Portraying B2B customer experience – case: GREIFF Mode GmbH & Co.KG

Abstract

Customer experience is becoming more and more important for businesses. This thesis concentrates on customer experience in business-to-business context. The commissioner of this thesis is GREIFF Mode GmbH & Co. KG, a German workwear manufacturer, which has mainly business clients. The company does not yet have a customer experience strategy.

The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis is to chart the customer experience of the business customers of the company commissioning the thesis. This is achieved with the help of a customer survey. The data from the customer survey is analyzed to pinpoint a current and relevant problem on the customer experience. The thesis makes suggestions on how to improve this problematic customer experience. A customer journey map is used to portray the customer experience during this problematic experience. The customer journey map is based on the results of the customer survey. This thesis aims to find out the current strengths and weaknesses the company has in customer experience and to help to understand the customers better. The company can use the gained knowledge to improve the customer experience and to raise the customer satisfaction.

Customer experience occurs when a customer interacts with a company. It is a dynamic, multidimensional process happening on many channels. The interactions are called touch points and together the touch points build a customer journey. Customer journeys can be visualized as customer journey maps. The customer experience in business-to-business context is more complex than in business-to-customer context. Due to the complex nature of customer experience, a perfect method for measuring it does not yet exist, but there are different internal and external proxy metrics that are widely used for this purpose. Customer experience management is the intentional aim to improve the customer experience. On a strategic level this is executed by customer experience strategy.

The subject was examined with a quantitative research method: a customer survey. The survey measured external proxy metrics for customer experience and gathered open feedback from the customers. The survey concentrated mainly on the touch point “order process”. The results were very positive, which indicates that the customers are satisfied with their current customer experience. The main strengths discovered are the high product quality and the service which have enabled long lasting business relationships with positive social aspects. The company has room for improvement in providing the customers with enough information and the technical functionality of the company’s online store. To visualize the results, a customer journey with touch points surrounding the order process was created. As a solution, this thesis suggests making more information available for the customers, keeping the sales staff’s technical knowledge up to date and looking into how to make the online store meet the customers’ needs even better. It also suggests that the company could benefit from adopting a customer experience strategy as part of their business strategy.