In B2B, 3 out of 5 buyers regret the software purchase they made, a Gartner study reveals. Why are 60% of B2B customers experiencing buyer’s remorse? All thanks to difficult implementation and mismanaged expectations—the hallmark signs of poor customer service.
Unlike B2C, where a refund or discount can repair a bad experience, B2B relationships are long-term commitments. In B2B, poor customer service doesn’t just result in dissatisfaction, but in lost multi-year contracts, damaged brand reputation, and ever-increasing churn.
So, every B2B company has the imperative to keep their customers happy to not just retain their existing customer base, but acquire new customers.
That said, how can your business deliver the kind of exceptional B2B customer service that fosters brand loyalty, increases retention, and drives growth?
In this guide, we’ll cover:
✅ What defines B2B customer service and why it’s important
✅ Best practices for creating a high-impact customer service experience
✅ How AI can transform your B2B customer service automation
Key Pointers
- B2B customer service refers to the assistance that a B2B company provides to its customers, which are other companies using its products or services.
- As B2B transactions tend to be more complex, delivering quality B2B customer service is important for any business looking to increase its customer lifetime value and build long-lasting customer relationships that drive mutual success.
- Using AI-powered tools helps B2B customer service representatives to automate mundane tasks like data entry, appointment scheduling, and customer research.
What Is B2B Customer Service?
B2B customer service is all the service-related interactions between your B2B company and other businesses who are your customers that starts from the moment they purchase your solution and continues over the entire course of their association with your business.
Typically, exceptional customer service in a B2B setting is both reactive and proactive.
In reactive customer service, you help customers overcome any challenges they report while using your product or service. This can include answering their queries and sharing relevant resources to help them troubleshoot the customer issues at the earliest.
Proactive customer service involves you initiating the conversation with your customer, where you start by understanding their desired end state, and then suggesting steps that’ll get them to that end state as quickly as possible.
Why B2B Customer Service Matters: 3 Key Benefits for Your Business
Helping your customers with excellent B2B service is important as it helps you improve customer satisfaction by helping you build strong relationships with your customers, which ultimately promotes your business growth.
Let’s see in detail. A survey by Oracle on consumers’ service experience reveals:
- 98% of consumers agree that a positive experience with an organization results in a greater likelihood to purchase or continue to purchase from them.
- 99% of consumers report that the quality of customer service that they receive from a business influences their overall impression of that organization to some extent.
Yes, you read these numbers right. Few opinions are as unanimously held by consumers as these ones.
The same survey also points out that B2B service experiences are held to the same standards as B2C experiences, as people tend to carry the same expectations after interacting with popular B2C brands.
So, a B2B company that aspires to increase or sustain its growth momentum has its work cut out when it comes to improving its customer service.
Let’s zoom into the top 3 reasons on why B2B customer service is important for your business:
1. Reduce Customer Churn Rate
Customer churn rate is the percentage of customers who discontinue using a company’s product or service over a period of time.
Customers may churn for a variety of reasons: They might have found a better alternative to your solution, or they might find your customer support, well, not supportive enough.
So, when you adopt strategies to improve your customer retention that includes improving your customer support, you improve your overall customer satisfaction. This translates to a decrease in your churn rate, as satisfied customers tend to stick with you for a longer period of time.
2. Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value refers to the amount of money your customer is expected to spend with your business as long as they use your product or service.
This is a corollary of the previous point. If satisfied customers stick with you for extended periods of time, it means there will be an increase in 3 things:
- Customer lifespan: The length of time customers engage with your business.
- Average purchase value: How much customers spend on each purchase.
- Average purchase frequency rate: How often your customers would purchase from you.
Naturally, if these 3 go up, the customer lifetime value also increases.
Studies show how acquiring a new customer can cost 5 to 7 times more than retaining existing customers. So, ensuring high customer lifetime value will help you drive revenue sustainably.
3. Boost Customer Loyalty and Advocacy
From what we’ve seen so far, it’s evident that B2B customer support plays a crucial role in shaping the overall customer experience.
