UniformMarket Blog

Things B2B Uniform Retailers Can do to Improve Customer Experience

Written by Jason | Jan 2, 2023 5:05:36 AM

An improved customer experience (CX) is closely linked with increased revenue as well as other advantages. With the rapid growth of B2B eCommerce in the uniform industry, the consumer behavior continues to evolve. B2B customers today prefer a brand with a self-serve website that provides detailed information enabling them to explore, research and order at their convivence.

McKinsey & Company estimates that improvements in e-commerce customer experience can lead to a 10% to 15% reduction in customer churn, a 20% to 40% increase in win rates of offers and a 50% lower cost to serve.

For B2B uniform sellers customer satisfaction also applies helping to partner with their B2B customers to ensure that their end-shoppers are fully satisfied with the purchasing experience.

However, before diving into the things uniform retailers can do to improve customer experience (CX), let's first understand what do B2B customers want.

What do B2B customers want?

Customers in the B2B space are becoming more and more demanding. These business buyers are, of course, also B2C customers in their free time: they are used to streamlined B2C customer experiences and their expectations are shaped by B2C giants.


Let’s quickly review the top priorities of your B2B customers:
  • The top 3 KPIs for B2B clients: Cost optimization, seamless purchasing process, and the end shopper satisfaction.
  • Relationships are important to B2B buyers, even in the digital age. In the opinion of four out of five buyers, the buyer-seller relationship is significant and affects their purchasing choices.
  • Undoubtedly, eCommerce now is the number one purchasing channel for B2B buyers. Over 50% of professional buyers now use web stores to place orders, followed by email (approx. 45%), and phone calls (approx. 36%).

    Improving B2B customer experience

Here are a few things B2B uniform retailers can implement to improve Customer experience. 

1. Speeding up B2B eCommerce

Speed and efficiency consistently show up as top concerns during the B2B purchasing process. How can a uniform retailer speed up their B2B customer experience? Here are some of the CX best practices:

  • Free up your team’s time to focus more on relationship building interaction: By providing portals with self-service options to your customers, your sales teams can focus on their real-job: engaging in meaningful, relationship-building customer interactions.
  • Sync your tech stack: Connecting all of your relevant systems, such as your e-commerce platform, ERP, payment, PIM system, and more, will hasten the entire order-to-cash (O2C) process. Make sure all of your technology works together seamlessly to give customers a quick and easy experience, from ordering and delivery to billing and returns.

2. Staying relevant

Whichever way you decide to enhance the B2B customer experience make sure the experience you offer your consumers is pertinent to them. What do they need? What do they expect? How do people want to interact with you, shop, and communicate?

B2B uniform retailers can create a more relevant customer exp, by implementing the following:

  • Group stores: While using group stores you can choose to display only the products that will be relevant to the shoppers of that organization. This eliminates the chance of wrong orders and boosts customer satisfaction as they are able to view what they want instead of browsing through tons of product.
UniformMarket’s Retail Commerce website lets you launch stores with specific products from a given catalog to maximize customer experience. 
  • Personalized customer exp: Customizable store templates representing the organization ensure that buyers get a consistent exp and a website that strongly represents the business they work for. In the uniform industry, customer-specific delivery, payment, shipping terms and more add up to provide a personalized exp.

  • Flexible CMS for rapid implementation: Easy-to-use CMS empowers uniform sellers to execute faster and independently. Quicker implementation means up-to-date content for all website visitors making them trust your brand more and leaving a positive influence on their buying decision.

    3. Implement employee-centric uniform stores with ease

How do you simplify the B2B customer experience?


  • Accommodate complex buying rules with ease:
Businesses have their pre-defined buying rules which include uniform allotments by role, order approval management, payment option, shipping rules and more. Dedicated webstores enable you to create, launch and manage employee uniform store with custom buying rules for the client. Serving customers with complex distribution boosts customer exp.
  • Leverage technology:
Technology can facilitate B2B customer experience. For example, AI sizing solution integrated into the portal can result in reduced order returns.
  • Prevent order errors:
    The profitability, productivity, and sales of your clients' businesses are significantly impacted by order errors. Determine the main reason(s) why orders go wrong for both your customers and your business, and then take action to fix these friction spots.

4. Create a seamless omnichannel experience:

The omnichannel strategy involves selling products on multiple channels, putting more emphasis on integrating your system to create a seamless brand exp across all touchpoints. Omnichannel is the unified exp that works no matter the channel the consumer chooses to interact with you though.

By doing so customers will have the flexibility to shop from anywhere at any time making uniform buying as fun and exciting like a regular B2C shopping.

UniformMarket’s Retail Commerce can be integrated with all your sales and distribution channel to provide a unified buying exp.

 

5. Transparency is the key

Streamlining your omnichannel strategy and creating an online store that offers accurate, real-time product information are two strategies to increase transparency for your B2B customers.

Using manual catalog management techniques can have a significant negative impact on business outcomes at such times when digital adoption is at its peak. Customers are constantly reliant on accurate, up-to-date product information to make purchasing decisions.

Allowing your enterprise customers to access inventory levels, order statuses and other changing product information in real-time are one of the ways to establish an exceptional exp.

Such a customer-centric strategy will boost client happiness and loyalty, which will inevitably increase sales, referrals, and customer retention for your B2B company.

Leveraging tech to transform your B2B customer exp

As an online uniform business all of this can seem a bit overwhelming when you are trying to provide a generic web store to your B2B customers that requires every custom-feature to be built from scratch. Instead of shopping a static solution for e-commerce, it may be better to consider one that is just as dynamic as market changes.

There’s no need to worry though. There are full-service solutions for uniform B2B sellers to leverage the latest technological advancements.

UniformMarket’s platform designed specifically for the uniform industry, with custom-made solutions baked into the system, makes applying the above customer experience pillars like a breeze.

 

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