Why do so many B2B organizations neglect customer experience design?

Welcome to Spark, a newsletter from Vivace. We curate and publish the most interesting thinking and ideas from our community on themes ranging from business and finance to culture and creativity. Send pitches and feedback to [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

Hello Spark reader,

This week we have a follow on to our interview with Jeanette Juetten, Vivace’s Managing Director and expert in all things User Experience. She and Spark Editor Mimi continued their conversation, chatting about why being intentional with your customer experience is the key to winning customers and building brand loyalty in B2B, and how we’re incorporating this into every aspect of strategy as part of ‘the Vivace way’.

This edition is also sponsored by Women in Brand, a network with a mission to amplify, celebrate, and progress the work of women in brand marketing, strategy, and design, which we are very proud to support. If this sounds like you, find out how to get involved below.

-joel

Why UX and CX are the key to winning in B2B markets

In conversation with Jeanette Juetten

More than a decade ago, design thinking and its applications like customer and user experience, or service design, was being spoken about as the next big business differentiator and advantage – lead by innovators like IDEO, Frog Design, Fjord and others, many of which were ultimately gobbled up by the big consulting firms. But we have yet to see large-scale, org-wide adoption of CX or user-centred design principles in b2b.

Jeanette and I met a few weeks ago to discuss her special interest in UX, how it has been woven throughout her career and now at Vivace.

Mimi: What has been your experience of the difference in experience design focus and appetite between b2b and b2c organisations?

Jeanette: At American Girl, my career in digital included the discipline of user interface (UI) design, but the whole company had a strong market-research focus, running a lot of customer focus groups and other types of research. So my time there had me laser-focused on the customer experience from the beginning. Every time you picked up a catalog, every time you visited the website, every time you received an email, every time you placed a phone order, and how they were all connected – all of those touch-points were carefully considered. 

Thomson Reuters was ahead of its time in that it had an entire in-house team within the centralized Global Creative Services division that focused on user experience – that was quite a unique proposition for b2b around ten years ago.

Ecolab, which is a really strong, reputable brand in their space, had yet to hire a single dedicated UI or UX person when I joined in 2019, but the aim of the customer portal and E-commerce initiative that I worked on was to bring in those b2c experiences and optimise them for b2b.