A direct consequence of improving B2B customer experience is an increase in customer loyalty—the customer’s willingness to consistently choose your products or services over your competition.
The more loyal your customers are, the more likely they are to become your advocates. Brand advocacy can result in a ripple effect, where the positive word-of-mouth spreads and attracts new customers to your business.
How To Improve B2B Customer Service?
To improve B2B customer service, start by making it a company-wide priority. Focus on personalization and a strategic multichannel approach. Ensure continuous feedback loops to refine services based on customer insights. Finally, leverage AI-driven automation to speed up response times, and enable proactive support.
Make Customer Service a Priority for the Whole Company
“If we were serious about building our brand around being the best in customer service, customer service had to be the whole company, not just a single department.”
This is what former Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh wrote while reflecting on his experience on building a customer-centric culture. And it’s worth emulating in a B2B context too.
For the entire company to align on delivering excellent customer service, every employee must understand how their work impacts the customer journey. This means:
- Mapping out your customer journey to see the interactions between you and your customer, including their touchpoints, user actions, and pain points.
- Fostering cross-team collaborations to ensure every interaction the customer has with your company is positive.
- Monitoring the impact that different teams are having on major customer success KPIs like customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and churn rate.
- Breaking down data silos between teams by allowing members of all teams access customer data from sources like CRM systems, support tickets, product usage data, and marketing automation platforms.
When these fall into place, all your key customer metrics like CSAT, response time, resolution time, and retention increases. Your customers get more personalized, timely and relevant service as teams become more collaborative.
Personalize Your Customer Interactions
Compared to B2C customers, B2B customers have higher expectations for personalization.
A study by Forrester shows 72% of customers expect personalization while using the product or service and 71% of customers look forward to personalized interactions while engaging with the company.
So, how can you successfully personalize your B2B customer service? By following these steps:
- Develop customized onboarding plans: Tailor your onboarding based on the customer’s specific goals to ensure they get the most value from your product or service. Include milestones that align with their business objectives and offer training sessions that are customized to the customer’s knowledge level and business use case.
- Have dedicated account managers: Assign account managers to each account to provide continuous and personalized attention based on the customer’s history, goals, and challenges.
- Share personalized content: Share content like white papers, case studies, webinars, or blog posts that’s relevant to the customer’s industry, role, and specific needs.
- Craft brand loyalty programs: To boost retention, develop personalized customer loyalty programs like discounts or exclusive offers that reward customers based on their specific engagement levels and business outcomes.
Go Multichannel, but Know When To Use the Right Communication Channel
Given that B2B customers expect personalized interactions while engaging with your business, it’s important to know which channel they prefer to engage the most.
For instance, some customers may prioritize emails over calls, while others might prefer getting in touch over live chat or even social media.
So, ensure your B2B customer support has a multichannel approach, where you’re typically using all key channels like email, phone, video calls, social media, and live chat to communicate with your customers wherever they prefer.
To make sure you’re using the right channel for the right purpose, you could set channel-specific guidelines like:
- Email for sharing detailed information like proposals, or follow-up communications. Ensure emails are personalized and reference previous interactions.
- Video/voice calls for complex discussions such as resolving issues that require detailed explanation or negotiation.
- Live chat/chatbots on websites for quick, real-time assistance to address relatively minor issues or providing fast answers during business hours.
- Social media for on-the-go engagement and brand monitoring.
- Self-service portals for addressing common queries through a knowledge base that’s comprehensive, accurate, user-friendly, and up-to-date.
Establish Customer Feedback Loops for Customer Experience
Customer feedback loop entails mutual interaction between you and your customers to constantly enhance and improve your product based on their inputs. It contains 4 steps:
- Collect customer feedback through survey tools, live chat, social media monitoring etc.
- Analyze feedback data to see which issues or pain points are being brought up over and over again.
- Applying feedback by fixing the issues that the customer raised.
- Following up with customers to close the loop.
Use AI to Unburden Your Agents
B2B customers of today have exacting standards—they demand fast, consistent, secure, personalized, and proactive customer experience from you.
