How to Develop a Convenient Personal Account for B2B

The era of downloading price lists by link and placing orders by manager’s call should become a thing of the past. And ideally as soon as possible. Sales automation and optimization of man-hours are increasingly coming into the picture. Moreover, the gradual change of generations affects the approval of new principles in the work.

The baby boomers (1946–1964) are retiring, Generation X (1965–1979) is taking over the leadership seats, with the Millennials (1981–1995) competing with them, but also Generation Z (1996 and later) is already tailing after them. This means that doing things ‘like before’ does not exactly work, as those at the wheel are shaped by technology and have grown up in a rapidly changing and highly competitive world.

To make your business stand out with service and approach from competitors who process applications by phone, modern solutions are required. If implemented wisely, they will help reduce the costs and increase profits, no matter what field you work in.

Let’s look at the pain points our clients faced when they wanted to create a quick personal account on the website to highlight the tasks it was supposed to solve.

What else is the Personal Account for? For example, you have a bonus system based on the number of orders or the total amount of purchases. Or you want to make life easier for regular wholesale customers who need to save selections of products for quick access to them. Or maybe you offer to track the status of an object or an order fulfillment process. All these tasks are solved by creating a Personal Account.

In my article How an ideal online store looks like, I described what a personal account should look like in an online store, that is, in the B2C segment. Today I’m going to break this down for B2B clients. I will also tell you how its quality affects the loyalty of such customers.

At one of our customers, clients are divided into 2 types: small businesses that take 80% of the manager’s time but only bring in 20% of the revenue, and large businesses that take the remaining 20% of the time but make 80% of the profit.

Why is it important to separate their display at the moment of creating a Personal Account? The field activity for different client statuses is also different. For example, the payment method is different: large players have deferred payment or the ‘no prepayment’ function, while others do not.

In banking, 24/7 tech support or a personal manager is not provided for everyone.

Personal Accounts will be different if you provide services not only to legal entities but also to individuals. Some people find it convenient to search for products by article, while there is no need for large and detailed product images. For others, it is important to see what you have ordered so that you do not make a mistake and set up searches according to morphological principles.

There is also a distinction between the Personal Accounts of a client and a manager. The first one has a ‘store with a consultant’, the second one has their own workplace.

However, the division of the Personal Accounts by client type is not the only option. Levels of access and interface can vary according to the hierarchy principles in the company.

For example, accountants will be able to extend the integration of the cabinet with oracle (access to financial statements, accounts payable/receivable, credit facilities), and managers will be able to issue bills, invoices, certificates, waybills, reconciliation statements, and the director will have full access to all information. And all this will not just be in tabular form, but with convenient navigation.

You are free to decide which processes to automate and for whom. I’ll give you a hint: you need to decide this at the moment of drafting the Terms of Reference. Of course, you can refine something in the process, but it is better to have an idea in advance of how long the task will take, and how much it will cost.

Setting up the integration is a purely technical issue that is resolved in conjunction with oracle developers or those who set up these or other systems.

I will not go into specific cases, I will draw your attention to the integration with oracle. In my practice, unfortunately, it is not uncommon for developers on the other side not to understand or not to want to understand what is required of them. Therefore, some settings can take weeks to complete. To protect ourselves from the carelessness of ‘colleagues’ we try to deal only with reliable representatives and often bring them to the project.

For our part, to protect the customer from any possible disruptions and errors in oracle, integrated into the Personal Account, we draw attention to the following points:

As you can see, the setup integration should be given enough time, both the developers and oracle staff, so that data exchange between operators is carried out without loss.

Interaction in our company with customers after the conclusion of the contract is usually structured as follows:

It should be noted that it is not always necessary to do them all at once. Our approach allows you to first make only a website, and over time to develop a cross-platform application. This, by the way, allows for uniformity and the same logic of operation for both iOS and Android users. Thanks to the API flexibility, applications will be fully synchronized with the website whenever they are made.

