Crafting The Better B2B ‘Customer’ Experience

“April is the cruelest month,” wrote TS Eliot.

His calendar was bit off.

At least insofar as 2020 has shaped up, and especially where B2B payments have been concerned.

March turned out to be bit of a rough path, too.

As the pandemic started to lash the globe back then, the necessity of doing things — pretty much everything — digitally upended the very ways supply chains functioned, buyers interacted with suppliers, and the ways in which those firms paid and got paid.

To quote another author, Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, “Only those with tenacity can march forward in March.”

We’ve made progress, but progress remains to be made.

In a wide-ranging online panel discussion with Karen Webster, five executives across payments and supply chain management offered insight into the pain points exposed by the pandemic

They also pointed to the tenacity and flexibility that has led to tech-driven responses and solutions that will far outlast the pandemic — and turn vulnerabilities into opportunities.

The panel included Kivanc Onan, head of B2B Payments, Financing and Protection, North America for Alibaba; Rob Rosenblatt, CEO of Behalf; Sarfraz Nawaz, Digital Transformation, Supply Chain at Johnson & Johnson; Tony Uphoff, CEO of Thomas; and Trish Fisher, senior director, Treasury Operations at WeWork.

The Supply Chains

At a high level, seismic shifts in supply chains lead to changes in the way businesses interact with one another.

The rumblings that gave way to the seismic shift began well before March.

Uphoff’s firm, Thomas, has 1 million businesses on its platform that links buyers and suppliers.

“We started to see a huge lift in PPE sourcing starting in late December,” he said. “But at the time, we had had this category on the platform for decades and if it moved by 1 or 2 percent in any given year, that would be a lot. So that clearly caught our attention. A lot of the movement was coming from China.”

Move beyond the medical equipment supply chains, and as Uphoff told the panel, amid the pandemic there also had (and has) been the acceleration of trends already in place — centered, for U.S. firms, mostly on reshoring (bringing supply chains closer to home).

The other big change cited by Uphoff has been global in scope. The push toward the digital transformation of lagging sectors such as the industrial and manufacturing verticals have accelerated. That’s been spurred in part by the fact that supply chain-focused technology is getting faster, cheaper and easier to scale within companies.

Fostering Cultural Change

The intersection of tech and external forces are helping usher in cultural change within companies, noted the panelists.

J&J’s Nawaz stated that the new digital reality has forced companies (including his own) to focus on being responsive and agile to make supply chains resilient even while ticking off the mandatory compliance and governance aspects tied to supply chain management.

“Tech should be an enabler,” he said, in aiding that cultural shift — with constant communications between buyers, suppliers, and within firms, CFOs and treasurers — toward flexibility and speed.

Along the way, payments can help guide and cement that digital shift. Nawaz pointed out that managing supply chains is about ensuring a seamless flow of finances as much as it is about tracking production from raw materials to finished goods.

“It is essential that payments cross the street, cross the border executed on time, tracked accurately and are optimized to avoid extra costs to the organization,” he said.

And yet, even now, said Uphoff, payments remain mired in the proverbial paper chase. Every company in the world is wrestling right now with their accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) and they are pondering why they are still reliant on physical checks.

“That’s just ridiculous,” he contended.

Changing the way payments have always been done requires renewed focus, he said, particularly among back-office teams.

The recognition that the paper check is hardly a good commerce conduit in an age of distributed workforces, where physical brick-and-mortar back offices (and mail) may be hard to access has spurred growth in online platforms (such as Behalf).

Those platforms make it easier for buyers and suppliers to transact in a “consumerized” manner that echoes the simplicity of B2C commerce today.

Although the pivot toward that simplicity has been taking time — and requires a bit of education — Rosenblatt said businesses have been moving online at a pace 10 times faster than had been seen before.

Payments — Sealing the Deal

That includes digitizing sales and marketing efforts, which of course had in the past been done face to face.

Payments, he said, “need to be part of the product because they can help sell a lot more product.”

That’s good for sales and marketing reps who may be worried about disintermediation — and, according to Uphoff, whose success can also be measured in terms of how many customers they are able to convert to paying digitally.

“What you measure matters,” Uphoff told Webster. “And I think a lot of these companies, the way to move through a cultural barrier is to be transparent, be open about it, make sure that people understand the need for the change.”

In the spirit of consumerization, digitization removes the friction of connecting buyers and suppliers. Alibaba’s Onan stated that his firms takes manufacturers online through virtual storefronts and can help set payment terms that take large (and small) firms beyond a reliance on checks, cash or cards.

Moving away from the check, said WeWork’s Fisher, has also improved cash flow visibility, especially for her firm, between landlord and tenant.

“We are about 98 percent digital,” she said, adding that “from a payments perspective, we haven’t missed a beat.”

She recommended (regardless of industry), the adoption of treasury workstations, which prove invaluable for real-time updates.

“It’s more important now than ever to have that real-time visibility because people want to know ‘Did you pay us? Did you get what we sent you?’” she said.

Data (and better, electronic communications), she noted, help set expectations among buyers and sellers, such as whether payments are being sent by ACH or when funds will settle.

Improving the B2B Customer Experience

The B2B customer experience, noted several panelists, now includes payments. And the better the payments flow, the better the experience, overall.

Improving that experience means that some of the interdepartmental silos need to be broken down in pursuit of shared goals and better communication.

That’s no easy task. Within companies, different departments have made a range of (human and monetary) investments across different software and systems.

“The challenge between tech and culture and bringing the humanity back into it — it’s not just an external necessity, it’s an internal one as well,” said Fisher.

Added Rosenblatt: “There are a variety of metrics that aren’t necessarily how people get paid. It needs to be considered because, you know, culturally payments generally sit off to the side somewhere in a lot of companies.”

But a holistic view can include shared goals between departments as far flung as finance, treasury, sales and marketing that drill down into customer loyalty, average tenure, renewal rates and ticket sizes. Benchmarking can help, said Rosenblatt.

“Those are the kinds of things that in an integrated end-to-end experience … can ultimately have a material impact on profitability,” he noted.