Here's what really keeps customers in the B2B industry

The opinions expressed by entrepreneurs contributors are their own.

Over the past two years, we've all been at the forefront of B2B digital transformation, and it's become clear that great B2B online shopping experiences don't happen >. They require a strategic investment of time and money, as well as an understanding of the psychological drivers that retain professional buyers.

While experiential loyalty has been around in the B2C world for decades, the B2B industry now understands that delighting customers doesn't build loyalty. Instead, reducing buyer effort, or the work a buyer has to do to solve their problems, does. For today's B2B customers, the "problem" to solve starts with the first purchase: how easy is it to start doing business with your company?

Related: The Convergence of B2B and B2C: How to Create Epic Experiences in an Experience-Driven Economy

More than half of B2B buyers have changed supplier in one year

Most B2B companies derive a large portion of their revenue from ongoing sales to existing customers, which makes customer retention an important B2B business priority. As human encounters are replaced by digital encounters, salespeople are challenged to find new ways to keep customers loyal when the competition is just a click away.

In 2021, 55% of US-based respondents to a global survey said they had switched all of their business purchases in the 12 months prior to the survey . 41% said they changed some suppliers for some business purchases. With nine out of 10 respondents switching suppliers, one can only conclude that good B2B buying experiences are not happening and are likely to fall behind as the digital age progresses. Just a year earlier, in 2020, the comparable percentages were 20% for all purchases and 43% for some purchases.

Although 2022 figures are not yet known, it is reasonable to assume that B2B buyers continue to have rising expectations based on their B2C e-commerce habits. That's why B2B managers need to understand that today's biggest differentiator is their company's ability to deliver the best possible B2B customer experience.

Customer effort matters a lot more than pleasure

Gartner has extensively studied experiential loyalty, evaluating whether customer satisfaction can accurately predict future loyalty. Although counter-intuitive, their conclusion is "no". The data revealed that 20% of customers who said they were "satisfied" also expressed an intention to buy from someone else. And the enchantment strategy fared no better: "There was virtually no difference between the loyalty of customers whose expectations were exceeded and those whose expectations were simply met," the report says. Instead, the real driver of customer loyalty is the amount of effort customers have to put in to solve a problem: 96% of customers who had a high-effort experience said they were disloyal, versus 9% for experiences that require little effort.

As business owners, we don't want our customers to have any problems with our products or services. But it doesn't take a "big" problem to make a customer feel like it's hard to do business with a company. Gartner identifies top sources of customer effort as:

The need to contact a company more than once

Be treated as a number or what is called a "generic" service