WANTED: A B2C digital experience for B2B chemical buyers
CAUTION: Some assembly required
By C Pudnos, K Murphy, L Sorgea
By now, it is widely accepted that the experience is as important as the product. Studies have shown that 50% of customers will switch suppliers due to bad customer experience. Suppliers who make it easy for customers during the moments that matter along their buying journey win customers and keep them coming back. Customers having a better experience are more likely to pay more, forgive more and advise others to use the same supplier.
In this report you will find answers to those questions. We benchmarked the digital experience offered by the world’s largest chemical producers. Even though we did not find any producer offering a complete end-to-end digital experience, we did find practical examples of how some have cracked the code at high leverage touchpoints.
It is our hope that you will find this report enlightening and inspiring. Feel free to use the ideas in this report to inform your leadership and build a roadmap for your own digital experience transformation journey.
Our goal is to help digital experience leaders make the right investments to shed the industry’s reputation as a digital laggard.
This research was borne out of our interactions with world-class chemical companies who struggled to provide a world-class digital experience across the customer’s journey. Is everyone having the same struggle? We wanted to learn the state of the industry. So, in the second half of 2020 we set out to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the digital experiences provided by 50 of the largest chemical producers.
We assessed the state of the digital journey from ideation (Discover), to analysis of options (Analyze), to selection of an ingredient solution (Select), and finally to purchase (Buy) (See graphic).
As our research progressed, we came to realize that digital sales channels are an integral channel to market for chemical companies. So, we made the decision to extend our investigation to include them, evaluating their capabilities through a similar process.
We acknowledge that these assessments are a point in time. Companies may have upgraded their digital experience after our evaluation. But given the slow pace of change in the industry, we feel the observations and conclusions will remain relevant for the near term.
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