Not even the top executives at Amazon obsess over the "Amazon experience" because “Amazon is just trying to do whatever’s best for its customers,” says Justin King, partner, B2X Partners, in Customer Engagement: Don’t Be Amazon, from MDM's 2016 Distribution Trends Special Issue. “You know, that happens to include some great Amazon best practices, but it’s not everything.”
The B2C shopping concept, in which people can get anything they need anytime they want it, is clearly influencing B2B buying. But a distributor’s customer has certain needs – from superior product knowledge to service and sales reps available to answer phone calls – that the “Amazon experience” can’t provide.
“It’s a bad idea to go and duplicate what somebody else is doing versus looking at your own customers and saying, ‘OK, how do I make their job easier?’” King says.
Doing things the old way and not meeting customers’ demands will lead to an erosion of your customer base over time, according to King. A distributor might lose one order to Amazon or a competitor whose e-commerce platform is superior. And then another. As more customers follow suit, market share will dwindle.
Read more about how to identify customer needs in Customer Engagement: Don’t Be Amazon, from MDM's 2016 Distribution Trends Special Issue.
