What B2B companies can learn from consumers’ service experiences

Today, enterprises are facing an environment of volatile and cascading challenges. Whether it’s the global inflationary and recessionary markets, ongoing supply-chain limitations, fluctuating workforce attitudes, or the perpetual maturing of consumer expectations, customer journeys continue to be impacted by these challenges and deviate from the desired experience more often than expected. As a result, it is more critical than ever for organizations to prioritize delivering quality service experiences. Service experiences happen throughout the entire customer lifecycle—before and after the purchase of a company’s products or services and across multiple channels. With this, businesses are presented with the tremendous opportunity to leverage service to build loyalty, gain recognition, and flourish during this challenging environment.

B2B organizations are falling behind

As maturing consumer expectations are often at the forefront of business-to-consumer brands, the importance of delivering quality service experiences has already been embraced strongly in consumer-based-markets. Organizations spanning multiple industries, from travel & hospitality to e-commerce or finance, are often recognized as delivering best-in-class customer service. Yet, strained by complex processes that often cross multiple back-office systems, B2B organizations have been slow to adopt the latest customer service innovations. To reverse course, it is crucial for B2B leaders to reconsider the value that quality service interactions provide to the business. So, what can B2B companies learn from how consumer-oriented companies operate?

The new playbook for B2B service

To answer this question, Oracle partnered with Acend2 and surveyed over 5,000 people globally to gain insight into how customer service is perceived, the ways service impacts a customer’s overall experience with a brand, and how these consumer service experiences influence the expectations of the people we work with and for. Our key findings include: 

1. Customer service quality matters
   When deciding to make continued purchases within a particular industry, customer service quality is more important than price.
    
2. An effortless experience is critical to adapting to the ever-increasing needs of customers
   When contacting businesses, consumers’ two most important considerations are the speed of connecting to an agent and limiting the effort required to achieve a resolution.
    
3. Digital adoption continues to grow
   Service channels with the largest increase in adoption included webchat with an agent, website, email, and mobile app.
    
4. Self-service and assisted service are equally important
   The top factor that contributes to a positive service experience varies across regions between either helpful service agents/technicians or having the ability to easily find the information needed.

Turn insight into action

Employees’ customer service expectations in the workplace are evolving. Oracle also found that 96% of employees who interact with customer service departments as a part of their job say that interactions they have as a consumer influence what they expect from customer service departments they encounter in the workplace.

To learn how B2B enterprises can turn our insights into action, download a copy of our report, “What B2B organizations can learn from consumers’ service experiences.”

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Oracle Fusion Service

Deliver efficient service outcomes at scale when and where customers engage. Oracle Fusion Service is a unified platform of apps, data, and capabilities enabling effortless self-service, agent-assisted service, and field service workflows tailored to your industry and use case. Learn more here.

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Asset-based Service for High Tech and Manufacturing

Asset-based service helps businesses in asset-intensive industries, such as high-tech and manufacturing, manage the service lifecycle, predict and prevent downtime, improve efficiency, and grow service-related revenue. This pre-integrated solution deploys rapidly, automates critical workflows and unifies your service value chain by connecting customers, service teams, and assets. Learn more here.