6 best practices for B2B customer service

Business-to-business (B2B) customer service refers to the ongoing dialogue between a company selling a product or service to another company instead of individual consumers. It's all about forming and maintaining strong relationships with other businesses over the long term.

Companies offering B2B customer service work to understand the complexities of their clients' businesses to prescribe personalized solutions.

B2B and B2C customer service are similar but distinct fields. B2C customer service focuses on improving the experience of a single consumer. By contrast, B2B customer service prioritizes ongoing relationships with businesses. B2B customer service also emphasizes personalized service beyond what an individual consumer might receive from a seller.

Effective customer service is critical for ongoing business success. Let’s explore some of the most effective B2B customer service strategies.

1. Personalize service to accommodate client needs

Whether it's an email or a slide deck, personalizing your outreach shows a deep commitment to the businesses you’re serving. Personalization allows you to demonstrate your knowledge of their market, core customer demographic, and challenges for market share. It also builds rapport and cultivates a sincere relationship between your company and its corporate clients. It allows your customers to feel more like a partner and less like a help ticket in ways that set you apart from other vendors.

2. Empower your support team

Customer outreach teams need high-quality tools for high-quality service. This means the right programs, training, resources, and autonomy make a difference on their clients' behalf. Empowered support teams are better positioned to make quick decisions, offer proactive guidance, and navigate challenging situations effectively.

The best support tools include integrated channel workflows, conversational AI, and unified analytics — everything B2B reps need to engage customers across every channel. Khoros helps solve those needs, through customer service software tailored for enterprises. Our solution comes with a market-ready, omnichannel engagement out of the box and customization capabilities so you can refine it to serve your B2B audience.

3. Collect feedback and act on it

Collecting feedback is a critical step in addressing customer concerns. Make sure to solicit positive or negative feedback from your B2B customers actively — and take time to review it. Acting on feedback demonstrates a commitment to continuous improvement and responsiveness to their concerns. This helps further foster trust among your best customers and improve loyalty among customers who might need more assistance.

For B2B customers specifically, you may find common themes among industries or similar customers you serve, which can help you make changes to be a better partner. By doing so, you can increase your customer retention and be more attractive to prospective customers.

4. Expand service beyond initial sales

When a company doesn’t continue customer service beyond a sale, it loses an opportunity to create lifelong partnerships and miss out on upsell opportunities in the future.

After making a sale, follow up with the company to proactively provide support and let them know you’re available anytime. For example, ask the company if they’d like a walkthrough of the product or service to ensure they know how to use it, and check in every now and then to see if there are any questions or concerns you can address. Instead of waiting for the company to come to you with an issue, taking a proactive approach shows a higher level of support and dedication.

This will help you form a strong relationship with the company and may present opportunities to upsell them on additional offerings in the future. For example, a business that bought a low-tier service may need more features as it grows. By maintaining open communication throughout your partnership, you can transition ongoing support into a conversation about upgrading to a premium solution that’s better suited for their needs.

5. Train customer support staff

Among priorities like response time and project management, training is often a forgotten strategy in B2B customer service. However, the right training form is crucial in helping your customer support team respond appropriately to a B2B customer’s needs.

Proper training ensures that support staff are well-versed in the company's products, services, and processes, enabling them to provide accurate information, troubleshoot effectively, and confidently address inquiries. Ongoing training also allows support teams to stay updated on industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in your industry and theirs. Depending on your business and service offerings, it may be a good idea to train support agents to serve specific industries, or for large clients, have agents act as dedicated liaisons for a single B2B customer.

6. Offer support across multiple channels

Like individual consumers, businesses may have distinct preferences regarding outreach methods for support. While some may favor email correspondence, others may prioritize messaging and voice calls for communication. Therefore, B2B enterprises must provide support through the preferred channels of their clients.

Whether it's through phone support, email correspondence, live chat functionalities, customer portals, or social media platforms, offering a range of communication channels enables clients to interact efficiently with your support teams. To ensure you’re prepared, discuss client preferences for support during the onboarding process and address any gaps if they like to communicate through a channel you don’t typically provide support through.

Strong customer service for B2B clients does more than sustain your business — it can also help your customers operate more effectively, proactively addressing challenges before they escalate. Here are some B2B companies setting the example for excellent customer service:

Cisco

As the worldwide leader in IT infrastructure, Cisco helps companies leverage digital solutions that improve internal productivity, cost efficiency, and data security. They employ more than 4,000 Technical Assistance Centers (TAC) engineers, who help B2B clients troubleshoot issues and implement new IT solutions. Cisco sought a way to better empower and motivate their IT support staff, and turned to Khoros to improve the data-sharing process between engineers and B2B customers.

Cisco leveraged Khoros’ community management software to make their engineers’ contributions more available to clients. Allowing engineers to share information in an accessible online community simplified the content creation process and made information more available for B2B customers in times of need. Now, B2B customers can access a wealth of information from the online community, including information from IT support staff and other users.

Visa

Visa is the digital payments partner of choice for more than 16,000 financial institutions and organizations. To create meaningful relationships with their clients' developers, they launched the Visa Developer Platform in 2016. However, the first version of the online community page was blog-heavy and not easy to navigate.

Visa consulted other online communities for inspiration and was fond of Khoros’ own community homepage. Their UX team partnered with Khoros to create a redesigned page experience for developers — with a focus on improved navigation so developers could easily find support and connect with Visa’s team. These changes increased users by 124%, and the growth allowed Visa to add more staff members, manage customer engagement, and better communicate with client developers regarding new challenges and opportunities.

Check Point Software Technologies

Check Point Software Technologies. is a software provider that offers tailored solutions to help corporate enterprises and government organizations improve their cyber security. Initially, the company released CheckMates, a community hub meant to support a specific product launch. It became clear from the start how helpful this community was and how valuable it could be to its B2B clients. Since then, CheckMates has evolved into a space for dialogue, learning, and innovation around the company's products and services.

The dedicated Partner Community within CheckMates is tailored to ensure that resellers, integrators, and managed security service providers have all the tools and information at their fingertips to be successful. This includes specialized training materials, marketing resources, and direct support channels, enabling partners to deliver added value to their customers. By expanding the capabilities of its online community, CheckMates enhanced its support to better serve its audience of B2B customers.

Khoros is the full-service customer support platform your enterprise deserves. As an all-in-one digital contact center solution, we supercharge your support team’s potential behind omnichannel workflows. Use features like natural language processing (NLP) to classify customer intent and deliver the right response at the right time.

Khoros exists to make your customer outreach efforts even more effective. Our no-code chatbot builder allows you to drag and drop conversational AI features until your bot answers customer questions with zero human input. The same features help prioritize urgent messages, route conversations to the right representatives based on context, and facilitate seamless handoffs between bot and agent.

Brands like Target, Zoom, Google, and T-Mobile already trust Khoros to engage customers in ways that create lasting business results. Request your demo today to learn how your customer support team can spend less time gathering customer data and more time acting on it.