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The digital customer portal is the next evolution of the B2B online shop. It can replicate the buyer’s procurement process, digitize the vendor’s sales processes, and support after-sales activities and the development of digital services. Covering a large part of the customer lifecycle, it provides a full spectrum of services during the various phases of the relationship. It also enables targeted communications based on the various roles and requirements at the customer’s end.
B2B companies today face a whole range of challenges:
So what can vendors do? One option is to offer high-quality services—the better you cater to the specific needs of customers, the more you stand out from your competitors.
The digital customer portal is the next evolutionary step of the B2B online shop. It’s the platform vendors need to meet demanding customer requirements while also gathering data to create new digital services and personalized business models. Using this technology, vendors can strengthen brand loyalty and generate new opportunities for sales and value creation.
“Our customer portal with integrated web shop incorporates our B2B customers directly into our processes. It is taking our relationships to a whole new level, as we focus our marketing, sales, and service on the digital customers of today. The quality of our services has improved significantly, for example, we now provide personalized recommendations and other information. Our marketing department can quickly identify what prospects need and communicate with them more effectively. In sales, we can now make personalized offers and negotiate online at any time. And our service staff can offer products and services in a very proactive way.”
HEAD OF DIGITAL AT A COMPANY IN THE OPTICAL AND OPTOELECTRONIC INDUSTRY
The digital customer portal is a central hub for efficient and productive interaction. As a result, it is becoming a pivotal element in the increasingly digital customer relationship. Combining digital selling and service processes, the typical portal provides a harmonized view of individual customers across all locations and systems. It also merges customer, transaction, and product data with service offerings to create a unified information and service platform for customers, sales and service employees.
Conceptually, the portal is built on four pillars that represent different usage scenarios and the associated benefits for vendor and customer.
Today’s B2B buyers want to manage their own data, products, and service agreements. They also want 24x7 access to the vendor’s information, processes, and e-learning content. Firstly, this reduces their administrative workload. Secondly, they can retain their existing internal processes. In addition, B2B buyers expect the same self-service features they are accustomed to as private consumers.
A digital customer portal enables:
Vendors can use product-related services to boost customer satisfaction and take advantage of upselling and cross-selling opportunities. The keys to success are personalization as well as fast and flexible communication across all touchpoints. For seamless interaction between vendor and customer, all information needs to be accessible in a central location.
A digital customer portal enables:
We are now in the era of the “empowered buyer,” who has greater independence when it comes to purchasing decisions. As a result, many pre-sales activities are already complete before the buyer contacts a sales representative. Nevertheless, that human interaction is more important than ever. In fact, sales representatives play a crucial part in building and maintaining customer relationships. Now assuming more of a consultancy function, they provide ideas and support on potentially complex issues while guiding the client through the buying process.
Supported by a digital customer portal, sales representatives can add value during the customer’s purchase decision-making journey, with exciting potential for reconfiguring sales processes and touchpoints.
Possibilities include:
Services are a key differentiator in the marketplace. Vendors can use them to create tailored offerings and thus real added value for specific target groups. As products become increasingly digitized within the Internet of Things, they can be replicated in digital form and used to gather data. This provides insights into product usage and other customer behavior. Vendors can then identify specific customer needs and create tailored services to meet them. The digitized products (“digital twins”) can be registered in the portal and linked to digital services.
User benefits:
Products are no longer purchased, but rented, leased or shared. Machine engineers and distributors have already understood this. According to a 2018 Capgemini survey, 72 percent of manufacturers expect to sell not only products but also services in the future.
Imagine a drill not sold, but billed according to the pay-per-use method.
Take a look at our smart drill showcase!
B2B customers, too, expect a shopping and service experience that is convenient, all-inclusive, and available at any time—leading to fundamental change in many traditional business models. So it’s hardly surprising that a digital customer portal is becoming the primary platform for handling increasingly digitized customer relationships. These portals are already well established in the B2C sector, where they are widely used by electricity, gas, water, insurance, and mobile providers to consolidate sales and service processes. Many B2B companies still lack this customer orientation.
Yet it is B2B where customer portals are the ideal solution for:
If all sales and service processes would be centered in a powerful and deeply integrated customer portal, B2B companies could expect positive side effects, such as:
Communicating with customers burns money. Sales and support staff is often burdened with recurring routine tasks: taking orders, sending out documents and invoices, and locating user guides and data sheets. These processes are costly, time-consuming, prone to human error, and occur throughout the customer life cycle: from customer acquisition, sale, and customer onboarding through to support and after-sales service. As products and services become more complex, these costs will inevitably rise.
