Consumer Research, Research and Information Services, Technology, Media and Telecom
Providing relevant offerings to buyers at every stage of their journey requires a granular understanding of the B2B customer experience. With new technologies and market shifts shaping buyer expectations, B2B organizations, such as technology providers, need to constantly evaluate their buyer journey to enhance customer satisfaction in an already competitive environment.
A leading global telecommunications provider facing this challenge was keen to understand the buyer journey more deeply to deliver a customer-centric experience. By uncovering the barriers in the buyer journey and the factors that influence how they choose products and suppliers, it aimed to provide customers with the right support they needed at each stage.
They partnered with Netscribes to conduct a B2B customer experience study analyzing buyer experiences across the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific.
Our client is a provider of telecommunication services worldwide. Its services include voice and data transmission, networking, IoT, cloud security, and other custom solutions catering to both B2B and B2C customers.
There can be significant information asymmetry in the telecommunications and IT industry, making it challenging for businesses to find, purchase, and manage telecom services.
Determined to provide a more customer-centric experience for buyers of telecom services, our client was keen to understand what was broken in the existing process.
By understanding the buyer journey and the factors that influence how they choose products and suppliers, it aimed to provide customers with the right support they needed at each stage. As a global telecom provider, it sought to analyze buyer experiences across the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific.
The company turned to Netscribes to gain insight into the telecom buyer behavior and identify the barriers in their journey.
Netscribes used a combination of primary and secondary research to facilitate meaningful analysis of customer behavior.
We first sought to determine the various players involved in the path to purchase – right from an organization’s employees as the end-product users to procurement officers as buyers, C-level executives as influencers, various departmental heads as decisions makers and finally network architects and specialists as the need initiators.
Next, our team employed a top-down approach to understand the fundamental aspects in the user-experience journey of our client’s customers. It involved the following steps:
We applied this methodology to uncover typical buyer scenarios and insights across five broad business needs that our clients served:
For instance, data security is an intrinsic need for organizations looking to expand their business and achieve digital transformation. Lack of visibility into the network’s infrastructure and inability to assess current security maturity are a few internal triggers driving this need.
To uncover how stakeholders scout for a solution, our team implemented a combination of primary research that involved interviewing relevant decision-makers across firms, regions, etc. and secondary research that scoured competitors’ websites, industry and government publications, news publications, and more, for contextual insights.
We used the insights drawn from both these sources to determine the requirements buyers have, both essentials and good-to-haves, while evaluating solution providers.
Buyers looking for security solutions, for example, sought the following:
Essentials:
Good-to-haves:
Our study identified the factors influencing buyer decisions, including the product features, the selection criteria, and the information they sought for vendor evaluations.
For instance, buyers looking for network security solutions were influenced by the following factors:
Selection criteria:
Product features:
Evaluation:
To help our client provide buyers with the right support, we provided probable solutions aligned to buyer needs and identified best practices based on the insights gathered from our research.
For example, for buyers seeking security solutions, we recommended that our client offer its advanced managed security solution, including capabilities such as advanced perimeter systems (APS), SIEM, and security operations. We also identified relevant business models and bundling opportunities to better meet current buyer needs.
Through this B2B customer experience, we armed our client with tangible insights into their customers’ buying journey. This involved:
Equipped with insights from our analysis, our client gained a data and evidencebacked understanding of the factors influencing buyer behavior. This helped their organization to better address buyer needs based on where they are in their buying journey and allowed stakeholders to bridge the gap between buyer needs and services they deliver.
