David Barnhardt, Head of Experience at Inbenta talks about current buying trends and marketing best practices for the B2B segment in this short Q&A with MarTechSeries:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, David, take us through your B2B tech journey and tell us more about your role at Inbenta…

My career journey has spanned over twenty years, with a bulk of my early work focusing on product experience and UX in the banking and payments sector. A big focus of that work was developing fraud strategies, building prevention systems and executive leadership for financial institutions. I went on to hold product positions with firms like Early Warning and Giact which served as the foundation for my role as Chief Experience Officer position at GIACT Systems (an LSEG business).

As the new Head of Experience at Inbenta, I’ve been given the opportunity to help companies leverage AI to improve customer experience as well as their bottom line. Inbenta’s AI platform, which includes five unique products, has been proven to resolve 95% of customer inquiries automatically.

As the industry looks to AI as a way to improve operations, Inbenta is in a great position to build on its existing products to engage customers automatically, reduce customer service costs and improve customer experience overall. It’s exciting to be part of a team that is paving the way for AI-driven customer experience solutions.

Why is it becoming more crucial for B2B tech brands to focus more on the end to end experience of their product journey in today’s market?

Today’s B2B buyer expects the same seamless, end-to-end experience they get when they interact with a B2C brand. If a B2B tech brand isn’t living up to that standard, and there’s a mismatch between their expectations and reality, you’re going to have an issue.

It’s becoming more important now because the buyers are younger (today Millennials, eventually Gen Z) and have different standards of customer experience. They demand immediacy, transparency and responsiveness throughout the product journey.

What in your view are the most crucial fundamentals of a sound customer experience journey that most brands still miss out on providing?

It’s all about consistency. There needs to be consistency in the quality of customer experience regardless of the channel you’re dealing with. For example, the quality of response from a chatbot should be the same as the response a customer receives through an IVR or through a contact center agent.

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If there were five things you could change about customer experience journeys in B2B tech, what would they be?

The first area of change is the demand immediacy. Lag times create drop offs, which lead to lower sales volumes and a negative customer experience. Businesses need to be able to automate simple requests and find ways to quickly escalate more challenging requests.

The second area of change is customization. Building long-term customer loyalty starts with gaining deep insights into your customer’s needs and supporting them accordingly.

The third area in need of change is better information sharing. This can be achieved by providing customers with free and open access to quality information that is easily searchable. By empowering customers with access to the information they need, communications can be streamlined, and they can be better equipped to make informed decisions.

The fourth area of change involves the need to establish quick access to customer support. While AI-enabled customer service solutions can answer simple questions or complete routine tasks, firms need to be able to quickly route customers to a live agent when asked. If there are too many steps involved in getting to a live agent, it creates a lot of frustration.

The fifth area of change involves the need for multi-channel customer outreach and support. B2B tech firms need to have seamless support across different channels to ensure that customers are receiving consistent attention without unnecessary delays.

Can you comment on the growing use of AI in this space? 

AI is going to vastly improve how businesses deliver on customer experience. AI can be used to engage prospects automatically, providing customized responses, and do so with consistency, 24/7/365.

On the back-end, AI is also going to be able to help deliver customer insights and identify gaps in the customer experience journey.

In the short-term, the benefits of using customer experience AI is going to be a differentiator. Eventually, everyone is going to catch on.

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What are some best practices for organizations looking to implement customer experience AI into their customer experience process?

Organizations should start with identifying where they think AI automation can be most helpful initially. For example, does your customer service department get requests for password resets or account changes? That’s a fairly simple request that customer experience AI can resolve without the need for agent intervention.

Once organizations have the most common questions and tasks identified, the beauty of automation becomes very evident — you start to see less unnecessary customer service requests in favor of automation.

From there, it’s easy to find gaps in the customer experience journey and create ways to  solve for those gaps using a chatbot or enhanced search and FAQs.

Importantly, organizations can experience a return on their investment pretty quickly when AI is doing the work for you.