Most of us recognise that (A) “Great customer service” is all about communication.
Being able to say “yes” to virtually any request; then backing that ”yes” up with quality products delivered on time.
While (B) “Great business relationships” are about more than just great service.
Relationships are about a personal contact, not just hearing but understanding what is needed then making sure channels of communication are kept open – from enquiry, through advice, to changes, to solutions. Then ensuring after sales support is instantly available if needed.
Recognising the difference between the former, which should be a given for any customer needing a one off purchase or a regular supply and the latter, which takes longer to fully synchronize and become a true supply partner relationship is essential in creating flexible business models and supply structures for any successful company – even more essential right now!
At QK Group all our companies work hard to provide great customer service, build relationships and maintain long standing partnerships, but across all Business to Business enterprises Covid has brought into sharp focus the need to change how we do that going forward.
Our flagship company, Quickits Ltd, like most businesses that worked straight through the crisis, has found how to adapt to being Covid safe in the workplace – supplying customers by following distancing guidelines and H&S recommendations.
The downside was none of that could help build new relationships and maintain existing ones the way we always had before March this year.
One face-to-face meeting (being worth 50 phone calls) was no longer allowed.
Re-imagining the future for most businesses will be a process of hoping for the best until we all return to normal, while trying to plan what happens if we don’t … or if a return takes many more months, or years.
The Plan for us has to be about regaining the momentum of building and maintaining business relationships. Sketching out that plan made it very clear we had to allow more time for our team and our customers to make as easy and natural as it used to be.
We decided online sales were one aspect of the plan that could definitely save some of that precious time. We knew this long before Covid struck, but it wasn’t something we were going to jump into.
Despite having (for one example) over 6000 gear boxes in stock at any one time, many of our products have multiple variants of materials, add-ons and size / capacity, and many of our customers wanted to order “Specials”.
It always seemed obvious that a quick call to Quickits was going to be a lot quicker than a customer wading through long lists of options before placing an order. The conclusion was you could only sell products online that don’t need to be discussed before purchase.
However, in tandem with our marketing partner, we had been researching an Ecommerce platform suitable for our particular products since last year.
We were already asking how many “simple” products were there? How can we make the complicated simple? Would that be a sign of genius? As Einstein proposed…
As part of our post Covid plan – we brought forward our research looking at how this was done in other industries – other sectors possibly giving clues as to how we could innovate in our own industry – instead of following anyone else’s lead who may not have the same range of options or in-house manufacturing capabilities. It’s fair to say we didn’t find much!
During our research into other areas we did find some major differences between B2C and B2B. For instance, when buying for your company it isn’t “your” money – there are almost zero impulse buys between businesses. Trust is another difference, although important to a consumer, it is vastly more important when buying industrial products than it is when purchasing birthday presents for your mum.
Having said that – If your business is selling stationery or other simple consumables to other businesses your online platform is essentially no different to B2C (maybe a stapler is an impulse buy) but as explained above – the products we sell aren’t all that simple, or anything you would buy from petty cash.
This is where we believe some of the confusion lays around Industrial take up of ecommerce.
After almost everyone in the World (well 1.8 Billion of us) individually bought into 25 years of Online Business to Consumer models, and some Business-to-Business companies found it easy to join the online revolution, it might look like others have been so slow to catch on – but that isn’t true.
With most industrial companies, trust is built on evidence, experience and those Great Business Relationships; all the things you can’t click into your online shopping cart.
Another difference is the grey areas between (A) which is all you can make instantly available online and (B) which we are fully aware many existing customers will still expect – regardless of the sales channel.
So at QK we are changing “online” up a few gears – not B2B which covers a multitude of sectors but B2I – “Business to Industry” starting with what you might expect from an ecommerce website – but developing into the full fledged portal for everything the Valve & Process Industry needs.
Watch this space – as marketing people used to say.