Customer experience(CX)' in the world of B2B business is no doubt advanced today. Speed, 24x7 response time and a technology backed and digitally enabled environment are all there, to focus on the customer. Yet, CX continues to evolve fast and differentiate the successful B2B businesses from the laggards. As an economic principle, an improved CX is closely linked with increased revenue as well as other advantages. B2B businesses realise that behind a digital façade, their customers are human, real, who experience great service in their daily lives and are driven by this principle. The sector, however, is not taking full advantage of what new and improved CX can offer.

"Living in your customers' shoes is the best way to enhance CX. It's also about taking an outside in role and living the experience of our service through the customers’ lens"

McKinsey & Company estimates that improvements in CX lead to a 10-15 percent reduction in customer churn, a 20-40 percent increase in win rates of offers, and costs 50 percent lower to serve. Likewise, a 2020 report by Adobe found that companies leading in CX are three times more likely to have significantly exceeded their 2019 business goals. McKinsey adds that B2B companies still average less than 50 percent, compared to B2Cs' score of nearly 85 percent on CX. And, according to MIT Sloan Management Review, which quotes a Salesforce survey, "More than 80 percent of business purchasers want consumer level customer experience, and two thirds have switched vendors to get it."

The Trend
The concept of ‘Customer Experience' has already sunk in with enterprise companies; these days they are formulating an entire practice and dedicated teams focused on CX. These professional buyers are also proving thats leek customer experiences shape their perception of your company and the decision to stay on as customers. The Salesforce survey quoted above is proof in point. These professional buyers, at the end of the day, are humans who press the `buy' button for orders to go through.

To emphasize, Irefertoa Forbes magazine list of June 2020 published amid the raging Covid pandemic, on how 10 B2B companies had transformed their CX to stay in the game. Prominent among them is the communications tool Zoom which had turned into a Covid communications platform. FedEx created resources for small businesses, while Bank of America eased small business regulations. And Verizon added a video conferencing tool while Slack put out out a survey on remote work. They were all going in different directions to help customers.

Customer Happiness Is Taking Center Stage
Living in your customers' shoes is the best way to enhance CX. It's also about taking an outside-in role and living the experience of our service through the customers' lens. Before, it was about servicing the internal customers who were serving the external customers. Today, as we innovate, the internal gatekeeper role goes away, and one must engage with the external customer directly. We now link internal business processes to experiences those customers have or want.

That transformation is on and going beyond beta programs, a culture born out of customer happiness. Predicting/anticipating what challenges they might face in the future is driving more product innovation, sharpening service focus and intensifying realtime customer engagement.

Things like speed, ease, consistency, being relevant, and transparency key asks of any customer ina B2B setup are evolving. The goal is to provide all these packaged in a memorable and great customer experience. And that should achieve ‘Customer Happiness', the true measure of a company's success.

'Customer Service' and 'Customer Satisfaction' are no longer sufficient benchmarks increating loyal buyers in today's fast-evolving technology landscape. One needs to build credibility and trust with external customers and start talking about innovation and how to focus on increasing the count of customers. Various studies have shown that purchasing decisions and customer loyalty are built on creating an emotional connection between a business and its customers and making them happy.

The Key Driver
It is specifically this 'Customer Satisfaction' not merely 'Customer Service' or ‘Customer Satisfaction' which is one of the core values written into the JFrog Codex, designed and created by our employees to define what values we should follow as a company. We are passionate about being one of those rare companies to foster a customer centric culture.

To create a memorable customer experience and ultimate Customer Happiness, one should think like a developer to create end-to-end solutions that give developers true value and benefits from the products. As a product led, trusted partner to your customers, you should consistently and constantly listen to the needs and feedback to create best in breed solutions for them. No problem is too big or too small for anyone to solve, like the ethos that Cisco states in their customer experience approach to achieve Customer Happiness: `Whatever it takes, we'll get the job done.'

The Bottom Line
In a company's transformational processes, customer experience should be the key outcome. The processes should align. Today, we live in a hyper connected world, where information is the commodity, the Internet is the supplychain and Cloud is the warehouse. The move to future processes involves a drastic shift from the traditional product centric strategy to one that focuses more on the customer. It stands to reason that further digitization will bring in an era of highly evolved methods to innovate, engage and provide extra value to the customer.

When we achieve this business outcome, we have not only achieved enhanced customer experience, but also positive lifestyle upshot. That is why, for us, the right business outcome  is the key which lends to richer customer experience.