Why are customer experience strategies so important in wholesaling industry? Wholesale distribution businesses often sell high demand products to hundreds of customers across the country. Some wholesalers even venture into dropshipping and become dropshipping wholesale suppliers.
Key Takeaway - It is challenging to keep up with the high pace nature of the industry and customer demands. From receiving customer orders and bulk shipping to getting new wholesale supplies and managing vendors, keeping up with customer relationship management tend to be a struggle.
Designing omnichannel customer experience strategies can improve your unique selling proposition and increase the value of your wholesale distributorship business. A great customer experience will increase customer satisfaction and improve your customer retention rates.
Successfully implementing a customer experience process results in greater customer satisfaction ratings. As a result, there is decreased customer churn and increased income for your B2B eCommerce wholesale business.
How Does Wholesale Work exactly? Becoming a wholesale distributor requires the right strategy and planning. Learn How to Become a Wholesaler and How to Run a Wholesale Distribution Business in this in-depth guide to wholesaling.
The success of your wholesale marketing plan is not just dependent on how much money you allocate to the eCommerce marketing budget. It is shaped by consistent execution of customer experience best practices.
So, what are these best practices? Let’s find out!
What Makes a Great Customer Experience?
70% of Americans, according to American Express, are prepared to spend an additional 13% on average with companies or brands that offer superior customer service. Similar findings were made by Oracle, which revealed that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a superior customer experience.
First, what is customer experience? Customer experience is the way a customer perceives your brand with every interaction. It describes how a customer feels about your products, wholesale business, wholesale marketing strategies, and B2B sales processes.
A great customer experience management strategy is key to improving customer loyalty to your brand. All phases of the consumer's journey across many touchpoints are included in the customer experience process.
The customer experience is made up of a variety of elements. Some of these elements include the sales experience, product design and quality, usability, brand perception, level of eCommerce customer service, and more.
So, what makes a great customer experience? Let’s see.
- Timely responses: Promptly responding to customer reviews, queries, and feedback is the first step toward developing a great customer experience.
- Omnichannel customer experience: Providing a platform that manages multiple customer interactions across various channels without disrupting the conversation flow.
- Effective communication: Communication is key to giving the best customer service and experience.
- Software automation: Customer experience management software and wholesale CRM tools can streamline and automate the way you interact with customers.
- Team education: Training your team members on customer experience best practices is essential.
There are three components of any solid customer experience strategy. They include:
- Emotion: Focusing on how your branding, marketing, and sales process will ensure that your customers have a positive emotion when interacting with your wholesale business.
- Effort: Making it easy for your customers to interact with your brand is another element of the customer experience strategy.
- Success: Measuring the level of satisfaction a customer derives after interacting with your business.
Top 7 Wholesale Customer Experience Strategy Best Practices
Let’s review the top 7 customer experience strategies and best practices.
- Create Your Customer Experience Strategy
Just like writing a restaurant business plan or an eCommerce business plan, it is important to create your customer experience strategy. So, how do you create a strategy?
- Identify Your Audience and Create Buyer Personas: You have a possibility of converting a consumer's interest into genuine brand loyalty if you have a thorough understanding of what they value, what they are seeking, and what would satisfy them. To understand the target audience, gathering and segmenting data are excellent places to start.
- Set a Goal: What do you want to achieve with your customer experience strategy? Higher customer satisfaction? Improved guest retention? More leads? Increased customer lifetime value? Setting your eCommerce metrics and goals will make it easier to measure the success of your strategy.
- Plan a Strategy: Once your goals are set and customers identified, the next step is to plan your strategy.
- Monitor and Adjust: It is important to monitor your eCommerce KPIs and adjust them whenever necessary.
- Define a Clear Customer Experience Vision
Your customer experience strategies show your brand values and business goals. You must define a clear business vision and decide how your wholesale business will handle the key components of the customer experience journey.
Defining the customer experience value enables brands to identify the worth of customers at the time of interaction. You can decide how to optimize that value through dynamic, personalized treatment to give the greatest experience possible and maximize the return on customers’ efforts.
When defining your customer experience vision, take these into account:
- Customer service: Describe the methods or techniques your company uses to provide excellent customer service.
- Customer journey mapping: How to take into account all points of contact with customers to understand their behavior and provide individualized support.
- Interactions: How customers feel about your brand as a result of their interactions with your company.
- Broaden Your Services
Broadening your services and product offerings is another way to improve your customer experience. For example, a wholesale food distributor can offer bulk shipping services to a restaurant business for ordering wholesale restaurant supplies.
You can provide additional services for your customers based on their preferences and requirements. Offering customers value-added services gives them a positive impression of your business.
Some additional services you can offer include:
- Delivery route management
- Warehouse inventory management
- B2B wholesale marketplace
- eCommerce Wholesale directory
- Kitting
- Subscription billing model
- Recurring payments model
- Switch to eCommerce Personalization Campaigns
Personalizing your marketing and sales efforts to fit your customers' unique needs and persona is a great way to improve your customer experience. Although a personalized marketing and sales campaign take a lot of time and effort, it is an excellent way to make customers feel seen.
