Customer Experience Benchmarking in B2B Industries
Updated: Jul 29
Benchmarking is a crucial tool in every successful enterprise. With it, companies can gauge their actual performance using translated, consistent data, and importantly can be compared against industry peers, current trends, or even the company’s past performances. In B2B industries, the benefits of benchmarking can be invaluable.
Customer Experience (CX) refers to your business's overall impact on the customer at every point of their buying journey – from awareness to purchase. The quality of service provided to them pre-decision-making and after-product sales is important to consider, especially for proper strategy adjustment and eventual replication.
“It’s not whether you are good or bad, it’s whether you are better or worse than your buyer’s alternatives.”
Tom Cates
CEO, Encompass-CX
Customer Experience Benchmarking uses standardized metrics to see what’s working best and identify best practices and underperforming areas in your business. These data can be used to boost your revenue and address issues accordingly – and fast. It can encourage improvement through prioritizing goals, providing accountability within the system, and creating better relationships with your customers – truly a competitive edge that inspires continuous growth.
Trusted Advisor Benchmarks
To illustrate CX Benchmarking, let's consider a key CX industry benchmark: the percentage of clients who consider you to be their Trusted Advisor:
We all want to earn a position as our client’s Trusted Advisor, and often we convince ourselves that we are, but the CX Benchmarking facts tell a very different story. In reality, depending on your industry, it’s very likely that only 4-32% of your clients consider you to be their Trusted Advisor.
Of course, these benchmarks are industry averages – some companies perform better than the average, some worse. To understand how we are doing, we might also consider the distribution of benchmarks within our industry. Consider the benchmarks of 10 companies from the IT VAR (Value Added Reseller) industry.
While the average company in the IT VAR industry can expect 32% of their buyers to see them as their Trusted Advisors, there is significant variation within the industry. The benchmarks below categorize performance into four business relationship standings: Trusted Advisor, Predisposed, Transactional, and Antagonistic.
Relationship Level of 10 IT Firms
Average Share of Spending
We know there is a clear correlation between the quality of the customer relationship and the share of spending. Higher trust and better relationships (Trusted Advisor) lead to significantly higher spending.
Conversely, poor relationships (Transactional and Antagonistic) result in much lower spending, highlighting the financial impact of customer dissatisfaction.
VARs 1 and 2 have a significantly higher percentage a Trusted Advisor relationships compared to the industry average and their peers, indicating best practices. VARs 1 and 2 are clearly doing something right!
CX Benchmarking in B2B Industries
When establishing a benchmark against competitors, trends, or past performances, there are three key steps:
Identify Your Targets: Choose your metrics and the results they focus on. Select the angle of analysis, whether it's finance, customer experience, or the quality of products/services. Decide if you want a competitor analysis or an internal one and if competitors – who to benchmark yourself against (including those outside your industry).
Collect and Compare: Gather data through standardized metrics and tools. Compare the results across different categories against your chosen benchmarks, be they internal or competitive.
Utilize Your Findings: Use the collected data to identify and act upon areas of vulnerability and improvement.
Although similar at first glance, there are a few notable differences between CX Benchmarking in the B2C (Business to Consumer), and B2B (Business to Business) industries. A notable example would be the number of decision-makers before a call to action. In most B2C industries, the products or services are purchased by the consumer, who will be the end-user themselves.
In B2B industries, you typically deal with not just one decision-maker but a multitude of stakeholders. These are likely different people from different departments, with differing needs and expectations of your product/service. This is why CX Benchmarks for B2Bs are heavily influenced by business relationships. You have no “average” buyers to change, you have an individual buyer— a 1:1, seller-to-buyer relationship.
B2B Customer Experience Benchmarking helps you analyze your buyer’s entire journey. In this case, in another business, and your general influence on their system of decision-making. Using various types of benchmarks and tools, you can now prioritize goals, close competitive gaps, and compare statistics in real-time against the current market, your competition- even the industry giants
Tools of the Trade in Customer Experience Benchmarking
There are different types of B2B benchmarks that you can utilize to take your company to the next level. Here are a few of them:
Quantitative Benchmarks
This CX Benchmark allows for the analysis of spikes and movements in between different periods. Comparison of growth rates over specific periods can indicate how well you are doing with customers regarding recent trends. It can also show the individual performances of different locations across the brand. As you shed light on your competitor’s performance, Quantitative Benchmarks let you see how the company ranks on various measures, when put side by side with the industry standard, and category competitors.
Reviews and Ratings
These Customer Experience Benchmarks are necessary when strategizing for your brand, especially in terms of online presence, due to the intelligent interaction it brings. This benchmark can provide real-time comparisons against local competition and quick customer feedback on areas of strengths and improvements.
Text Benchmarks
This benchmark measures the emotional satisfaction of customers, after the gathering of quantitative data. They help provide context on the open-ended comments and reviews received from the customer. They often measure how your brand is brought up in word-of-mouth instances. Deciphering the sentiments behind their comments can help you further understand unquantified metrics and blind spots yet to be considered. With Text Benchmarks, you can uncover these new categories of improvement, and recognize areas of commendation.
