B2B Tech Brands Rethink XaaS Customer Experience

Leading B2B tech companies are focusing on customers’ emotions, engagement, and effort levels to deliver a seamless experience and help clients achieve their business objectives.

The buying and selling of B2B technologies is rapidly evolving. One key reason is that tech customers increasingly expect the same kinds of seamless and consistent interactions they experience as consumers. At the same time, as tech companies shift their business models to sell everything as a service (XaaS), they have become more focused on improving the overall customer experience and helping clients achieve broader business objectives.

“In the XaaS environment, customers are no longer buying a product or service; they’re looking for a partner as they drive toward their desired outcomes,” says Deepak Sharma, managing director of the Customer Success practice at Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Given these expectations, many B2B tech companies are shifting their customer experience strategies, a move that can yield benefits for both clients and sellers. In fact, Deloitte research on B2B buyers and sellers shows that brands that deliver an excellent experience are 18% more likely to exceed their revenue goals. Additionally, clients are 34% more likely to buy and 32% more likely to renew from B2B sellers that provide outstanding experiences.

A Deloitte assessment of B2B tech companies in the XaaS space reveals some practices designed to improve customer interactions—including making trust a centerpiece and adopting more holistic measurement programs. Through these and other tactics, tech companies can deliver more rewarding experiences, help clients achieve their business goals, and build long-term loyalty.


— –Deepak Sharma, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Leading Practices in Customer Experience

In its assessment of B2B tech companies, Deloitte interviewed customer experience executives, technology users, and IT decision-makers at several companies. Based on that research, three core strategies were identified that could improve engagement and retention.

Design a human-centric experience. Customer experience leaders can begin by establishing a shared vision of the customer journey, including critical engagement points and expectations at each stage. From there, they can define how internal functions collaborate to orchestrate experiences and map critical engagement points to required business capabilities and enabling technology systems.

It is also important to design engagement models that serve people in the ways they prefer to interact. “Today, people expect a mix of self-service access, predictive automation, and personalized interactions that elevate their human experience at each engagement point,” says Jeff Navach, a leader in Deloitte’s Customer Success practice and a senior manager with Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Delivering on these expectations requires tech providers to harness the power of data and insights to enable personalized experiences at scale.”

Take a holistic view of customer experience. Many companies use a “customer health” score to assess relationships. Typically, that score includes measures of product usage and adoption as well as sentiment indicators such as net promoter or customer satisfaction scores. Yet the following considerations have become important to capture a full perspective of the customer experience:

  • Emotion. Clients want an ongoing relationship that extends beyond the purchase—and that relationship depends on a feeling of trust. In Deloitte’s survey of B2B buyers and sellers, both groups of respondents ranked trust as the most important factor contributing to customer experience. To build trust, businesses can demonstrate how they’re taking client input into account. For example, XaaS sellers can reconnect with customers who have supplied feedback to update them on how the business is solving a given issue. 
  • Effort. Customers expect to be able to access help quickly and easily—and, importantly, they can become dissatisfied when they have to put in more effort than they expect. The most effective tech brands measure effort at every step along the customer journey, aligning teams to ensure a seamless experience. For example, it’s important for sales to set the right expectations for effort upfront, while the product and customer teams also should collaborate to identify and resolve pain points throughout the experience.
  • Engagement: To improve engagement, companies can compare customer sentiment data and product performance with product usage analysis and training completion rates, among other measures. If, for example, a client isn’t conducting trainings that are critical for adoption, that’s a signal to act. “Product and operational data can help predict engagement problems in advance and indicate when it’s time for customer success representatives to step in,” says Melody Liu, team lead with Deloitte’s Customer Success practice and a senior consultant with Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Beyond emotion, effort, and engagement, leading B2B tech providers are also incorporating value realization metrics into their understanding of the client to create a more comprehensive framework. “Companies should be asking, ‘What outcomes are customers expecting, and how will they measure the effectiveness of their business investments?’” Navach says.

Align leadership around the customer. Increasingly, many B2B tech companies are bringing client-related capabilities together under a chief customer officer (CCO) or chief experience officer (CXO) to deliver consistent, seamless experiences. Typically, the CCO or CXO oversees the customer success, support, renewals, professional services, and education services functions, which work together to deliver a range of outcomes and collectively orchestrate a seamless experience.

It’s also important for customer experience leaders to collaborate closely with sales and marketing to design a cohesive experience from the first point of engagement all the way through purchase, adoption, and renewal. When the three functions are aligned, they can help embed a focus on measuring emotion, effort, and engagement into enterprisewide culture.

Building Relationships, Ensuring Value

Improving client interactions typically requires C-suite collaboration, more holistic measurement tactics, and emphasis on the human experience. Sharma points to Salesforce, the cloud-based provider of applications for customer service, marketing automation, and analytics, as an example. “Salesforce has integrated most customer functions under a CCO and made trust foundational to its strategy,” he says. “Aligning functions enables the company to streamline customer interactions across the business, while focusing on trust helps deepen brand loyalty.”

Salesforce is also developing a new approach to helping customers achieve business outcomes. The company is creating industry-specific guides that are available on its education portal. A health care guide, for example, will offer insights to improve patient interactions based on Salesforce’s experience with hundreds of its health care clients. “Ultimately, the goal is to put customer success back in the hands of the customer,” says Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, executive vice president of global customer success and strategy at Salesforce. “We want to enable rewarding interactions throughout the customer journey.”

The investments that Salesforce and other B2B tech companies are making in the XaaS customer experience can both help these brands meet rising expectations and drive future revenue growth, Sharma adds. By focusing on emotion, effort, and engagement, B2B tech providers can deliver consumer-grade experiences, help their clients achieve business objectives, and build trust for the long term.

—by Jennifer D. Fisher, writer, Deloitte Insights in The Wall Street Journal


