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Few B2B companies are prepared to invest in improving their customer experiences. A recent Accenture research of B2B companies around the world and across industries shows that nearly half of these companies' customer experience investments are ineffective. More than half of the companies surveyed have experienced little, flat or negative growth in their effectiveness in retaining customers.
According to Accenture's survey of more than 1,450 executives at B2B companies, 85 per cent of executives said the customer experience is important to their companies' strategic priorities, and 88 per cent indicated they are investing more in this area year-on-year. There are material differences between masters of customer experience that are "playing to win" from those companies that "play not to lose"- with masters yielding up to twice the return on their customer experience investments. That means for a majority of companies, up to half of their customer experience investments are being used ineffectively. Another factor that can influence a company's ability to generate results from their customer experience investment is leadership. Companies where customer experience is centralised within a C-level function do better than others.
