The B2B market has been experiencing a dramatic growth in recent times, with the COVID-19 outbreak. In fact, the pandemic has moved everybody to a digital transformation perspective for consumerism, including B2B consumerism. “At this time, along with implementing top technology trends, it is equally important to obtain insights on what your customers are doing, what channels they are using, and understand where you can meet in the middle,” says Jackie Palmer, VP of Product Marketing, Demandbase. This is where Demandbase One—a comprehensive ABX (Account-Based Experience) software comes in.

Based in San Francisco, CA, Demandbase is a leader in ABX (Account-Based Experience) in today’s changing B2B landscape. Their flagship platform, Demandbase One, surfaces customer insights at the right time to the people that are responsible for those customer relationships, such as salespeople, whether they are account executives, growth account directors, technical account managers, or whether they are CSMs. Regardless of who it is, Demandbase One reveals insights for those end users at all times. This gives the ability to understand competitive intent being pursued as well as additional opportunities.

Surfacing customer insights

According to Jackie, after determining key insights, the next step is presenting them to the right people at the right time. The end goal is to surface those insights across a buyer’s journey so that a B2B seller can make a sale. For instance, “a customer is looking for a competing product, and you notice that more web searches and other intent signals are popping up. Maybe you’ve also noticed that their activities with you went down. You’ve received fewer emails from them and they’ve logged in less times than normal. All of this points to a potential churn upcoming.”

For a more positive scenario, a B2B seller may also notice that the customer is looking at other options that could point to a potential upsell or cross-sell. In some cases the appropriate action may be no action at all. “In many CX cases, the best relationship is not a pushy relationship. However, you still need access to these activities so when something comes up, you can be prepared to understand and respond to the behavior behind it.” Demandbase implements a full platform approach. Their ABX can extend beyond the traditional end points and provide CX to customers in a continuous circle.

End-to-end ABX

Demandbase One provides an end-to-end suite of solutions like Engagement, Advertising, Personalization, Orchestration, and Attribution. They fulfill three fundamental aspects of any ABX campaign to ensure you are reaching the right customers at the right time.

• The data needed for a comprehensive understanding of your accounts
• The decision-making capabilities to know the right time to engage the right people with the right message
• The delivery mechanisms to take action across multiple channels.

“We give revenue teams the ability to align around one set of data, one sales and marketing motion, one buyer’s journey, and a single comprehensive view of the customer—from accounts to people within buying centers,” points out Jackie. Moreover, Demandbase One allows revenue teams to drive buying committee awareness with the company’s native B2B DSP or LinkedIn advertising, gain increased conversion rates with unique and personalized website experiences, run full cross-channel marketing and sales automations, and measure the impact and ROI of every interaction across sales and marketing with multi-touch attribution.

Personalization at its best

Unlike any other ABX provider, Demandbase also ensures personalization through their all-in-one solution, Demandbase One. They customize customer journey stages and therefore personalize their experiences at different points specific to a business process. Besides that, they provide a unique flexibility that no other platforms give. “The key to success is to give our customers the level of granular personalization that will really drive a good CX,” claims Jackie.

“We help optimize the entire account journey, including opportunity and post-sale, because we’re able to customize those stages beyond just the top of the funnel,” she ends.

It is the era of digitization. From business processes and models to solutions and technologies, companies are now moving digital to inherently drive a unified customer experience. Dana, the global leader in drivetrain and e-propulsion systems, wanted to deliver the best customer-focused experience for its aftermarket business. They approached PhaseZero Ventures to accelerate digital transformation to build a consumer-centric enterprise. Dana also needed to adopt cloud technologies to integrate multiple catalog, inventory, and order systems to deliver a modern customer experience.

PhaseZero’s CxCommerce platform streamlined their operations and created a seamless and straightforward experience for Dana’s customers. From easy parts searching to painless return management, CxCommerce provides everything that is needed to create a world-class customer experience. The platform solved Dana’s key digital commerce needs with many intuitive features, which helped them to achieve greater digital sales, increased customer adoption, faster searches and transactions, and improved customer satisfaction. “Dana had a vision to transform its aftermarket business into a digital, customer-centric enterprise. By collaborating closely with PhaseZero, we were able to accelerate our digital journey and transform our global aftermarket e-commerce and customer experience initiative,” said Dana

The all-in-one platform for all

In an evolving digital landscape, customer demands change consistently. Meanwhile, businesses are expected to ensure continuity and operational efficiency at all times. This is where PhaseZero comes in. Harnessing the power of digital 2.0 cloud-based technology, the Silicon Valley-based e-commerce software-as-a-service provider delivers an unparalleled digital commerce experience with comprehensive enterprise capabilities, through its all-in-one platform for manufacturing and distributor companies.

Business buyers increasingly want the same level of convenience they experience in their personal lives. They want to search for products, buy, track orders, and manage their accounts online–or have the option to order online and pick up in store. CxCommerce is a global B2B and B2C e-commerce cloud platform featuring comprehensive customer experience management capabilities to deliver digital commerce outcomes for manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and retail organizations. Some of its capabilities are:

Integrating CxCommerce 

CxCommerce is more than a website. It is a powerful platform integrated with a distributor’s business systems to provide employees and customers with a richer information experience. “Integrating CxCommerce with your business applications also eliminates silos and helps streamline your internal processes,” says Ram Chandrasekar (Chandra), Founder and CEO of PhaseZero. Having a track record of great success, Chandra has been involved in transforming businesses and operations by commercializing internet, enterprise software, mobile, web and analytics technologies for more than 25 years.

Today, serving all major industries, such as automotive, industrial, high-tech consumer packaged goods, aerospace, and manufacturing, “we make it a point to accelerate digital sales through an enhanced customer experience, providing cutting-edge and built-for-the-industry digital commerce capabilities though our platform.” Apart from Dana, PhaseZero makes digital sales possible for other fortune 500 companies and SMB distributors such as PBS Truck Parts, CommPar, SPT, General Truck Parts, etc.