Using the B2B self-service tools in the digital customer portal, customers can access information and documents whenever they want. This frees up staff in sales and service roles and reduces errors. Another plus point is that by using the portal to support and simplify core sales tasks—such as negotiation, fulfillment, invoicing, reporting, and master data management (e.g., customers, products, price lists)—vendors can reduce the cost per customer contact and let sales staff focus on what matters most: adding real value for customers.
Services play a crucial role in driving customer satisfaction. Most B2B customers have grown up in a digital world and expect the same service experience and usability they are accustomed to as B2C consumers. Every day, buyers use online portals offering tailored services that make their lives easier. They go shopping on Amazon, receive personalized recommendations on Netflix, and manage their insurance policies via service portals. These experiences create the expectations that B2B customers bring to the workplace.
What’s more, this trend will be even more pronounced from 2020 onwards, when the majority of B2B buyers will be “digital natives”—who are even more digitally savvy and demanding.
A digital customer portal also improves efficiency by using up-to-date customer data to create personalized and perfectly timed offers. While the customer is free to manage their own data, the vendor can tailor cross-selling and upselling offers that increase sales and customer loyalty. These offers are particularly effective if they add specific value for the customer—which solves two problems at once. For example, easy-to-manage offers, such as add-on insurance, not only generate additional revenue, they also make it more feasible to carry low-margin products.
According to the Forrester report Online and Mobile Are Transforming B2B Commerce, 54% of the 353 companies surveyed are more successful in reaching customers when they use a digital solution to market services. And if related products and services are clearly presented:
Products are becoming increasingly digitized and also collecting data as part of the Internet of Things. This data can be used within a digital portal to allow customers to improve their operations and vendors to understand their customers. Vendors who recognize their customers’ needs can create tailored digital products that offer genuine added value. They also have an active means of differentiating themselves from their competitors.
A digital customer portal is the ideal platform for diverse digital services that have the potential to create new value, e.g.:
In this whitepaper you will learn how companies can use a digital customer portal to gain a competitive advantage while reducing costs and improving process efficiency.
Being customer-centric means putting your customers first. Most B2B companies live this philosophy by providing a good customer service. Nevertheless, customer centricity goes beyond this and needs an architecture that supports it. To be truly customer-centric, we have to start outside-in, from the customer perspective to provide a positive customer experience throughout the entire customer life cycle.
An API-based architecture is the evolution from more siloed e-commerce initiatives to a more integrated approach. It natively supports multiple front-ends/touchpoints and allows the leveraging of the API-economy.
This means, an API-oriented architecture fits best to the requirements needed for customer centricity.
The following is Intershop’s vision of an IT architecture for a digital B2B customer portal:
You would like to impress your demanding customers while reducing your costs? In our webinar you will find the necessary inspiration. Our expert will present practical solutions on how to master the challenges of digital B2B commerce using a digital customer portal. Customer cases will also be used to illustrate the requirements for successful implementation. Have a look - it's worth it!
“In addition, we have the customer portal with which we offer all kinds of services to our customers. (...) The site, as well as the app that runs on the same platform, are increasingly becoming an extension of our services. In this way, we help the customer to order reliably and save time”.
Suzanne Bussman-van Es
Marketing Manager at Isero
“To make it right, we needed to understand the connection between our users and our products: We spent as much time as possible at their production sites. We followed them around and studied their processes. Subsequently, personas were created to assure the right market communication and service selection. Accordingly, we designed our Customer Experience platform as the digital single point of purchase for all of our products. It now caters to all the adjoining needs triggered by smart technology.”
Rainer Schüßler, Program Manager Customer Experience at TRUMPF
“We required a customer portal tailored to the needs of our specialist partners, which helps to quickly understand our specialized product range so that one can easily order there. (…) The aim of the project was to reduce the need for time-consuming telephone consultation. Specialist retailers are now enabled to research and order their required products at a time that they themselves choose. This is how we strive to increase customer satisfaction.”
Inge Rappold
Head of Marketing Communications at elero
Frank Andersen, B2B Commerce Specialist Europe
I have over 15 years of digital commerce experience in manufacturing and other industries. I am at your service if you need more information on how to excel in digital customer experience. Just give me a call or drop an e-mail.
Phone: +49 3641 502062
E-Mail: info@intershop.com
Octavio Perales, Director of Solutions US & Canada
Phone: +1 (847) 340-1119
E-Mail: o.perales@intershop.com
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