What is B2B Customer Service? Examples + Best Practices

Look around for examples of great customer service. Chances are, you’ll find examples of how top B2C brands like Apple, Tesla, and Walmart provide exceptional service to their customers.

But what about B2B customer service? Should B2B companies focus on customer service as much as their B2C counterparts do?

Let’s put things in context with a stat. A Gartner study shows how 3 in 5 buyers regret the software purchase they made. The major reasons? Difficult implementation and mismanaged expectations.

So, every B2B company has the imperative to keep their customers happy to not just retain their existing customer base, but acquire new customers.

In other words, exceptional customer service is non-negotiable for your business to grow.

Here, we’re going to look at all aspects of B2B customer service: its importance, how it’s different from B2C customer service, examples and best practices worthy of emulation, and a tool recommendation to help you deliver the best-possible customer service.

Let’s get down to brass tacks.

What is B2B customer service?

B2B customer service is all the service-related interactions between your B2B company and businesses who are your customers that starts from the moment they purchase your solution and continues over the entire course of their association with your business.

Typically, B2B customer service is both reactive and proactive.

In reactive customer service, you help customers overcome any challenges they report while using your product or service. This can include answering their queries and sharing relevant resources to help them troubleshoot the problem at the earliest.

Proactive customer service involves you initiating the conversation with your customer, where you start by understanding their desired end state, and then suggesting steps that’ll get them to that end state as quickly as possible.

This begs the question: Why is customer service important in B2B?

The importance of B2B customer service (3 benefits)

Helping your customers with excellent B2B service is important as it helps you improve customer satisfaction by helping you build strong relationships with your customers, which ultimately promotes your business growth.

Let’s see in detail. A survey by Oracle on consumers’ service experience reveals:

• 98% of consumers agree that a positive experience with an organization results in a greater likelihood to purchase or continue to purchase from them.
• 99% of consumers report that the quality of customer service that they receive from a business influences their overall impression of that organization to some extent.

Yes, you read these numbers right. Few opinions are as unanimously held by consumers as these ones.

The same survey also points that that B2B service experiences are held to the same standards as B2C experiences, as people tend to carry the same expectations after interacting with popular B2C brands.

So, a B2B company that aspires to increase or sustain its growth momentum has its work cut out when it comes to improving its customer service.

Let’s zoom into the top 3 reasons on why B2B customer service is important for your business:

Reduce customer churn rate

Customer churn rate is the percentage of customers who discontinue using a company’s product or service over a period of time.

Customers may churn for a variety of reasons: They might have found a better alternative to your solution, or they might find your customer support, well, not supportive enough.

So, when you adopt strategies to improve your customer retention that includes improving your customer support, you improve your overall customer satisfaction. This translates to a decrease in your churn rate, as satisfied customers tend to stick with you for a longer period of time.

Increase your customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value refers to the amount of money your customer is expected to spend with your business as long as they use your product or service.

This is a corollary of the previous point. If satisfied customers stick with you for extended periods of time, it means there will be an increase in 3 things:

• Customer lifespan: The length of time customers engage with your business.
• Average purchase value: How much customers spend on each purchase.
• Average purchase frequency rate: How often your customers would purchase from you.

Naturally, if these 3 go up, the customer lifetime value also increases.

Studies show how acquiring a new customer can cost 5 to 7 times more than retaining existing customers. So, ensuring high customer lifetime value will help you drive revenue sustainably.

Boost customer loyalty and advocacy

From what we’ve seen so far, it’s evident that B2B customer support plays a crucial role in shaping the overall customer experience.

A direct consequence of improving B2B customer experience is an increase in customer loyalty—the customer’s willingness to consistently choose your products or services over your competition.

The more loyal your customers are, the more likely they are to become your advocates. Brand advocacy can result in a ripple effect, where the positive word-of-mouth spreads and attracts new customers to your business.