Combination of Metrics
Encompass-CX uses a combination of quantitative and text benchmarks to analyze your B2B client relationships. Clients answer thorough assessments of their sales managers according to relationship engagement, climate, and practice. This pinpoints gaps in your buyer’s perception of your business. This establishes your CX benchmark and helps your business build actionable insights, not only to mitigate possible churn but also to increase revenue.
CX Benchmarking Metrics
Aside from that, other trusted tools can help you along the way. These Customer Experience Metrics are prime examples of that.
Customer Satisfaction (CSat)
This metric seeks to quantify and measure the level of satisfaction customers experience after interacting with your product or service. This is done by asking the core question: How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [products/service] received?
Analyzing data gathered from this customer experience benchmark releases you from your perspective bubble. It aims at resolving issues by establishing the context of your buyer’s journey. Who are the satisfied customers, and who are the unsatisfied? What part of the journey was unsatisfactory, and why? Forbes has reported that across the world, companies lose hundreds of billions. The culprit? Bad customer service.
CSat is a common metric used traditionally by companies for its potential to evaluate customer satisfaction with your product/service. It is measured mainly through three ways: the In-App Survey, the Post Service Survey, and the Email Survey. However, recent research shows its inefficiency in giving a complete and cohesive result by itself. Why? Satisfaction research at large only measures brand and product equity – mostly assessed primarily through staff satisfaction – disregarding actual sales equity. Satisfaction can lead to loyalty, but it is simply not enough for B2B sales growth – and you must go beyond.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
This metric asks the customers one question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?” Depending on their rating, you can then categorize who are the brand’s active promoters, the passive consumers, and even the detractors.
NPS is a great business growth tracker. When you have a high NPS rating, it indicates a strong relationship with your target base. With this data, you can foster and create relationships with customers who are likely to evangelize about the product/service, stoke organic word-of-mouth promotion, and in turn, generate growth trends. As part of the general survey, you can ask customers follow-up questions, establish new and quantifiable internal benchmarks, and rally everyone to specific, newly-prioritized objectives.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
It computes the effort rate consumers put in when interacting with your business. It takes into consideration the effort it takes consumers to understand, avail, and use your product/service, their experience in waiting for a response, resolving an issue, and more. Used mostly after a purchase or an interaction with the brand’s service team, or after any experience service-related. It can also predict the rate of referral likelihood, as well as future purchase behavior. It is also quite easy to implement.
Sales Equity Score (SEQ)
Sales Equity Score is the tangible and intangible value a buyer receives from his perception of his relationship with his sales and account service teams. In Encompass-CX, a relationship survey contains questions categorized into the 6 Relationship Dimensions. Scores for each question are weighted based on their Relationship Dimension, and the output of that calculation is a score between 1 - 100. Each contact receives an individual SEQ Score which is averaged to generate an average SEQ score. This benchmark metric will help you identify your buyer’s perception of your business relationship.
Why Traditional Metrics Aren't Enough
Customer Satisfaction is not enough. To create a significant impact and get ahead of the competition, you must use a scientific system that can prioritize generating customer satisfaction, one that works through various levels of sales equity. Invest in a scientific system that can propel your momentum upward. Encompass-CX goes beyond satisfaction to increase your sales equity.
However, relying solely on traditional NPS or other traditional metrics will not show you the complexities of the customer experience – while also presenting glaring vulnerabilities. The complex flow of decision-making in B2B industries can present a convoluted timeline – dragging out supposedly urgent resolutions.
Among other issues, B2B’s longer and more complex sales cycles and the intricate internal relations between company stakeholders also hinder NPS from its purpose - to veritably observe the nuances and the general sentiment at varying stages. To fully evaluate this, you need to go beyond the single survey response. Each B2B company has its own set of requirements and conditions unique to them. What you need is a tool that adapts, and allows customization – a tool that creates tailor-made solutions for your company.
Product equity and brand equity are the minimum requirements in B2B. If you want to create exceptional buyer value, you have to create sales equity!
Back up Decision Making with the Right CX Benchmarking Tool
With Encompass-CX you get a bird's eye view of your whole CX management system and pinpoint gaps in your client relationships!
Choose a better way to analyze client loyalty. Traditionally B2B sales teams cast a wide net in their customer experience approach, creating more personalized messaging, targeting greater touch points, etc. The problem is that this is a costly and inefficient way to address how your client feels. Using AI technology Encompass-CX shows you how you are performing across 6 dimensions: integrity, competency, recognition, proactivity, savvy, and chemistry to improve relationships with the clients that matter.
Prioritize goals, close competitive gaps, and compare statistics in real time!
Get a 30-day Free Trial to a Customer Experience Management Software that will help you boost your revenue. See how your client relationships can improve with Encompass-CX