There’s a huge difference between B2B (business-to-business) companies and B2C (business-to-consumer) companies, not only in terms of how they define and engage with customers, but also how they operate internally.
So what is B2B2C? Is it a combination of both? Or something else entirely? In this article, you’ll learn about the nature of B2B2C companies, and how to structure and manage cross-functional teams to ensure that all businesses and customers are satisfied.
B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) businesses are those that partner up with other businesses to provide products and/or services to consumers.
There are two distinct types of B2B2C: the franchiser and the middleman.
This business model is about selling to both businesses and consumers. A great example of a business that operates this way is Avon, a cosmetics brand that not only sells to consumers directly, but also sells to representatives who then sell to their own customers.
Avon “reps” are essentially franchisees (as are most branches of McDonald’s and 7-Eleven as well), although “affiliates” might be a better term to use to describe Avon reps with digital storefronts.
This business model is about enabling other businesses to sell their products or services to their consumers. Airbnb and Uber, who work with other businesses to provide short-term accommodations and transportation, respectively, are great examples of businesses who act as middlemen. They are the middle entity between sellers (aka the service providers) and consumers by providing tools and a platform.
Establishing direct lines of communication between key parties means enabling teams, organizations, and consumers to speak with each other (as needed) while also providing the functionality and policies for them to do so efficiently.
For example, because Avon customers have to return products via their rep rather than to Avon directly, the overall returns process is slow and error-prone.
In addition, retail businesses lose out on revenue when their sales representatives don’t have direct lines of communication to their vendors since they aren’t able to clarify answers to customer questions.
When it comes to Airbnb, the functionality and their policies make it super difficult to resolve problems that hosts can’t or won’t fix. To make matters worse, these problems are very often urgent since the guest is staying in the accommodation at the time of the issue.
Simply put, businesses start to crumble when there’s too much bureaucracy and people aren’t able to speak to the right person, team, or even company.
Luckily, there are a few ways to implement effective communication in a B2B2C environment, which we’ll cover below:
Firstly, implementing functionality to help key parties communicate means enabling the right mediums (e.g., telephone, email, form, live chat, and messaging) and quite often restricting the use of the wrong ones.
For example, a phone call is the only form of live help that Airbnb provides (in practice), which is useless to anybody who can’t use their phone abroad. There’s also no functionality that enables guests, hosts, and Airbnb to have a three-way B2B2C chat, and therefore resolve issues efficiently. Plus, speaking over the phone isn’t accessible anyway due to lack of translation technology and usability for deaf or hard-of-hearing folks.
I claim that Airbnb only provides live help via telephone because they (and so many other companies, in fact) implement what I call “fake live chat”. This is essentially email behind a live chat UI that leads people to believe that they’re getting undivided attention and instant help, when they’re actually not.
For all mediums, clarify what the medium’s best for so users aren’t confused. In addition, forward them to another medium if necessary, clarify how they might be able to solve their problem themselves, and precollect critical information so that problems can be resolved faster.
Next, it’s important to build intuitive form interfaces and implement switchboards to ensure that people wind up communicating with the right person. Implement AI-powered chatbots and interactive voice responses that can reference help documents and pre-collect information to free up customer support bandwidth. That way, when people need to speak to a human, they can do so instantly or, at least, quickly.
On the B2B side of things, you’ll want to streamline cross-functional and cross-organizational communication using wikis that explain how to run key processes, who to contact, and how to contact them. If there are intuitive microtools that can be built to solve specific problems, build them and put them in your wiki.
Outside of that, use collaboration tools to ensure that everyone can communicate in an organized, centralized way.
All-in-all, you must do more than “just have” these mediums — the functionalities that you implement should be thoughtful and make sense from a cross-organization perspective, so that people who need assistance don’t get bounced around. You can read about specialist healthcare providers and general practitioners in the UK to see what happens when there’s no clarity or accountability between various organizations that are supposed to collaborate together.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but communication is hard — especially when there are multiple parties involved, endless scenarios to consider, and various needs and preferences to cater for. If your brain hasn’t exploded yet, let’s move on to policies.
You also need to implement good policies that serve the B, the other B, and the C. In a B2B2C business, you simply cannot think only about yourself if you want to reduce bureaucracy and foster accountability.
For example, it’s no use having direct access to the best person to solve a problem if there’s a policy in place that prevents them from doing so, or if there’s a lack of accountability that essentially leaves responsibilities up in the air.
