Improving suppliers’ response to customer needs will rely on technological innovation, and especially on the ability to share data up and down the supply chain. It will also depend on a shift in mindset; where there is a willingness to emphasise customer experience.
Such precise customisation is not so likely in the B2B world. However, where personas take a basic top- down, hand-crafted approach, data analytics provide marketers with a bottom-up, data-driven mechanism to detect fine-grained patterns among customer cohorts. We will see more and more innovation in detecting and visualising behavioural trends. Linking understanding of customers with the management supply chains Where organisations can understand and predict the behaviour of customers, they can feed this information into supplier management. Some B2B marketplaces, for example, capture and share information about traffic, search terms used, time spent on a supplier’s page, and include data on the number of pages visited, time between visits and visit-to-lead ratios. In effect, the suppliers can use the marketplace as an extension of their marketing presence. Competitive advantage is increasingly found in how you sell, and not as much in what you sell. The most valuable innovation among suppliers will be in their ability to help improve the overall customer
experience. For some businesses, that will mean simplifying the buying process by reducing the overall complexity of how a product or offer is assembled, packaged and delivered. For others, it will mean greater transparency not only into the status of an order but also into where and how parts are sourced in terms of environmental impact and fair employment practices. And for others it will be the ease with which items can be returned or exchanged. Improving suppliers’ response to customer needs will rely on technological innovation, and especially on the ability to share data up and down the supply chain. It will also depend on a shift in mindset; where there is a willingness to emphasise customer experience. CRM has come a long way from simply being software in which organisations strive to get a single view of the customer, to a platform which integrates and analyses customer data from a diverse set of internal and external applications. Within the leap forward is the ability to understand and act on customer needs more rapidly, increasing the responsiveness of the whole supply chain. But it may take time to develop the right mindset and form the necessary trusted relationships.
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