Key Takeaways
- UX is not just a design task - it affects every digital and physical touchpoint a customer has with your brand
- Accessibility is a legal requirement - your website must be accessible to all users, however they navigate the web
- A good user experience is one that is useful, easy to navigate, accessible, valuable, easy to find, trustworthy and desirable
User experience (UX), covers a myriad of things, but at its core, it aims to ensure your target customer is at the centre of all of your B2B strategies. By taking a customer-centric approach to your digital channels, you'll ensure a seamless journey that will lead to happier customers and better results from your marketing campaigns.
UX is often seen as the responsibility of the UX designer, but all members of a B2B brand have a role to play in shaping the user journey, from product management to marketing to customer support.
In this post, we provide a really comprehensive breakdown of B2B user experience, including examples, why UX is vital to all B2B businesses, how to get started, how to measure impact and more.
Table of contents
What Do You Mean by User Experience?
User experience encompasses every single digital and physical touchpoint a prospect or customer has with your brand. This includes top-of-funnel research, website navigation, product feature discovery, the checkout or lead-generation process and the post-purchase experience.
UX refers to how something looks, its ease of use, and how the customer feels throughout the buying journey. 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 discipline.
B2B UX vs B2C UX: The key differences
Unlike B2C retail, where emotional buying decisions happen quickly, B2B user journeys feature distinct complexities:
- Multi-user decisions - A single B2B purchase can often require approval from procurement, legal, technical teams and end-users. Good UX accommodates these varied stakeholders and their requirements
- Complex workflows - B2B sites have to be able to handle custom pricing tiers, bulk ordering and integration with external ERP systems
- Longer sales cycles - Because the consideration phase can span months, UX must nurture leads and returning users over multiple sessions
Why User Experience Matters
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 your product or service is better than your competitors', a frustrating website user experience creates immediate distrust. If potential customers or clients have difficulties in understanding your offering, requesting a quote or seeing how your products or services work, they'll abandon the session. Good UX means eliminating those difficulties, turning your website into a high-performing lead generation engine.
What Are the Benefits of UX?
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:
- Increased revenue
- Improved customer loyalty and retention
- Better user interactions
- More goal completions (for both ecommerce and service-based B2B brands)
What Is a Good User Experience?
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:
1. Is it useful?
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?
B2B example: A 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?
Or, if you're selling machinery or components, are you offering genuinely helpful information (technical specifications, downloadable datasheets and brochures, compatibility information, etc), rather than just generic product descriptions?
2. Is it easy to navigate and use?
Can users find what they’re looking for quickly and easily?
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.
B2B example: When taking the user through an account set up, only ask for the information you really need and that they will be able to provide there and then, without having to go to another tab or even away from the screen.
3. Is it accessible?
Digital accessibility is not optional. When browsing your website, everybody must be treated equally, regardless of any disabilities they may have or what technology or device they are using. This isn’t just important for user experience, it’s also part of the Equalities Act 2010. If your business trades in the EU, you may also be subject to the European Accessibility Act (EAA).
In the UK, the recommended standard for compliance is WCAG 2.2 AA. This means ensuring high colour contrast betweenn page elements, making pages fully-screen-reader compatible and implementing keyboard-controlled navigation (among other requirements!). 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.
4. Is it valuable?
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 time where business owners everywhere are watching their pockets, you have to really show the value of choosing your product or service over a competitor.
5. Is it easy to find?
This applies to external search visibility (SEO and AEO) as well as internal site navigation.
The aim here is to design your site so that search engine crawlers and AI engines can easily understand what you’re offering. When users land on your site, they must be able to find precisely what they’re looking for quickly and easily. A clear search function, mega-menus and filters should guide them to where they want to be.
B2B example: Going back to our workwear example, can somebody get onto the correct product page, select the colours, styles and sizes they need for their team and pay without any niggles?
6. Is the information you provide credible and trustworthy?
Trust is vital 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 back them up with case studies, testimonials and accreditations? Are security badges, data compliance certifications (like ISO or GDPR) and review ratings prominently displayed?
7. Is it desirable?
Despite B2B purchase journeys being inherently less emotion-driven than B2C, aesthetics and brand perception still play a big part. If your interface looks dated, overly crowded or unprofessional, this can subconsciously reflect on your product or service among your prospective customers. Keep typography clean, layouts stable and consistent and pages quick to load.
When it comes to your product, 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?
What Is User Experience Management?
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:
- Setting out short and long-term goals that align with further business growth
- Agreeing on time frames to meet those goals
- Carrying our user research and market research to set benchmarks to measure performance against
- Crafting strategies
- Designing metrics to measure them by
- Implementing the strategies
- Analysing, reporting and tweaking the strategy for further improvement
How to Measure User Experience
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:
Conversion rate
Conversion rate 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.
Time on site
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.
New vs Returning Visitors
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.
Retention Rate
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 indication that there’s a UX issue.
Reviews
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.
Maximise Your B2B Conversions with The Digital Maze
An exceptional user experience bridges the gap between your marketing campaigns and your sales pipeline. This is why we design, build, and optimise high-performance B2B websites that map perfectly to how modern buyers search, compare and convert.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your B2B brand improve your UX, get in touch!