This is exactly what happens when businesses like Airbnb and Uber put policies in place that enable both the platform and the service provider to throw the responsibility of fixing a customer’s problem over the fence, into each other’s yards. In the case of Airbnb, their policy is that if you, as a guest, have an issue, you must complain within 24 hours. If Airbnb doesn’t respond to your complaint by then, you’re out of luck, and if they do, they usually tell you that you must try to resolve your issue with the host first.
Unfortunately, the issues that guests encounter are often so urgent that guests forfeit their stay, or the compensation is so pointless that guests choose to stay in an Airbnb that doesn’t meet their needs. If you don’t stay, you don’t get to leave a bad review. And if the host needs to cancel, they get a penalty, which leads hosts to trick guests into canceling and forfeiting their money. This also happens with public services and all other types of B2B2C businesses.
I try to think of managing a B2B2C company as managing a community. This helps me to visualize the needs and wants of everybody involved holistically. Some organizations use a knowledge base for this, but I recommend creating a mind map that explores the problems faced by all teams across all organizations and how exactly they’ll have to come together to ultimately provide the intended service to the end-consumer.
Imagine McDonald’s with no stores or Uber with no drivers. In order for these businesses to succeed, McDonald’s needs to treat their franchises well and Uber needs to treat their drivers well, and this is why the business partners of B2B2C businesses must be treated like customers.
By this, I don’t just mean valuing them. I mean that you should try to create five-star experiences for them just as you would do for customers — by doing research, doing customer check-ins, keeping them up-to-date about changes, and so on.
Take UX and sales, for example. Conversations between UX and sales should be about the user experience of the selling tools provided to businesses to help them sell their products. Examples of selling tools include the point-of-sale (POS) systems provided to franchised stores and the Airbnb platform as a whole provided to hosts. To listen to the UX needs of salespeople, consider running interviews, focus groups, and moderated UX testing sessions.
Again, this is a direct line of communication from a cross-functional team in your business to a cross-functional team in theirs, as opposed to having perhaps relationship managers on either side that don’t actually know anything about what any of the teams do.
Provide product updates and ways to upskill to help consumers and your business partners get the most out of your products and maybe even get better in general at whatever your products help people to do. More importantly, target people/teams with information that’s relevant to them in a way that they’ll digest it. What you should be looking to do, essentially, is utilize or build a customer success team.
If you think about the ways that we’re typically fronted with product updates and tips, they’re not very effective. It’s hard to pay attention to or even notice emails when there are so many of them. When it comes to in-app notifications, nobody wants to be interrupted while they’re doing work. You’ll probably want to leverage blog posts and documentation for various reasons, but it’s hardly an effective method of intensive learning. Besides, outside of the digital world, connecting with people directly is really the only option, so it’s the best approach in any case.
This means that you’ll want to focus more on seminars or crash courses. In the case of B2B, you can use focus groups as a way to brainstorm how cross-organizational teams might iterate on their workflows using these new products and features. Recruitment for seminars and crash courses is obviously trickier with consumers, but not impossible. Let’s explore an example or two.
A problem that marketing teams face is not knowing how to leverage technology to create targeted, personalized campaigns. Creating a single email campaign using segmentation and personalization features would be the perfect focus for a crash course aimed at marketers, regardless of what your business’s role in the B2B2C partnership is.
Another example is technical products. When it comes to highly technical products, product teams would do well to communicate with the engineering teams of their business partners. The reason for this is that some things, such as technical features and documentation, are really only understood by and beneficial to engineers.
Again, this is why it’s so important to consider all stakeholders as customers and open direct lines of communication with them. Making improvements to products and processes is pointless if you’re just throwing them over the fence and hoping that your business partners stumble upon, understand, and implement them.
Managing a B2B2C company can be quite challenging because in many ways, you have to do everything twice — firstly for your B2B customers and then for your (or their) B2C customers. You also have to make sure that your company is meeting its business objectives while your B2B customers are doing the same.
However, it can also be extremely rewarding, especially if you think of managing a B2B2C company as managing a community where everyone needs to look after each other in order to maintain stability.
This means strategically establishing direct lines of communication between key parties regardless of whether those lines are connecting teams, organizations, or consumers. It also means having the right processes in place to ensure that needs and wants are ultimately being met to the best possible extent.
Hopefully I covered all of that in this article, or at least linked to some other articles that you should definitely read if you skipped over them. If you still have questions, the comment section is below. And, as always, thanks for reading!
Featured image source: IconScout
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