George Anderson

When we talk about B2B ecommerce trends, there’s a lot of ground to cover. Strategy, technology, market trends—all these influence the decisions that are happening today in B2B ecommerce.

But what trends are emerging in customer experience? What’s getting priority in terms of customer-facing functionality—and what’s getting pushed to the back burner?

Here are five trends we’re seeing in B2B ecommerce customer experience.

1—In complex B2B scenarios, chatbots aren’t delivering if they aren’t manned by humans

While chatbots are a huge trend in B2B ecommerce, organizations are reevaluating their effectiveness. AI-driven chatbots are a great addition to B2C ecommerce, where customer questions (and answers) are fairly simple. But in B2B scenarios governed by complex, customer-specific ERP data and logic, unmanned chatbots may not be able to give customers the intelligence they need.

The key here is to ensure a real person (or team) is watching chatbot inquiries. While robotic responses can be helpful, there’s no guarantee that the chatbot is actually pointing your customer in the right direction (or answering with enough customer-specific intelligence to drive revenue).

2—Manufacturers are demanding customer personalization driven by ERP logic

If you look up B2B ecommerce trends, you’ll find a lot about personalization. Yet most B2B ecommerce platforms can’t deliver the personalization that customers actually need (at least, not without a complex ERP integration). The market talks about basic personalization like product recommendations and context-specific messages. And while these things are important, they’re not make-or-break for B2B ecommerce customers.

What personalization is essential?

Here’s what manufacturers’ customers are requesting.

• Real-time, personalized inventory availability;
• Personalized pricing governed by customer-specific ERP logic;
• Real-time, customer-specific credit status from the ERP displayed in B2B ecommerce;
• Real-time order simulation against ERP business rules (with intelligent error messaging returned to the user, to prevent order errors);
• Real-time order history and status for all orders logged in the ERP (not just those from B2B eCommerce);

While you can theoretically offer these personalization features with a non-integrated B2B platform (through third-party integration software), this architecture introduces unpredictable risk and cost when it’s supporting an integration of this complexity and depth. If any information gets out of sync, it creates a bad customer experience and drives up the cost of running your B2B ecommerce channel.

This is why we’re seeing an increasing preference for solutions that include built-in ERP integration.

3—Increasing demand for real-time inventory availability

While this B2B ecommerce trend fits neatly within the previous one, it’s worth calling this out on its own.

If you’re going to provide no other real-time ERP data in B2B ecommerce, you need accurate inventory quantities. And for ERP-dependent organizations, that means you need some form of real-time integration.

Manufacturers, in particular, are prioritizing this feature. With their customers needing certainty that they’ve claimed available stock when placing an order, manufacturers are finding that customers won’t use B2B ecommerce without inventory information.

Simply put, it’s too difficult for customers to tell if they’ll get what they need on time.

Which leads us to the next B2B trend.

4—Increasing customer demand for transparency around RDD (requested delivery dates)

We’re seeing this more and more with B2B ecommerce users. It’s not enough to know whether a product is in stock. Customers also need to know when their order will arrive.

For manufacturers whose entire business lives in the ERP, shipping time isn’t the only factor that determines this. The entire supply chain impacts the date when the order will arrive. With COVID disruptions still settling, some manufacturers are finding this impact larger than ever.

Hence the RDD (requested delivery date) logic that many organizations build out in their ERP. This calculation accounts for all factors that influence order arrival date—not only whether the material is in stock, but how quickly the supply chain can respond to demand that’s above stock levels.

As you can see, it’s a powerful calculation—and providing it in B2B ecommerce creates a great customer experience.

Without visibility into RDD in B2B ecommerce, customers will end up calling customer service to get answers. At scale, this takes a hands-free interaction (seamless order placement through B2B ecommerce) and turns it back into an expensive interaction (phone call, conversation, ERP check, callback, and order placement via phone or email, which requires another human intervention to rekey the order into the ERP).

The trends we’re seeing here are:

1) A preference for ERP-integrated solutions that can display RDD automatically, for every SKU, and

2) A willingness to clean up those RDD rules in the ERP if necessary (so they play nice in the B2B ecommerce solution).

5—Using B2B ecommerce to empower sales teams to provide customer-specific upselling/cross-selling recommendations

Here’s a creative trend in B2B ecommerce: using the solution as a portal for sales reps to recommend products to customers (and maybe even place orders on behalf of customers).

The key is a B2B ecommerce platform that maps each sales rep user to the customer accounts assigned to them in the ERP. This allows the sales rep to select a customer account from a drop-down, then see whatever unique product catalog you’ve defined for that customer in the ERP—including any related product rules.

This is a great way to leverage your ERP-defined product relationships for sales. B2B ecommerce is easier to use than an SAP GUI, or graphical user interface, (if you’re on SAP ERP) so it’s a no-brainer to make the portal available for reps in addition to customers.

In fact, we’ve even seen companies start with sales reps when they launch B2B ecommerce. With reps included in the project from the very beginning, you ensure the solution has their concerns baked in. This empowers them to be motivated evangelists who take B2B ecommerce to customers. It’s a brilliant strategy, and it’s working for real manufacturers.

George Anderson is a marketing manager at Corevist Inc., which provides manufacturers with software to launch B2B ecommerce portals integrated with SAP ERP software. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn. A portion of this article first appeared on the Corevist blog.