B2B Customer Service: The Ultimate Guide

It’s common knowledge that the sales and marketing strategies to win over B2B clients are very different from those that are used to attract B2C customers. We use different channels, expect different behaviors, and create specific personas for each of these buyers. Similarly, when it comes to customer support, B2B customers have unique needs and resolution journeys that make B2B customer service a distinct category by itself.

In this blog, we’ll dive further into how B2B customer service is different from B2C customer service, along with examples and tips to ace customer service in B2B companies.

Before we jump in, let’s look at what customer service means in a B2B environment.

What is B2B customer service?

B2B companies–or businesses that sell products or services to other businesses–are heavily dependent upon customer loyalty and customer retention for predictable revenue growth due to larger deal sizes and longer buying cycles.

And guess what? 72% of B2B buyers point to real-time, always-on customer service as one of the key factors in boosting customer loyalty. B2B customer service is all about ensuring the continuity of your product or service operations by providing quick responses, prompt troubleshooting, and fast resolutions whenever your customers face any challenges.

Because multiple stakeholders and larger teams are involved in B2B transactions, it’s important to be more proactive and contextual in your support interactions. 

B2B companies expect a more hands-on approach when it comes to customer service. In fact, it is very common in B2B customer service to have ‘Customer Success Managers’ mapped to certain high-ticket accounts instead of just assigning support agents. Is this high-effort strategy worth it?

Why is B2B customer service important?

B2B customer service is the foundation of lasting business relationships that drive mutual success. Exceptional customer service is a critical differentiator, particularly in larger and more complex transactions. Below are some benefits of B2B customer service.

• Fosters long-term relationships: Consistent, high-quality customer service builds trust and loyalty, which are essential for long-term business partnerships.

• Enhances brand reputation: Positive service experiences lead to word-of-mouth referrals, strengthening your brand's reputation in the industry.

• Drives customer retention: Exceptional service reduces the likelihood of churn, keeping valuable customers engaged and satisfied over time.

• Supports higher revenue potential: Satisfied B2B customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and explore additional services or products.

• Facilitates competitive differentiation: Superior customer service can set your business apart in a crowded market, offering a unique selling proposition.

• Reduces resolution time: Effective service strategies lead to faster problem-solving, minimizing downtime for your customers' operations.

• Improves product and service feedback: Direct interaction with customers provides valuable insights that can guide improvements and innovation.

Effective B2B customer service ensures that every issue is addressed with urgency and expertise, reflecting the value you place on your business relationships. This commitment to excellence in service not only secures customer loyalty but also sets the stage for long-term partnerships and success.

How does customer service help B2B companies?

Imagine this: You buy a set of headphones online, but the pair you receive is damaged. The solution is simple enough— get in touch with a customer service representative and request a replacement. The support agent doesn’t require too much context, and the request can be resolved without a lot of effort. 

On the other hand, what if you have purchased a software tool for your company that users are not happy with? Not only is this a problem for multiple users who may not be able to go about their work, but you also need to show a return on your investment. B2B customer experience plays a critical role in whether you will continue using and repurchasing the product or churn in favor of another option. 

Let’s look at two direct consequences of how B2B customer support can impact a company’s balance sheet.

How does B2B customer service impact revenue and growth?

When creating a strategy for your B2B customer service, remember that although B2B customers require higher effort, they also offer higher returns. Creating a more hands-on approach with these customers is critical for improving the lifetime value of each account. 

Depending on the size of the customer, one sale can have a significant effect on your revenue and margins. Similarly, providing delightful and dependable customer service will ensure that the customer not only renews their contract with you but will be more open to upsells or cross-sells of adjacent products or services.

How does B2B customer service impact your brand?

The fastest way to gain a good reputation in the market is to let your customers do the talking for you, but you have to earn this reputation. This means ensuring your customers are always treated well, and those customers who champion your brand should be rewarded with something extra.

The reward you gain for providing excellent customer service is that your customers will become brand evangelists offering testimonials and public reviews that encourage other potential customers to make a purchase decision. 

The power of promotion also has a direct correlation to the name and value attached to your brand in the market. It’s a win-win situation since clients love to partner with the hottest or fastest-growing companies in the market.

How to assess the quality of your business’s B2B customer service?

One effective method of assessing the quality of your B2B business’s customer service is through regular feedback mechanisms such as surveys or direct communication channels with clients. These feedback loops allow customers to express their opinions, highlight areas for improvement, and provide valuable insights into their experiences with the company's support team. Analyzing customer feedback can unveil recurring issues, emerging trends, or areas where the service excels, guiding the business in refining its strategies accordingly. 