There are a few important rules to ensure that both you and your customers can work safely. Here they are:

Regardless of whether you sell to a particular customer or another business, nobody has canceled the stimulation of demand. And it is possible to carve out from the competition, using both classic marketing tools and modern trends inherent in e-commerce:

The development of personal accounts with a loyalty program, in general, is becoming more and more relevant. An alternative is a mobile app. We explained what it should look like in the article «The Perfect Retailer Loyalty Program App».

Catalog, pricing, and checkout procedure are the key elements of a successful B2B store. But there are a number of important little things that make it more convenient for customers in a wholesale company. From our point of view, the following stand out:

One of the decencies when interacting with a B2B client is to provide a personal manager. It affects loyalty. A Personal Account should provide the ability to quickly communicate with him/her, access his/her contacts, and even an avatar. This will demonstrate an individual approach and transparency.

Regular customers are often given a credit facility or deferred payment. This will be displayed in the Personal Account and can be set up by a personal manager or automatically (for example, when reaching a certain amount of orders).

You can also set up a new order with deferred payment automatically. If for some reason this is not possible, the customer will be notified. Additionally, a manager may receive such a notification.

This step makes life easier for both you and the client. No need to remember passwords, you will always have access to the account, regardless of the device from which you log in. And you will always have a database of phone numbers of all your clients. And the cherry on the cake is the safety of your database. A manager who left the company will not be able to access the database without your phone.

One client may often have several legal entities, and one legal entity may have several contact persons. The right solution is to create individual accounts rather than creating one for everyone. This way we can build a better purchase funnel, and the analytics will be more accurate.

As we mentioned earlier, the Personal Accounts of a legal entity and an individual are different. Hence, the catalogs in them are different, too. But even for B2B clients, it makes sense to provide the ability to switch between interfaces. For example, in addition to the classic visualization of the list of products in the form of tiles, you can offer to view the catalog in the form of a table with a large number of items.

Another level of personalization is when your prices in the catalog are set separately for each partner.

You need to update the availability of ordered items in the cart (in case someone managed to buy all the items out of stock), change the price depending on the number of items, and save the entire cart, if necessary. Because the customers often place orders for the same products.

This option can be made in the form of a list of products, thanks to which you can make an express order by simply changing the number of products in the desired line. Prices should be constantly updated as well as the stock levels. To prevent you from working at a loss or selling nonexistent positions.

In my opinion, the most convenient is the search made with MeiliSearch. Like Elasticsearch, it allows you to take morphology into account, search through synonym lists, rank search results, index and re-index search suggestions, but in contrast, it is much faster, more flexible, and less voracious. This is an open-source, incredibly fast and hyper-relevant search engine that will improve your search experience.

In any case, if we are talking about efficiency, then the user should be able to:

We have recently found out that in one of the online stores we worked on, people do not use the search bar and look for products by category. Even though we are talking about the B2C segment, one conclusion is inescapable — analytics must be thought through at the very start of the project. Otherwise, this information would have never come out.

Other benefits of the various metrics that you have thought through in advance will be:

Notifications in the Personal Account are certainly a good thing. But let’s be honest, customers do not spend eight hours in it every day. This means that they may not know that the cost of delivery has changed or there are problems with the shipment. So give them the opportunity to get push notifications where it is really convenient, at least in the form of emails.

The same capabilities should also be available to managers because they need to promptly receive messages and changes in the status of the order from their customers. And also to stay in touch with them. The main thing here is not to do it the way you are used to, but the way it will be more convenient for the users of the Personal Account.

The issue of delivery for the B2B segment is no less critical than for individuals. You should also take into account the work schedule, the ability to choose the right company and know in advance how much it will cost you. This is why we usually insist that the following information should be displayed in the Personal Account:

The effectiveness of a Personal Account depends not only on the right decisions made by the customer before starting a project but also on the experience of the contractor. We recommend paying attention to the following issues before starting a project:

And most importantly, remember that if you’ve already decided to create a Personal Account for your business, do not strive to do it anyhow, and do not merely reincarnate your Excel in a more advanced form. Really think through what processes you can automate, and what advantages in money terms you will get. A Personal Account is an opportunity to improve your business, so you should not pass it up by entrusting the work to a contractor who offers a quick, cheap, and template-driven solution.