You can use customer analytics tools to gain more precise insights into certain profiles. Real-time data reporting can be set up to help you react rapidly to events. Every personalization campaign begins with segmentation and sorting through different personas.
Additionally, you can fine-tune your content strategy (for instance, personalized emails) on a client-by-client basis with the aid of account-based marketing (ABM) and account-based sales (ABS). Technology solutions are necessary if you want to apply this technique to lots of customers.
You can personalize your customers' experience in several ways:
- Always use the customer's name while addressing them.
- Send customized messages and responses.
- Don't forget to follow up with customers who join up for a free trial or buy any products.
- Inquire about their experience with onboarding.
- Find out how you may assist them by asking them.
- Be Proactive
You can use the customer data you have to create the perfect sales and marketing strategies. Anticipating what your customers want before they ask for it and offering it to them is a great way to improve your customer experience.
Paying attention to the tiny details shows customers you care about them and will undoubtedly boost their loyalty to your brand. Being proactive with your sales strategy will positively impact your brand and help you outperform your competitors.
You could, for instance, keep track of wholesale purchase agreement that is about to expire and get in touch with the customer well in advance to renew them. Or you could analyze their buying history to determine when it might be appropriate to acquire new things.
- Invest in the Right Wholesale Tools
The right wholesale distribution software will streamline your business process flow and help you build efficient business systems. Investing in digital tools and software will help you engage better with your customers and improve your productivity as a team.
Customers will be encouraged to interact with your brand more if the appropriate tools are identified and used. The ultimate objective is to satisfy customer expectations and make them happy.
Wholesale CRM tools can help you interact with your customers better. It can also organize and gather customer data. Another tool you can use is wholesale ERP software, this tool will manage your logistics operations as well as other business processes.
Other tools that can automate your wholesale distribution processes and improve customer experience are:
- Payment processing software to make it easy to accept payments online
- MPOS systems and POS software to streamline complex wholesale operations
- Invoice management software to make it easier to request for payment and process invoices received
- eCommerce accounting software to automate your wholesale accounting process
- Delivery and route management software to track wholesale deliveries
- Warehouse management software to manage inventory storage
- Wholesale inventory management software to track wholesale inventory
- Order management software to stay on top of customer orders
- Wholesale distribution management software to manage wholesale distribution
- Supplier relationship management software to manage vendors and suppliers
- Monitor Customer Experience Metrics
Companies can use a variety of metrics to define goals and assess the performance of their customer experience strategy to provide a good and distinctive customer experience. Understanding how your customer experience strategy is performing is crucial.
It goes beyond simply calculating your corporate ROI when evaluating customer experience KPIs. Knowing which tactic is improving customer experience the most is a necessary step. Understanding customer intent, churn risk, and level of happiness can be done in a number of different methods.
NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), and CES (Customer Effort Score) are the three main metrics that can measure customer experience. You can evaluate your performance in the market using these metrics.
You can also check the following eCommerce KPIs:
- Customer satisfaction score: The customer satisfaction score is a metric that businesses can use to measure the effectiveness of their efforts to satisfy consumers.
- Customer effort score: The customer effort score is a measurement of the amount of work a customer must do in order to execute tasks like purchasing goods and submitting support issues.
- Churn rate: The rate at which customers discontinue making purchases from a business is measured by churn rate.
- Net promoter score: The net promoter score calculates how likely customers are to tell their friends or family about a product or service.
- Response time: Response time is the length of time it takes a representative in customer support departments to address a client's query or problem.
Frequently Asked Questions About Customer Experience Strategies
Keeping customers happy is one way to improve your customer experience. One thing you should always remember when creating your strategy is that customer service is at the heart of any customer relationship. Giving the best customer support and service will improve the way customers perceive your brand.
Let’s answer more questions about customer experience processes.
What are the 5 Parts of the Customer Experience Cycle?
The five parts of the customer experience cycle include:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Purchase
- Retention
- Advocacy
What is CX Lifecycle?
The customer experience lifecycle is a sequence of actions a customer takes during the purchasing process. These actions include discovery, evaluation, conversion, and if everything goes well, the development of a long-term relationship.
What is an End to End Customer Experience?
End-to-end CX refers to the series of interactions that take place between a company and its customers over the course of their working relationship. Discovering the strategies that have the biggest influence on customers is the main objective of the end-to-end customer journey.
Keeping it Simple
Building stronger customer experience strategies will improve customer retention and loyalty. When customers are happy with a brand, they tend to spread the word. You can get a lot of great referrals from loyal customers and improve your ROI. Find out what is a good ROI.
Integrating wholesale CRM software, like BlueCart, and CXM software will positively impact your brand reputation. Customers will feel empowered and your business profitability will increase rapidly.