My professional opinion as a customer experience speaker-consultant- author is that customer service is customer service, period: whether B2B (business to business), retail, wholesale, hospitality, banking, even healthcare. It’s humans — and the systems and technology created by those humans — helping humans.
Business to business (B2B) customer service is the same, yet different
There's no question, however, that in some of its particulars business to business (B2B) customer service needs to be executed differently from B2C (retail) customer service. The projects last longer, leading to a relationship between seller and buyer that's more akin to a marriage than to a hot date, as Diane Gordon, SVP of customer care for Brainshark, a Massachusetts-based SaaS company providing business communications solutions, aptly compared it in a chat with me recently. There’s less of that initial feeling of wow, perhaps, but this may be compensated for by fewer disruptive fireworks.
Secret #1 of B2B customer service: Make your customer's customer happy
One secret of great B2B customer service (and building B2B customer loyalty) is to become an organization that's always watching out for opportunities to help your customers make their customers happy.
Take 800-CEO-READ, or 8cr, as it's affectionately abbreviated, is, in basic terms, an online bookseller specializing in bulk and customer orders of business books.
800 CEO READ founder Jack Covert (center) with publisher Ray Bard and business author Dan Heath... [+]
This isn't a simple job. The stakes are high. The potential for screwups is immense. And by taking care of their customers’ customers (the end users of the books, upon whose happiness the authors and publishers are counting), 8cr keeps a very loyal clientele.
Jon Mueller, GM:
We work with authors, publishers, and companies to help facilitate bulk shipments of business books for events, and corporate training and giveaways. Bulk orders are different than single copies, and the service surrounding those types of orders can be complex with intense deadlines. An event with no books is bad for the attendees, the host, and the author. We have a great team of service people who interact with these customers on a daily basis, making sure these complicated orders get where they need to be, when they need to be there.
Sometimes companies or authors need 1000 books shipped to individuals around the world. Sometimes 50 copies need to get to a corporate headquarters in Iowa. Other times an event planner forgot to order the books for an event this Thursday, where every paid attendee expects a copy of a book as part of their entry fee. We make all of these scenarios happen smoothly.
(Maybe you think Amazon.com can handle something like this? Yeahhhh…nope. Amazon, the undisputed master of retail consumer orders isn't really set up for precisely timed, full completion of a bulk book order. )
In addition to straight shipping of bulk books, 8cr offers services that help both the author and the ultimate customer: “We also do a lot of customization to book orders, either physically (tipped-in pages, stickers, belly bands, letters) or logistically (list of individuals around the world, warehousing for author disbursement, etc.)”
Secret #2 of B2B customer service: Facilitate relationships between your customers and their customers
As much as taking care of the customer’s customer, 8cr, like any great B2B business, helps facilitate good relations between their customer and their customer’s customer.
For example, their ChangeThis site, a free service curated by 8cr based on an idea by Seth Godin. This is an opportunity for authors to showcase a specific idea in a very attractive, brief format, and get it out to an avid group of business book readers. In this way, it helps connect the authors (and the publishers who are supporting those authors) with the audience for their next book.
Jon Mueller:
We do a lot of different promotion campaigns with authors and publishers, book giveaways to targeted readers, ads on the blog, various reviews, and we also work with them, as you know, to feature their authors on ChangeThis.com - the site we featured you on, Micah, that publishes a handful of manifestos each month that address creating positive change. We also host an annual Business Book Awards that honors the top books in a variety of categories. We announce the winners in January and work the entire month on promoting those winners,” culminating in a high-profile event in NYC.
Now that is great B2B customer service.
Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, customer experience speaker and bestselling author.
