95% of B2B buyers said they prefer making purchases without interacting with salespeople. And their expectations are similar to or sometimes more advanced than B2C customers.

• Friendly website design

• Clear navigation and easy search experience

• Detailed & Updated product descriptions

• Online Customer service

• Simple purchasing process

• Offering discounts or flexible prices for B2B buyers

The main problem is that only a series of KPIs are implemented and followed through after launching the platform. Yes, online sales are significant, but if you make 10 Million online, and 3-4 clients generate 10 million out of the 100 clients you have, it can’t be considered a success. Are those clients representative of your core segment? What about smaller ones with growth potential? What about clients that stopped ordering online because they didn’t like the experience? Even worse, clients who had a bad experience because of your digital platform are now looking at alternative distributors.

In other words, is customer adoption KPIs part of your digital strategy? Yes, you have a welcome series email and a QR code on your flyers, but there’s still more to do.

Reviewing your KPIs should be a priority, and adoption and optimization of your platform should be a priority. Your team (please tell me you don’t depend solely on an agency) should do it in a very agile way; six months for a new feature is too long, don’t forget your clients are using your platform more frequently than a B2C customer, sometimes daily, the last thing you want is for your digital platform to impact the loyalty of your customers. Today platforms like #shopifyplus allow more flexibility and reduce the delivery time of new features.

In a recession period, all your client’s loyalty is on trial; if you want to make a difference, keep focusing on customer-centric initiatives, review your customer journeys, implement adoption tools, and rebuild your welcome email series. I’d like you to please focus on customer adoption of your eCommerce platform. If you have less than 50% of transactions offline, this should be your #1 priority because your clients expect and deserve better.

Let me know how you measure your customer adoption. I would love to hear more.