Major 8 differences between B2B and B2C customer service

While the ultimate goal of customer service—B2B or B2C—is to help customers, there are significant differences between B2B customer service and B2C customer service in several aspects like sales cycle, stakeholders involved, nature of feedback, and personalization.

Here’s a quick summary of the differences between B2B and B2C customer service based on 8 key aspects:

5 best practices for B2B customer service

Now that we’ve covered the scope and importance of B2B customer service, let’s check out the 5 best practices for a B2B organization to follow if they’re looking to improve their customer service.

Make customer service a priority for the whole company

“If we were serious about building our brand around being the best in customer service, customer service had to be the whole company, not just a single department.”

This is what former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wrote while reflecting on his experience on building a customer-centric culture. And it’s worth emulating in a B2B context too.

For the entire company to align on delivering world-class customer service, every employee must understand how their work impacts the customer journey. This means:

• Mapping out your customer journey to see the interactions between you and your customer, including their touchpoints, user actions, and pain points.
• Fostering cross-team collaborations to ensure every interaction the customer has with your company is positive.
• Monitoring the impact that different teams are having on major customer success KPIs like customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and churn rate.
• Breaking down data silos between teams by allowing members of all teams access customer data from sources like CRM systems, support tickets, product usage data, and marketing automation platforms.

When these fall into place, all your key customer metrics like CSAT, response time, resolution time, and retention increases. Your customers get more personalized, timely and relevant service as teams become more collaborative.

Personalize your customer interactions

Compared to B2C customers, B2B customers have higher expectations for personalization.

A study by Forrester shows 72% of customers expect personalization while using the product or service and 71% of customers look forward to personalized interactions while engaging with the company.

So, how can you successfully personalize your B2B customer service? By following these steps:

• Develop customized onboarding plans. Tailor your onboarding based on the customer’s specific goals to ensure they get the most value from your product or service. Include milestones that align with their business objectives and offer training sessions that are customized to the customer’s knowledge level and business use case.
• Have dedicated account managers. Assign account managers to each account to provide continuous and personalized attention based on the customer’s history, goals, and challenges.
• Share personalized content. Share content like white papers, case studies, webinars, or blog posts that’s relevant to the customer’s industry, role, and specific needs.
• Craft loyalty programs: To boost retention, develop personalized customer loyalty programs like discounts or exclusive offers that reward customers based on their specific engagement levels and business outcomes.

Go multichannel, but know when to use the right channel

Given that B2B customers expect personalized interactions while engaging with your business, it’s important to know which channel they prefer to engage the most.

For instance, some customers may prioritize emails over calls, while others might prefer getting in touch over live chat or even social media.

So, ensure your B2B customer support has a multichannel approach, where you’re typically using all key channels like email, phone, video calls, social media, and live chat to communicate with your customers wherever they prefer.

To make sure you’re using the right channel for the right purpose, you could set channel-specific guidelines like:

• Email for sharing detailed information like proposals, or follow-up communications. Ensure emails are personalized and reference previous interactions.
• Phone/video calls for complex discussions such as resolving issues that require detailed explanation or negotiation.
• Live chat/chatbots on websites for quick, real-time assistance to address relatively minor issues or providing fast answers during business hours.
• Social media for on-the-go engagement and brand monitoring.
• Self-service portals for addressing common queries through a knowledge base that’s comprehensive, accurate, user-friendly, and up-to-date.

Establish customer feedback loops

Customer feedback loop entails mutual interaction between you and your customers to constantly enhance and improve your product based on their inputs. It contains 4 steps:

• Collect customer feedback through survey tools, live chat, social media monitoring etc.
• Analyze feedback data to see which issues or pain points are being brought up over and over again.
• Applying feedback by fixing the issues that the customer raised.
• Following up with customers to close the loop.

Use AI to unburden your agents

B2B customers of today have exacting standards—they demand fast, consistent, secure, personalized, and proactive customer experience from you.

Research by HubSpot shows 82% of customers expect problem resolution from customer service agents within 3 hours without compromising on personalization. Naturally, service agents struggle to keep up with these mounting customer expectations.

