Posted 03.08.2022
User experience (UX), covers a myriad of things, but at the most basic level, it aims to ensure your target customer is at the centre of all of your B2B strategies. By taking a customer-centric approach, you’re guaranteed to see better returns on all your marketing campaigns.
Often UX is seen as the responsibility of the UX designer, but all members of a B2B brand have a role to play.
In this post, we’re going to be providing a really thorough definition of user experience including examples, why UX is vital to all B2B businesses, how to get started and more.
What Do You Mean by User Experience?
What Is a Good User Experience?
What Is User Experience Management?
How to measure user experience
User experience encompasses every customer touchpoint, from top-level research and ease of navigating to the product or services they’re looking for and you’re providing, to after they’ve invested and are using your product or service and their after-sale experiences.
It refers to how something looks, its ease of use, and how the customer felt throughout the process.
You’ll often hear user experience in regards to UX design, and while the role of UX designers is incredibly valuable, this is only one facet of a much larger concept.
Put simply, UX matters because it can easily be the difference between your B2B business converting customers to them opting to go to your competition.
Even if you believe your product or service to be of a higher quality than your closest competitors, if potential customers don’t have a good experience with your brand, they will look elsewhere.
UX requires a lot of time, it’s an ongoing process that you can’t just tick off your list and move on. With that said, it is an incredibly worthwhile approach to customer service and marketing, with some of the benefits including:
You can test whether your webpage, online experience, customer interactions, product or service is offering a good user experience by measuring it against this checklist:
What audience need or needs does it fulfil? What pain points is it alleviating and is this the best method of solving your audience’s problem?
For example, one common pain point when shopping online is that one shop’s size 12 will be a size 14 elsewhere. If you’re selling workwear, do you have a size chart to help users ensure they are purchasing a size that will fit correctly?
Can users find what they’re looking for quickly and easily?
Even if the user has short or long-term disabilities, will they have the same hassle-free positive experience as someone who doesn’t?
Does the user have the same usability regardless of the device they use?
Is everything structured in a logical and easy-to-understand format?
The aim here is to make the user feel as though the process of getting onto your site and making a purchase or investing in your service is second nature. Don’t make it unnecessarily complicated.
A good example is, when taking the user through an account set up, only ask for the information you really need and they will be able to provide there and then without having to go to another tab or even away from the screen.
This goes back to the previous point. You need to ensure that everybody has the same high-quality experience when shopping with you or investing in your service.
You need to ensure that everybody is treated equally, regardless of any disabilities they may have. This isn’t just important for user experience, it’s also part of the Equalities Act.
Readability is also incredibly important to a user’s experience. Even if you’re offering is quite technically-heavy, this needs to be communicated as simply and concisely as possible.
Finally, it’s vital that you consider members of your target audience who are data poor. If they are using their very limited data to invest in your brand, they need to be able to find it as quickly as possible using as little data as possible.
Are you providing a level of service that your target audience wouldn’t be able to get elsewhere? Remember that if you’re asking people to part with their hard-earned money, particularly during a cost of living crisis, you have to really show the value of choosing your product or service over a competitor.
This refers to both when searching online for the product or service you’re offering and when they get onto your website.
The aim here is to design your site so that search engines understand what you’re offering so that they can rank it accordingly and, when users land on your site, they get precisely what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
Going back to our workwear analogy, can somebody get onto the correct product page, select the colours and sizes they need for their team and pay without any niggles?
Trust is vitally important in a world where competition is fierce, especially in the B2B market. It is also something that’s incredibly difficult to build and extremely easy to break.
Are any claims you make substantiated? Can you prove that what you’re saying is true?
This refers to the product or service itself.
For products, is it as sleek, easy to use, aesthetically pleasing and does it evoke positive emotions compared to other similar products on the market? Is it professional looking?
For services, is your offering better than your competitors? Is your target audience getting the best value for money? What’s different between your offering and your competitors that will give your target client a better experience?
Now we know what user experience covers, your next step will be managing these experiences for even better brand performance.
Just as with any business strategy, it involves:
This part is a little complicated as the way you measure UX performance is based on the goals you’ve set. However, here are a few common measurement methods include:
This may seem like a metric solely for ecommerce sites, but brands offering B2B services can use it too. This takes the overall number of visitors to your site compared to how many make a purchase or sign up to a service and works out the average.
This way, should the amount of (unqualified) visitors to your site drop as the quality of your targeting increases, your conversion rate should go up so long as your site has good usability.
This is a difficult metric as it can be interpreted in so many ways. If a potential customer spends too long on your site, you may conclude that they can’t find what they’re looking for easily enough.
Conversely spending an incredibly short amount of time isn’t a good sign either. It could mean that your marketing strategy isn’t targeting the right people.
A great place to start is to benchmark how long people who request your services or buy your product spend on average on your site and go from there.
If your overall average time on site gets closer to that number, you are likely to have a good user flow.
How many site visits are from people who are discovering your brand for the first time or coming back again and again?
Return visits are a great mark of positive user experiences. People that come to your website will likely be at different stages of the buying cycle. You need to treat loyal customers with as much care and attention as new and potential customers. Measuring new vs returning visitors to your service or eCommerce website is a great method of gauging your focus and ensuring that it’s equally spread so that everybody has a positive experience of your B2B site and your brand.
This is a metric focusing solely on sites where customers need to return to invest in your product again, such as for cleaning supplies, for example.
If your customer base is not returning, that’s a big confirmation that there’s a UX issue.
This is a really simple way to gauge user experience. Simply review all of your online reviews and calculate the percentage of positive vs negative responses. You can do the same on any social media channels if you use these as part of your communications strategy.
Benchmarking this to measure whether your user experience is improving is a little more long-winded, particularly if you don’t have a review strategy in place or you don’t receive reviews often.
You’ll have to wait until you can gauge positive vs negative reviews over a timeframe to generate a benchmark to work from.
However, it’s a great way to get user experience information straight from the users themselves so it’s more than worth doing.
At Evolve Trader, we work in the B2B market, creating tools and solutions that can automate processes to ensure a positive user experience on eCommerce sites. Our solutions include:
Our catalogue order management system ensures that your site never says a product is in stock when it isn’t, preventing user disappointment. Automated inventory also frees your team’s time up to focus on other aspects of B2B marketing.
Find out more about our customer order catalogue system
This puts a lot of power in the hands of your customers, tailoring their online experience. This works great if you’re product serves teams where people of differing levels need to access a portal to order products. They can quickly and easily find what they need and order it smoothly.
Find out more about our customer order portal
We work with the following industries:
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your B2B brand improve your UX, please complete this form and someone will be in touch.
Image credit: Mohamed Boumaiza on Unsplash
