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RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

B2B sellers must take control of their

omnichannel experience

Creating a personalized and seamless omnichannel 2. Sellers face sales and marketing challenges
experience involves integrating a myriad of people, pro- across all phases of the customer journey, espe-
cesses, technology, and data to enable channels to cially when dealing with personalization, as dispar-
share information close to real time, states Forrester ate systems and processes complicate data aggre-
Consulting in its Thought Leadership Paper Mastering gation and sharing efforts.
Omnichannel B2B Customer Engagement, commis-
sioned by Accenture Interactive and SAP hybris. 3. Most customer data is only available in some
channels, but not all. B2B sellers said that although
The research found that B2B sellers still have a hard they have customers’ names, purchase/service his-
time meeting buyers’ expectations across the customer tories, and business backgrounds available fairly
journey, revealing the following: broadly, they don’t have other critical personalization
data, such as pricing, available across all channels.
1. B2B firms face challenges with technology, data
silos, and measurement, finding it “difficulty sharing Indeed, omnichannel solutions are not possible without
customer data and analytics between channels, technologies and enabling business processes capable
countries, or locations, besides mentioning a “lack of of providing consistent and responsive content, data,
the right business measurements and incentives.” and transaction services to all channels at the custom-
Sellers cannot create personalized experiences if er’s moment of need. Therefore, sellers are on the right
their various systems can’t talk to each other, nor track in working to implement omnichannel touchpoints,
can they easily improve their customer engagement but must accelerate the integration of technology plat-
based on the data that they do have access to if they forms with people and Agile processes to support a real
aren’t even sure what to measure. -time operating environment.
According to Forrester’s findings, creating personalized
8 Asian eMarketing - December 2015 Omnichannel Marketing
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