Future BtoB Marketing: Understanding Your Customers' Unsurfaced Disappointments

In BtoB businesses, in which a company's direct customers are not consumers but organizations, the functionality benefits of a product or service are thought to be much more important than those in BtoC when it comes to attracting consumers. Thus, many BtoB companies have been making special efforts to develop their products and services by implementing advanced technologies or providing special deals to beat competitors.

However, surveys conducted by Nikkei Research revealed that these cases represent only one aspect of BtoB business efforts. In fact, masses of unsurfaced customer dissatisfactions and disappointments exist -- most of which are not directly related to product features or technological capabilities but rather to human or emotional factors. Such discontentment simmers beneath the surface, waiting to erupt at any time to damage relationships or induce customer churn.

In the case of businesses dealing with the supply of materials (i.e., materials, raw materials, and electronic components), 85% of customers have experienced some form of "pain point" (meaning dissatisfaction or disappointment) within the past year, while 71% repeatedly experienced the same "pain point" and 90% are troubled with it. Moreover, despite the high percentage of customers who have felt such "pain points," only 56% of those who did so would contact the suppliers to make a complaint. In addition, considering the critical impact on the business, just 11% are satisfied with the supplier's response to complaints.

Further, by exploring the occurrence of "pain points" along the customer journey, it was indicated that various disappointments were happening at unexpected times, of which suppliers of the products and/or services were unaware. That is, in other words, suppliers failed to meet the customers' real expectations, where those are not likely to be simple needs. We found that in some cases customers were expecting good communication or the right forms of information provision (channels, accessibility, contents, etc.) daily. More importantly, such pitfalls differ from industry to industry and company to company, and a careful examination of each business is required.

Companies need to understand that as long as they think from the inside of their businesses, they will probably not be able to detect the "pain points" customers are experiencing or the untold expectations that clients have. Nikkei Research's proposed well-designed survey could be one of the key instruments for a company to achieve a good sense of the customer's perspective.

Please read the following articles for more details.
BtoB Marketing Updated (1)
BtoB Marketing Updated (2)
BtoB Marketing Updated (3)

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