Research by HubSpot shows 82% of customers expect problem resolution from customer service agents within 3 hours without compromising on personalization. Naturally, service agents struggle to keep up with these mounting customer expectations.
One efficient way to tackle this is by using AI for customer service. The advances in generative AI can help agents automate several manual tasks. Here’s a glimpse:
- Accelerate response times through AI-powered chatbots to free up time for handling more complex inquiries.
- Leverage AI’s predictive omnichannel analytics based on past interactions and behaviors to anticipate customer needs and deliver proactive customer service.
- Devote more time to projects that increase customer value by allowing AI to automate mundane tasks like data entry, appointment scheduling, and customer research.
3 Inspiring Examples of B2B Customer Service
Velocity Global
Velocity Global, a leader in global workforce solutions, enables other businesses to hire, pay, and manage employees across 185+ countries while ensuring compliance.
As its operations scaled, its existing support platform became inefficient, relying on manual workflows and fragmented processes. The team needed a modern solution to streamline customer support.
By switching to DevRev, Velocity Global transformed its support operations:
- Automated ticket assignments, improving First Response and Full Resolution SLA achievements to near-perfect scores.
- Migrated 600 macros and 900k tickets seamlessly, ensuring a smooth transition without disrupting operations.
- Onboarded 350+ employees globally, enabling efficient, AI-powered customer support.
- Leveraged in-app reporting and custom dashboards, enhancing decision-making with real-time insights.
Uniphore
Uniphore provides a leading Enterprise AI platform that supports billions of customer and employee engagements across 20 countries on a weekly basis.
Given the nature of its operations, Uniphore needed a support tool that would allow engineering and customer support teams to collaborate effortlessly and solve customer tickets. The team looked for a solution that allowed their support team to effortlessly connect to product teams and be integral in delivering product improvement insights based on engagements with customers.
With DevRev, Uniphore was able to:
- Migrate 16,000 tickets from their erstwhile support tool to DevRev in less than 6 hours.
- Have a single source of truth for their customer data including their level and SLAs.
- Allow seamless collaboration between support, engineering and product teams to implement customer feedback effectively into software development.
Aditya Birla Capital
A part of the $66 billion global conglomerate Aditya Birla Group, Aditya Birla Capital provides financial solutions including insurance for over 25 million customers through its mobile apps.
Some of the service-related problems the organization faced include limited user issue highlights that resulted in delayed problem resolution and inability to identify hotspots and dead zones in the app interface.
Once they used DevRev, they experienced:
- Faster bug diagnosis
- Improved user journeys and feature adoption
- Independent resolution of issues by the support team
Transform Your B2B Customer Service With Conversational AI
AI is rapidly transforming customer service, yet most businesses are still struggling to unlock its full potential. A study by Deloitte shows while 9 in 10 respondents were confident that AI has the potential to improve customer experience, only 3 in 10 said AI is used often within the customer experience today.
Why this gap? Because legacy customer support software wasn’t built for AI. Many companies attempt to bolt AI onto outdated infrastructure, leading to fragmented workflows, poor data integration, and limited automation. As a result, customer support agents continue to grapple with information siloed in different tools, slow resolution times, and high operational inefficiencies, which affects both the customer experience and business outcomes.
This is where DevRev makes the difference.
By unifying enterprise data with its patented Airdrop technology, DevRev eliminates data silos and structures information into an AI-native knowledge graph. DevRev brings conversational AI into every customer interaction, making every touch smarter, faster, and more personalized:
- Conversational Customer Support: Omnichannel support is transformed with AI-native ticketing, predictive incident management, and self-service automation.
- Conversational Product Development: AI streamlines traditionally labor-intensive product workflows, automating data analysis and decision-making for customer-first product innovation.
- Conversational Search: AI-powered enterprise search delivers relevant, real-time responses with cited sources, reducing time spent on internal knowledge retrieval.
- Conversational Customer Experience: AI-driven chat and automation provide instant resolutions, trigger proactive engagement, and adapt to sentiment and user behavior.
Ready to redefine your B2B customer service with conversational AI? Book a demo now!