One efficient way to tackle this is by using AI for customer service. The advances in generative AI can help agents automate several manual tasks. Here’s a glimpse:

• Accelerate response times through AI-powered chatbots to free up time for handling more complex inquiries.
• Leverage AI’s predictive omnichannel analytics based on past interactions and behaviors to anticipate customer needs and deliver proactive customer service.
• Devote more time to projects that increase customer value by allowing AI to automate mundane tasks like data entry, appointment scheduling, and customer research.

3 inspiring examples of B2B customer service

Spotnana

Headquartered in New York, Spotnana provides a Travel-as-a-Service platform to make corporate travel simpler, more affordable, and efficient.

With legacy B2B customer support software, they faced challenges in scaling their operations. They didn’t have a structured ticketing system in place, forcing customer success managers to manually handle queries. On top of this, their data was fragmented across multiple tools, which prevented cross-team collaboration.

However, once they switched to DevRev, they saw:

• Reduced manual work with AI-driven customer support. Utilizing AI-first solutions for common customer queries, Spotnana significantly reduced manual efforts in resolving repetitive questions, improving customer service and freeing up time for customer success staff.
• Streamlined internal communication and product management. DevRev’s features eliminated the need for multiple platforms, bringing Spotnana’s operations into a unified, cohesive workflow.
• Unified data view. Collating data from product and customer experiences in one place, Spotnana was able to drive more data-driven decisions. Having a single platform also facilitated centralized communication and document sharing.

Uniphore

Uniphore provides a leading Enterprise AI platform that supports billions of customer and employee engagements across 20 countries on a weekly basis.

Given the nature of its operations, Uniphore needed a support tool that would allow engineering and customer support teams to collaborate effortlessly and solve customer tickets. The team looked for a solution that allowed their support team to effortlessly connect to product teams and be integral in delivering product improvement insights based on engagements with customers.

With DevRev, Uniphore was able to:

• Migrate 16,000 tickets from their erstwhile support tool to DevRev in less than 6 hours.
• Have a single source of truth for their customer data including their level and SLAs.
• Allow seamless collaboration between support, engineering and product teams to incorporate customer feedback effectively into software development.

Aditya Birla Capital

A part of the $66 billion global conglomerate Aditya Birla Group, Aditya Birla Capital provides financial solutions including insurance for over 25 million customers through its mobile apps.

Some of the service-related problems the organization faced include limited user issue highlights that resulted in delayed problem resolution and inability to identify hotspots and dead zones in the app interface.

Once they used DevRev, they experienced:

• Faster bug diagnosis
• Improved user journeys and feature adoption
• Independent resolution of issues by the support team

Deliver stellar B2B customer service with DevRev

A study by Deloitte and the Customer Experience Professionals Association found out that while 9 in 10 respondents were confident that AI has the potential to improve customer experience, only 3 in 10 said AI is used often within the customer experience today.

So yes, AI is key to improving your B2B customer service. But take a step back and ask yourself this while finalizing your B2B customer support software: Is AI built into the new technology or bolted on to it?

Retrofitting AI into legacy interfaces presents constraints in the depth and breadth of AI integration, which creates a disjointed user experience. What’s more, AI integrations create dependencies on external vendors and present challenges of lock-in and lack of flexibility.

If you’re looking for an AI-first platform that streamlines your B2B support infrastructure, consolidates multiple tools onto a single hyperconverged solution, and fosters customer-centricity into every aspect of your organization, check out DevRev.

DevRev was built from the start with AI in mind to avoid the pitfalls of bolting AI onto legacy systems, so that you can get seamless data interoperability, robust performance, advanced security, and effortless scalability.

Its AgentOS features a smart knowledge graph that seamlessly integrates diverse data sources, ensuring up-to-date, contextual information for AI and human agents.

Curious how DevRev can help you take your B2B customer service to the next level? Book a demo now!