B2B Customer Experience:

Start Playing to Win and

Stop Playing Not to Lose
B2B companies must change their
"customer experience" (CX) approach:

Disruption of B2B customer engagement

Consumerized Never a done deal. Open network.

experience.

71% 70% 67%

agree that their customers' confirm that customers always say the way they engage is
rising expectations for a monitor and (re-) evaluate their impacted because their customers
consumer-like convenience suppliers, requiring a more flexible get more influenced by what they
experience impacts how to and ongoing engagement. hear from other customers,
interact with them. vendors and colleagues.

Accenture surveyed 1,450 executives globally in companies that provide products and/or
services to other businesses.

Focusing more on customer experience

Strategic priority. It is here to stay.

85% 70%
view customer experience as critical to agree that in two years customer-experience
achieving their strategic growth priorities. related considerations will play an even larger role
in the overall corporate strategy.

Up to half of CX investments fail to

deliver top results
Among the companies that prioritize CX, Accenture identified three groups.
Rather than playing to win, the majority still plays not to lose, ineffectively using
up to 50% of CX investments.

“Playing To Win” “Playing Not To Lose” “Not in the game”

Masters. Strivers. Trying Hard/Laggards.

24% of companies 48% of companies 28% of companies

• Achieve strongest • Achieve moderate • Yield low/negative
revenue growth revenue growth revenue growth
• … And excel in both CX • … But perform sub-optimally • … And have large
strategy and execution. in strategy and/or execution. performance gaps in CX
• Yield highest return on strategy and execution.
CX investments

Playing to Win
Masters that play to win prioritize CX and deliver it—both
strategically and operationally.

1. Walk the talk. 2. Know What Customers

Masters prioritize, invest and excel in Notice and Value
key capabilities.
Masters align metrics and experience efforts
to areas that matter most to customers rather
Strivers and Laggards, playing not to lose
than relying on intuitive improvements.
companies:
• Place lower priority on key strategic and
execution capabilities.
• Don't plan to increase CX investments as
much as playing to win companies.
• Have substantial performance gaps in CX
strategic and/or execution capabilities. 65% 24% 10%
Masters Strivers Trying hard/Laggards

Agree that their current customer metrics

effectively provide actionable data to improve CX.

3. Fast forward with digital…but don’t forget “analog”

Masters understand how technology broadly affects their business. They consistently embrace digital
technologies that affect customer experience (web, social, mobile and cloud), moving from being
digitally disrupted to becoming digital disruptors.

Though Strivers and Laggards also In addition, Masters embed CX into day-to-day
recognize digital’s importance, operations across both digital and analog
performance gaps are wider. channels and emphasize accountability across
all of them for results.

Masters Strivers Trying hard/Laggards

92% 76% 48%

Masters Strivers Trying hard/Laggards
88% 86% 74% 65% 49% 32%

Importance of selected capabilities

report CX delivery is a formal end-to-end
business process.
Performance of selected capabilities

4. Focus on outcomes and preempt complexity

Rather than adding layer upon layer,

Masters know which initiatives to turn

93% 70% 61% off. They monitor efficiency of multiple

CX programs, they know what’s working
and what’s not. They handle complexity
better, focusing improvements on what
Masters Strivers Trying hard/Laggards
drives outcomes.

Perform well at tracking overall CX delivery to

measure its value impact and identify improvements.

5. Ensure leadership drives collaboration

Masters prioritize collaboration with other
stakeholders, and do it well. Doing business is
now a "team sport".

Not only do masters view collaboration with

other stakeholders as vital, they also clearly
outperform other company profiles. In terms of
90% 76% 55%
customer experience organization structure,
there is no single best answer. However,
Masters Strivers Trying hard/Laggards
leadership empowerment—especially proximity
to the P&L—and accountability are needed to
say collaboration (internally and externally)
successfully align diverging priorities.
is critical.

Getting started
Play to win by moving beyond acknowledging CX's importance to taking action
to perform well both strategically and operationally.

1. Empower CX leadership with P&L 2. Adopt a new customer model

Align customer experience Ensure you build on a solid foundation:
accountability with P&L Move from the traditional sales funnel to
responsibility and decision-making the Accenture B2B Nonstop-Customer
authority to focus resources and Experience Model. Also, ensure you get
improve processes. customer experience basics right before
adding new capabilities.

3. Enable “Born Digital, Stay Digital” 4. Target CX investments

Don't just bolt digital onto existing To reduce performance gaps, develop
capabilities or force “analog” and manage a structured approach
interactions after promising digital; to CX investments. Focus on what
rather, provide customers with customers notice and value to drive
03:00 digital options throughout their impact and reduce complexity.
entire experience.

5. Operationalize and standardize an “industrial strength” experience

Implement the customer experience with the same rigor as

your most critical operations. Architect quality into CX
from start to finish and as an end-to-end process.

Contact
Robert Wollan Kevin Quiring Learn more
www
Senior managing director Managing director Visit the Microsite
Accenture Strategy, Sales & Accenture Strategy, Sales & http://www.accenture.com/b2bcx
Customer Services lead Customer Services, North America
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