B2B technology companies fail to gain trust of buyers
B-to-b technology companies are finding it hard to please their customers despite an increased emphasis on customer service, study says.
In a study conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council over the last six months, results indicated that 56% of business providers see themselves as customer-driven; but only 12% of customers agree. The CMO Council is a global peer networking organization consisting of more than 3,000 marketing executives.
The research, reported in B2B magazine, surveyed 1,000 top b-to-b technology buyers, IT marketing and customer relationship executives. It revealed lack of trust in b-to-b technology companies, with over 30% of customer-participants saying they would cease partnerships with providers that fail to gain their trust; 62% said they would scale down existing contracts, while 7% said they would not consider using the supplier in the future.
More than half of the customers who participated in the study said their relationship with sellers are either dependent and captive; struggling for common ground; or, in the worst scenario, combative and adversarial. The research also found customers saying they were frustrated when their provider presumes to know what is needed by the client, and skips over company protocol and procedures.
Meanwhile, a report by Celent, a Boston-based research and consulting firm earlier this year had said that adoption rates of B2B e-payments were not about to increase any time soon, even as e-payments have become a huge factor in consumers’ lives.
“With few exceptions, payments currently are not front-burner issues for corporations. They focus more on their core business—their products and services. Finance and treasury are usually second in line,” Celent manager Alenka Grealish had told Bank Systems and Technology (BS & T) a few months before the CMO Council study was undertaken.
Grealish had told BS & T that the problems revolve around electronic data interchange (EDI), a process wherein business transactions, are exchanged electronically among organizations. These days, companies rely on their own means of interpreting the information, she had said.
Grealish had also said that future transactions lie with XML-based messaging standards to maximize a corporation’s interoperability. The downside, according to Grealish, is that “it could be 20 years before the majority of companies replace their EDI infrastructures with XML-based platforms.”
For his part, Mark Weidick, chief executive and president of Cymerc Exchange, a leading online Business to Business Internet trading exchange for buying and selling surplus telecommunications and IT Technology equipment, had said recently that in some cases of online b-to-b technology exchanges where a buyer and seller are merely electronically matched, buyers cannot simply rely on the quality of product.
Weidick had also said even with business-to-business exchanges creating more direct buyer-seller connections, solution providers can still be utilized, as customers are more willing to retain a technology supplier when they see that the company has understood the clients’ requirements and are more than capable of providing their needs from start to finish. “Even with customers still not sold to the idea using b-to-b companies, technology could still lend a hand.”