Additionally, monitoring customer service metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), such as response time, resolution rate, and customer satisfaction scores, offers quantifiable metrics to evaluate performance over time. By setting benchmarks based on industry standards or internal goals, B2B businesses can objectively assess the effectiveness of their customer service efforts and identify areas needing attention.

What is the difference between B2C and B2B customer service?

The way you evaluate and decide on purchasing a B2C product subscription, such as Netflix, differs widely from onboarding a CRM product for your organization. Likewise, given the number of stakeholders and SLA clauses involved in B2B customer support, there’s a stark difference between customer service in B2B and B2C companies due to the following reasons:

1. B2B customer issues are highly complex

B2B companies are more likely to have problems that are complex and unique to each customer. Solving these problems usually requires a considerable amount of time and effort, and often requires multiple teams to solve. Even when it’s a new problem, it usually takes a while to fix. For example, problems involving a server issue or a product functionality issue usually take hours to resolve and require coordination with the product and IT teams.

B2C issues are more singular in nature. It usually does not have too many elements and can be resolved quickly by following a certain number of steps.

2. True personalization is more complicated in B2B customer service

B2C customers enjoy a level of personalization that we never thought was possible. For example, if you are using an e-commerce application, you are given suggestions on what kind of items may be of interest to you based on your previous orders. 

On the other hand, B2B customers often invest significantly and expect more than first-name personalization from their vendors, such as the agility to solve urgent issues on priority. They may also expect custom integrations with their existing software suite or dedicated support resources for the smooth functioning of their business.

Related resource: B2B vs. B2C customer service interactions

3. B2B customer relationships are not transactional and involve several stakeholders

Relationships are the bedrock of B2B customer engagement. While a solid product with a great sales pitch will get you in the door, strong customer relationships will ensure you get a long-term seat in the room. Unlike B2C interactions that are usually isolated and mostly transactional, B2B works on a relationship-driven model, which makes customer service a central part of any business you conduct with a B2B customer.

For example, let’s look at a payment issue with a food delivery app. It only takes a couple of steps for the agent to process the refund once you have raised the complaint. This marks the end of your conversation with the support agent.

However, in a B2B scenario, a payment issue will require the efforts of multiple teams because it involves complex legal and financial conditions that have to be evaluated for the issue to be resolved. This puts a lot of emphasis on B2B customer relationship management to make situations like the above easier to navigate.

Two examples of B2B customer service to inspire you

1. OneFile:

Leading UK-based EdTech and apprenticeship SaaS company, OneFile, prioritizes positive experiences across the learning journey and has a Royal approval under its belt. Supporting 1.2 million users for nearly 20 years across 700+ organizations, they recently received the ‘Queen’s Award for Enterprises’ to recognize their efforts in developing successful and innovative software products.

The company is known for its outstanding customer service, retaining the ‘Customer Service Excellence’ accreditation year after year since 2016. Their customer service philosophy is crystal clear: By your side. Supporting your delivery from day one.”

From onboarding new customers to offering technical support, OneFile ensures that their support is easily available and accessible to customers. Onboarding specialists, dedicated customer success managers, and a state-of-the-art help center built on Freshworks Customer Service Suite come together to guide their users along an effortless customer journey.

The customer support team is now open to customer queries across email, phone calls, support portal tickets, and live chat after implementing Customer Service Suite Omnichannel. Breaking internal data silos, the OneFile support team gives faster responses with the Suite, achieving 98% customer satisfaction.

2. Clarity:

Clarity is a multi-product corporate B2B company that helps businesses make travel bookings, manage travel expenses, and optimize savings. Being a customer-centric business, they strive to improve and deliver excellent customer service consistently.

Understanding that customer service is the prime differentiator for their business, Clarity is a member of the UK’s Institute of Customer Service to continually learn and adopt customer service best practices. They’re also on their way to obtaining the ServiceMark accreditation that further seals their commitment to customer service excellence.

Operating as multiple support teams that specialize in catering to the distinct customer needs of every sector, Clarity ensured that their customer service teams remained centralized and in sync by using Freshdesk. Automated ticket assignment workflows ensured that the right agents worked on the right request type. This simplified operations and helped them achieve high customer satisfaction scores of 96% and an NPS of 81. Their high standards of delivering superior customer experiences make them a notable example of practicing stellar B2B customer service as a competitive advantage to drive business growth.

