitation of channel programs to focus on more scalable and more digital models of sales and distribution. On both sides though, early on companies faced limitations when these solutions offered no flexibility, and no ability to address out-of-the-ordinary requests that weren’t on the script.
We have reached a tipping point. AI-driven customer experience solutions are not only as good as human interaction, they’re better, and may even seem more personal than an interaction with a live human. A fascinating example can be seen in Kroger’s new intelligent smart shelves, which is being run in test markets. Rather than leveraging older, in-store demographics gleaned from loyalty cards, the smart shelf can, if a customer has their smartphone app open, recognize the customer and offer recommendations, discounts, promotions, and other useful information based on the customer’s in-store actions. For example, if you’re walking past the soda aisle, the smart shelf will know your favorite brand and offer up a coupon.
In the B2B realm, we’re seeing more hardware and software vendors moving towards cloud and as-a-service models, and this too has demanded a broad shift in how those companies interact with their customers. In the as-a-service model, the traditionally large up-front fees are replaced with a subscription model. As a result, go-to-market strategies are undergoing a transformative shift to embrace AI-enablement. For example, AI would be used to direct client activity and direct the sales account team by informing the reps on what prospects are likely to be interested in, or what existing clients are likely to buy.
B2B buyers appreciate the efficiency and speed of an AI-driven customer interaction model, but at the end of the day, B2B buyers are still human, and they like to be recognized. According to recent research commissioned by hotel price comparison platform HotelsCombined, 22% of American business travelers like to be recognized when they stay in the same hotel on a regular basis for business travel.
There’ll always be a place for the human sales rep who has a knack for remembering birthdays and that big client’s favorite brand of Scotch. That sort of personalization though isn’t scalable – but with the assistance of AI tools, it can be. Customer experience isn’t just for consumer goods. According to Accenture, 90% of B2B executives said they intend to maintain or increase spending on customer experience.
It’s interesting that the Accenture study also shows that while almost all B2B executives put resources into customer experience, only 23% achieve strong returns from those initiatives, and 20% generate low or negative returns. Those results don’t mean that paying attention to customer experience in a B2B environment is a lost cause, far from it. Rather, it means the vast majority of B2B marketers haven’t yet realized the tipping point is here, and have yet to embrace the more advanced AI-driven technologies that have transformed B2B customer experience into a driver of growth.
The good news for B2B marketers is that in this early stage of the game, there is room to grow, and those early adopters to bring AI into the customer experience mix will gain a competitive edge. The window is narrow though, and those marketers must be quick to adopt these new technologies or risk getting left behind.
