B2B Companies spending more to improve Customers’ Experience - Accenture

The overwhelming majority of business-to-business (B2B) organizations are spending more on initiatives to improve their customers’ experience but many are not getting the most return on those investments, according to new research from Accenture. In fact, the study, based on a survey of 1,458 sales, service and customer executives of B2B companies in 13 countries, suggests most (76 percent) may be wasting up to half of their investment on ineffective customer experience initiatives.
 Accenture’s research indicates that executives believe their business customers increasingly are exhibiting consumer-like behavior in terms of how they view, interact with and buy from their suppliers; including their knowledge of the market, higher expectations and greater price sensitivity. As a result, 43 percent of B2B supplier executives say they intend to increase spending on improving customer experience programs by 6 percent or more over the next fiscal year. However, more than half the respondents admit that their customer experience programs had achieved little, flat or negative return in terms of retaining customers (55 percent) and building global revenues (52 percent).
 “B2B Customer Experience: Start Playing to Win and Stop Playing Not to Lose” explores the significance, scale and success of B2B companies’ initiatives to provide their business customers with a positive customer experience across all sales, marketing and service touch points. Eighty-five percent of B2B supplier executives consider the overall customer experience they provide in sales and service to be ‘very important’ to their strategic priorities, and 70 percent recognize that, over the next two years, customer-experience related considerations will play an even larger role in the overall corporate strategy.