7 Ways to improve B2B customer service using a help desk

Customer service is all about making an impression—31% of consumers globally are willing to pay more for a great customer service experience. A B2B help desk can help smooth out all the rough edges in your customer service while greatly improving the experience you provide. Here are the ways a B2B customer support software can be resourceful to your team:

#1 Use conversational history to maintain relevant context

B2B businesses face complex issues, which makes it all the more important that everyone involved in solving a problem knows the history of the issue. Customers expect that the agent already knows the context of their issue, even if this is their first interaction with them. And if you have successfully retained a long-term client, it’s likely that the account has changed hands between relationship managers and multiple agents who have worked on a single customer’s issues. 

Freshworks Customer Service Suite allows you to maintain contextual history through the activity log feature. It allows an agent to pick up any customer ticket and see all the actions that have taken place since its creation. This includes status changes, who’s worked on it, and all conversations that have taken place with the customer. This snapshot of issue history is a great way to ensure everyone in your support team is on the same page.

#2 Collaborate effectively with other teams to solve issues faster

When dealing with B2B customer issues, you might need to involve other teams depending on the type and complexity of the problem. However, collaboration can be difficult and time-consuming when there are many details to communicate with different people in a short amount of time. Using a B2B customer service software like Freshworks Customer Service Suite, you can share the ownership of tickets with other teams, giving them the same visibility into the issue as your support team. 

Often, there will be a need to provide instant context to another agent or someone from another team. In Freshworks Customer Service Suite, collaboration happens right within the ticket thread by simply adding the required person to the conversation. That person will now have all the relevant information to solve the issue, and you can update the customer on the status in real time. Customer Service Suite further eases internal collaboration and communication by integrating seamlessly with commonly used B2B project management and operations tools like Jira and Slack.

 #3 Allow customers the flexibility of choosing their communication channel

67% of consumers globally use 3 or more channels regularly to engage with a brand, making it important for customers to be given the option of choosing how they can reach out to you. Mail, chat, call, and social media are different channels you can open up to customers as a way of contacting your support team.

To provide an omnichannel experience, you need to maintain a single version of all your customer information. Customer Service Suite has a unified customer database that does this, ensuring you always know which customer is reaching out from which channel. The Suite’s omnichannel capability can convert any conversation, regardless of the channel used, into a ticket. The agent can also then respond on the same channel from within the Customer Service Suite itself.

#4 Take advantage of self-service capabilities

Digital self-service is a necessity not just for B2C consumers but also for the complex B2B environment. B2B customers want the freedom to explore and know more about how to use the B2B products or services better and take the first steps in resolving challenges by themselves before reaching out to the company’s customer support team.

A Forrester study indicates that offering effective self-service options like support portals and AI-powered chatbots deflects ticket volumes by 27%. Customer Service Suite allows you to host a customized B2B self-service portal with well-categorized FAQ pages and guides. The exhaustive knowledge base can help customers find fixes by themselves, and the portal can also have the provision to raise a ticket if your customers need any additional assistance.

#5 Proactively deal with customer issues

It’s not enough for organizations to just be reactive to issues; customers can be left frustrated if they are made to wait for an update after the problem has already occurred. Being proactive means you are anticipating an issue happening, and you reach out to customers beforehand to inform them about it while also stating how your support team is working to fix it

For example, if one of your servers is down and you expect a delay in getting it back up, you can inform your customers with a proactive outreach email before they come to you with a complaint. In a B2B customer support software like Customer Service Suite, you can set up an email outreach that explains everything customers need to know about this issue, including how quickly they can expect it to be resolved right from your help desk.

#6 Track and act on customer feedback

The key to maintaining good B2B customer relationships is to connect with your customers frequently and seek their feedback on a regular basis. Customer success managers or assigned account executives often reach out to their B2B clients to find out if:

• Customers are continually satisfied with their products and services,

• B2B clients face any challenges in using their services,

• Users what any specific features that can be included in the product roadmap,

• How to improve your products or services.

Actively gathering these insights from customer feedback periodically helps maintain account hygiene and reduce churn rates. 

Also, when customers reach out to you for support, you can gauge how satisfied or effortless their interactions were with you by triggering customer satisfaction surveys and measuring customer effort scores directly from your helpdesk software.

#7 Improve the speed and quality of customer service with automation

Given the importance of building customer relationships in B2B, support teams should be able to dedicate a good chunk of their time to it, but quite often, redundant, time-consuming tasks end up wasting the customer support team’s time.

With help desk automation, this situation can be avoided. Within Freshworks Customer Service Suite, you can create specific rules based on event and time triggers so that repetitive tasks, such as ticket assignments, status updates, etc, happen automatically. For example, you might have a dedicated account manager for a particular customer. Using the customer name as a filtering criterion, you can create an automation rule that reroutes every issue to that customer’s account manager. Customer Service Suite also allows you to deploy specific SLA policies for different tiers of customers, helping you deliver quality support with effective SLA management.

