Making the Case for Customer Experience in B2B Global Enterprises: Take the Regional Perspective
Marketing leaders within global B2B enterprises face unique challenges when building the business case for investing in digital experience platforms (DXP) that bolster the B2B digital customer experience.
What’s a DXP? A digital experience platform (DXP) is an emerging set of acronyms in a marketing technology world full of acronyms. It is typically defined as a suite of marketing technology products that support an enterprise’s ability to deliver connected customer experiences and gather customer insights. It’s basically the set of applications (a bunch of other acronyms like CMS, CRM, DMP, and ESP) that reach customers across digital touchpoints.
For global enterprises, getting buy-in for investment in the suite of applications that make up a DXP can be a high hurdle, since most B2B organizations do not drive on-site revenue and must rely on indicators like lead volume or operational efficiencies to measure impact.
In my experience working with global B2B enterprises, there is an interesting angle through which to view the impact of an investment in DXP, and that is the support and enablement of regional marketing teams around the globe.
Here are four things to consider about how DXP can improve regional marketing, positively impacting marketing operations and the customer experience globally.
Regional Teams Are Often Underserved by Legacy Enterprise Systems
For US-centric organizations, regional teams across the globe are often underserved and can benefit tremendously from more flexible marketing tools that support content delivery and lead generation.
DXP provides enterprises with the ability to centralize and decentralize the creation of the regional customer experience, support multiple languages, and simplify regional compliance.
Most importantly, DXP can enable regional marketers with limited resources to build out and deliver compelling campaigns.
Managing Regional Products and Services Content Is Challenging
For a global enterprise, the online product catalog or other technical documentation is often one of the highest value aspects of the online customer experience. It drives significant organic search results and can be the destination for customers coming through a campaign funnel.
If a global enterprise has a traditional content management systems (CMS), the organization often struggles to keep content updated. The manual effort required simply overwhelms resources, and after a few years, the content becomes hopelessly outdated.
With a robust DXP, maintenance of product and services content can become greatly streamlined. Integrated with PIM, PLM, ERP or some other system of record for product and technical information, DXP can pull up to date product information from a centralized repository and display it based on regional requirements for product and services availability, metric systems, compliance, or language translation.
The opportunity to improve and, in many cases, automate once arduous tasks for managing regional product content can save the organization a ton of time and money.
Onsite Search Can Be Improved
For the customers coming to a B2B website to find product information, they typically have a couple methods available to find the content they want. The user can drill down through the navigation tree or utilize onsite search to find the product.
Implementing DXP often presents an opportunity for organizations to greatly enhance the onsite search experience, reducing user friction on a critical path to finding content.
With more robust search capabilities, the search experience can be fine-tuned to meet the needs of regional users, whether that means narrowing results to specific languages or omitting content from the search results that should not appear to a regional customer.
Economies of Scale Can Increase ROI
A B2B global enterprise recently engaged our Blue Acorn iCi team in a strategic consulting engagement to layout the roadmap and level of effort for deploying a DXP in support of the North American brand and marketing organization.
Through the engagement, we calculated that the client would realize a low return on investment if only focused on North America. We encouraged the client to take a broader view of DXP across the global enterprise.
By considering marketing needs in over forty regions outside North America, the client realized a much higher return because of economies of scale. The returns outpaced the incremental investment required to roll out the platform globally.
In the end, the client made major investments in DXP, CRM, and ecommerce because of a compelling case and clear strategy to deliver an improved customer experience for all regions globally, not just North America.
Need help making the case for Customer Experience in B2B?
If you need help building the case for DXP in your B2B global enterprise, feel free to reach out.