The digital transformation strategy

To enter the digital economy, PhaseZero helps its customers by carefully creating the plan of action and leveraging technology. Keeping in mind the present state and the future goal, PhaseZero implements a step-by-step digital transformation strategy. Most of their clients are high volume manufacturers with a large number of SKUs in their catalogs as they deal with complex engineered products sold through multiple channels. As the SKU complexity is very high in these cases, they face a hard time to identify and validate the parts customers would be looking for. To resolve this dilemma, PhaseZero implements and executes a digital transformation strategy as a service. “This is where our cloud-based software as a service model helps immensely,” points out Chandra.

The company addresses this from the very first engagement with a client, which is created via a seed stage. They then help them to select and analyze their digital transformation portfolio, which is followed by the launch state. For PhaseZero, the seed stage means conducting conversations with stakeholders, understanding their markets and products, and identifying up to 3-4 digital opportunities for the client. “Finally, we prioritize an initiative for a proof of vision to launch with early adaptors.”

Accelerating digital commerce journey while mitigating the execution risks

Apart from the major challenges of managing large vehicle databases and catalogs and ensuring proper parts fitment mapping, the aftermarket companies are now striving to find ways to enhance customer engagement and fulfill customer demands, especially due to the COVID-19 crisis. “Customer preferences were changing even before the crisis. Business buyers increasingly want the same level of convenience they experience in their personal lives,” says Chandra. They want to search for products, buy, track orders, and manage their accounts online—or have the option to order online and pick up in store. On top of that, safety is now a concern for both employees and customers, with pandemic spike.

E-commerce with the focus on differentiating customer experience is now a table stake and a must-have for business of all sizes and complexity. “The manufacturing and distribution businesses are now adding retail-inspired delivery and pickup options, including timely communication with the customers,” states Chandra. As per the McKinsey & Company’s recent report, about 30 percent of consumers intend to continue using self-checkouts after the crisis. Additionally, up to 40 percent of consumers have switched stores and brands for better digital commerce experience. “We consider this as an opportunity to create a modern, digital commerce experience for the customers and the employees, quickly and affordably, without changing any of their current back-end systems through CxCommerce.”

Even in the midst of an evolving market, PhaseZero allows companies to empower their customers and sales, along with their customer service teams to find precisely the right part for the job, confirm it’s available, and get it to the customers fast. “We know digital commerce, we know the manufacturing, distribution and the overall go-to-market channels needs of our target industries, and we appreciate the essential role companies are playing today. That’s why we created a modern digital commerce and experience cloud tailored to the industry and business,” concludes Chandra.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) plays a critical role in any company’s sustained growth index. With this market expected to grow from USD 8.5 billion in 2020 to USD 14.9 billion by 2025, companies are looking to enhance their CEM strategies, while providing a holistic customer experience. Emmersion is one such rapidly growing SaaS company that specializes in AI-powered language assessment technology. Based in Lehi, Utah, USA, the company proves language ability for employment and education for the nearly two billion English language learners and speakers in the world.

The Journey

Brigham Tomco, CEO and Co-founder of Emmersion is a serial entrepreneur, with an undying passion for education, mentorship and economic development. He says he was constantly looking for an edge in recruiting and enhancing customer satisfaction indexes as he built an offshore Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), focused on staffing software developers and a 500-plus-seat market research contact center. ‘’Contact center managers and executives are looking to hire and retain the best talent and improve upon customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores in order to increase the bottom line. “Once I recognized the need for automated language testing, I cofounded Emmersion with a goal to revolutionize the industry,’’ notes this entrepreneur. After several years of research and development, the first fully automated speaking test was launched in 2018.

Revolutionizing Language Screening methods

Emmersion recognized the need for contact centers to properly screen the language skills of job applicants. It has developed an AI-driven and adaptive language assessment engine that provides accurate and immediate reports in English and several other languages including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Japanese. This tool helps global contact centers automate bilingual language screening to more quickly, accurately, and affordably hire qualified talent, reduce turnover, and improve customer satisfaction scores.

Brigham opines that organizations should focus on properly screening job candidates for their language proficiency as a foundation skill. “Most companies use internal screening methods that are erroneous, time-consuming and unscalable. Automated testing provides for immediate results, unlimited scalability and improves accuracy with the removal of human error and bias. With automated language testing, companies can hire better while also saving time.’’

Emmersion’s Language Tools

Emmersion’s speaking test is touted as the first fully automated speaking test, which makes it the only speaking test in the world that is completely driven by AI and machine learning with no human involvement for testing or scoring. With a fully automated assessment, results are available immediately. “Additionally, this automated assessment leaves no room for human error or bias and includes adaptivity, drastically improving accuracy. The test is also cloud-based, so it can be taken anytime, anywhere, and by as many people as needed—dramatically improving scalability,’’ adds Brigham.

Pandemic’s Effect on the Industry

To cope with the new normal of working from home for most of the global workforce, Emmersion has diversified its services to include cloud-based solutions. “Companies can screen job candidates’ language abilities virtually since face-to-face interaction is limited, and hiring has also gone virtual,’’ says Brigham.

The Success Journey

A top 5 global contact center client of Emmersion experienced a 20% growth in their CSAT scores and a 9/10 end client score in just a short span of two months. “The contact center was experiencing low CSAT scores, and chat (specifically grammatical errors) was identified as a root cause. This contact center used our reading and grammar assessment to test and improve agents’ ability to communicate with the customer over chat’’ signs off Brigham. The contact center is now using the speaking assessment tool to also assess and improve agent ability for interactions over the phone.