What are some tools and software that can be used to improve B2B customer service?

Freshworks Customer Service Suite

Freshworks Customer Service Suite is an innovative platform designed to revolutionize customer support experiences. It offers a vast array of comprehensive tools that enable organizations to efficiently manage customer inquiries, resolve issues promptly, and foster lasting relationships. Its intuitive interface and customizable workflows empower teams to streamline operations, automate repetitive tasks, and deliver personalized omnichannel assistance. By leveraging Freshworks Customer Service Suite’s advanced analytics and reporting functionalities, businesses can gain insight into customer interactions, allowing them to optimize their support strategies and drive continuous improvement. From ticket management to self-service portals, Freshworks Customer Service Suite is a versatile solution that ensures unparalleled customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Key Features

• Collaboration tools

• Extensive third-party integrations

• AI-powered insights and assistance

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Advantages

• Reduced response times

• Highly scalable and customizable

• Consistent, convenient customer experiences

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Why customers rave about the Customer Service Suite?

Freshworks customers rave about the Customer Service Suite because it simplifies complex support tasks and enhances productivity. They also recommend the suite due to its commitment to innovation and continuous improvement, ensuring that customers receive regular updates and new features that address their evolving needs. The Freshworks team provides exceptional customer support, with responsive and knowledgeable agents readily available to assist users, further contributing to its popularity. Customers also love Freshworks’ dedication to fostering a vibrant user community that cultivates a collaborative environment where users can exchange ideas, tips, and experiences.

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Zendesk

Zendesk enables businesses to centralize customer inquiries from various channels, such as email, chat, phone, and social media, into a unified platform, streamlining communication and improving response times. Its ticketing system organizes customer inquiries efficiently, allowing agents to prioritize and manage tasks effectively. Additionally, Zendesk's automation capabilities help businesses automate repetitive tasks, optimize workflows, and scale their customer service operations. With advanced reporting and analytics functionalities, Zendesk provides valuable insights into customer behavior and support performance, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions and continually improve their service delivery.

Pros:

• Vast third-party integration ecosystem

• Comprehensive automation capabilities

• Highly scalable

Cons:

• May require in-depth user training

• Advanced reporting and analytics capabilities only available in higher-tier plans

• Integrating third-party apps can be complex

Zoho Desk

Zoho's B2B customer support software encompasses a range of tools beyond ticketing and automation, catering to diverse support needs. Among its offerings is live chat, which enables real-time communication between agents and customers, fostering immediate resolution of queries and enhancing customer satisfaction. Additionally, Zoho's knowledge base management tool empowers businesses to create and maintain a repository of self-service resources, including FAQs, articles, and guides, enabling customers to find solutions independently. Furthermore, Zoho Desk Voice facilitates phone support, allowing businesses to engage with customers via voice calls, ensuring a personalized and efficient support experience.

Pros:

• Cost-effective

• Highly customizable

• Omnichannel communication options

Cons:

• Limited data analytics and reporting flexibility

• Integrations can be complex and time-consuming

• Limited support for Zoho customers

What are some mistakes to avoid in B2B customer service?

Avoiding fatal B2B sales mistakes is crucial to sustaining positive client relationships and ensuring business success. By proactively addressing these mistakes and prioritizing personalized communication and continuous support, businesses can foster stronger partnerships and drive long-term success. Avoid the following:

• Assuming all clients have the same needs

• Poor communication, including ambiguity or inconsistency

• Neglecting ongoing support and relationship-building post-sale

• Ignoring customer feedback or failing to act on it promptly

• Overpromising and underdelivering on commitments

• Lack of empathy and understanding towards client challenges

• Relying solely on reactive rather than proactive support strategies

• Failure to prioritize client satisfaction and retention over acquisition efforts

• Underestimating the importance of timely responses to inquiries or issues

• Inadequate training and development for customer service teams, leading to subpar support experiences

The finer details matter the most in b2b customer service

B2B customer support effectively comes down to the finer margins. Going through every aspect of your B2B customer service with a fine-toothed comb is a necessary first step. This exercise will help you map out the aspects of customer service that you need to focus on.

By maximizing the potential of a helpdesk, it becomes a lot easier to work on these aspects and deliver an amazing B2B service experience. Given the time-consuming nature of B2B customer relationships, making customer service a differentiator will help you stand out from the competition. In the long run, customer service will play a crucial role in helping your business achieve customer advocacy.