Use Case

How Businesses Can Lower Operational Costs Through Self-Service

While cost reduction and efficiency are top of mind, a B2B portal that enables customers to self-serve saves money and increases revenue potential.

Status Quo

Recessions, inflation, pandemics, wars – they are all ultimately out of our control. While you can’t change what’s happening in the world, you can foster the resilience of your business. 

The key to weathering any storm is ensuring that your company is efficient and cost-effective. 

One of the most powerful changes a B2B business can make is enabling your customers to self-serve through a portal that manages the relationship from start to finish.

Currently, many businesses offer customers information about their orders and relationship, but from multiple and disparate sources – such as the ERP, CRM, or a Customer Service tool. 

Customers lack transparency and autonomy as they cannot easily find information about order history, related products, or new offers. They must rely on slow manual interaction to provide the information they want. 

A digital self-service tool reduces both cost and time by automating manual tasks and increases the opportunity for personalized sales directly through the portal. 

Challenges for B2B Businesses Without Digital Self-Service

  • Without a portal consolidating all information, customers only have access to limited information about historic orders and interactions.
  • Personalization and tailored offers are difficult to offer without consolidated customer data, leading to missed sales opportunities.
  • Customer relationship management involves a great deal of manual interaction and processes as customers must reach out to a human to get the data they’re looking for. This maintenance by sales and service reps is both costly and time-consuming.
  • Lack of convenience for the customer, which may lead them to look to competitors with better after-sales user experiences.

What is Digital Self-Service?

Digital Self-Service is a customer portal at its core, that supports the full customer lifecycle by providing complete visibility into all elements of the business relationship. It manages the after-sales process by consolidating all information and services related to the customer. 

A business relationship consists of many individual roles and responsibilities. Those individuals also have very different needs regarding what information they regularly require or should have access to. 

While the supply chain controller might be interested in the overall purchases, the buyer may be more concerned with the payment status, the available credit or cashback tiers they are able to take advantage of. At the same time, the buyer might want to ensure sales people are only able to request a purchase, while only the buyer themselves can approve orders meeting certain criteria. 

All of this is possible in one single place with a Digital Self-Service portal. 

  • Order history
  • Consumption & Purchase Summaries
  • Available discounts & cashbacks
  • Access to credit status  
  • Product updates
  • Service data
  • The knowledge center
  • Company and product news
  • Customer-specific assortments
  • Subscriptions
  • Recommendations
  • Troubleshooting 

How Digital Self-Service benefits your business

By merging the customer, transaction, and product data into one unified portal,  Digital Self-Service puts buyers into the driving seat. Insights, customer service, and after-sales services such as maintenance and repairs are available at the click of a button.

From the sales side, customer portals can be leveraged by sales and service reps by personalizing offers based on previous order histories. By giving customers autonomy and visibility,  B2B businesses can offer a more convenient and cost-effective user experience  that will in turn positively impact retention and revenue.

Business Outcomes Of Digital Self-Service

How does Digital Self-Service benefit your business, and what kind of value does it generate?

Increase Customer Satisfaction & Stickiness

  • Acts as an easy-to-use central point of contact
  • Possibility of personalized experiences
  • Tailored products and services
  • 24/7 availability, with access to information at any time
  • Increased customer value through after-sales services
  • Support through the entire customer relationship and lifecycle
  • Gain customer insights to better personalize offers

Increase Revenue & Share of Wallet

  • Cross-selling and up-selling 
  • Repeat purchases/subscriptions
  • Personalized offers
  • Notifications for cashback or discount tiers
  • New value-add services based on history and insights
  • Product and service announcements and company news
  • AI-based offers at the right time

Cost Reduction Through Self-Service

  • Reduce cost and time per contact
  • Focus on high-value services
  • Reduce recurring manual tasks
  • Order templates and automatic replenishment save time and money

 

Increase Efficiency on Buying & Selling Sides

  • Acts as a convenient ‘one-stop’ solution for information
  • Customers gain full control with self-service
  • Tailored and individualized experiences and dashboards increase quality of customer experience
  • Customer insights help to inform future offers

 

Spryker Capabilities

Digital Self-Service Features from the B2B-Solution with Spryker Cloud Commerce OS

Our B2B Solution with Spryker Cloud Commerce OS includes a range of features to enable a Digital Self-Service portal, such as Invoice Management and personalized Offers. 

Alongside this core capability, we work with an extensive network of partners who can further extend your business self-service capabilities with features such as a dedicated Customer Service Tool.

Supporting you every step of the journey, our in-house business consultants offer tailored enabling services, such as Digitization Mapping, to ensure your transformation to Digital Self-Service is successful.

Spryker Capabilities

  • My Account functionality
  • Configurable bundles
  • Customer-specific pricing
  • Product Links
  • Account-specific assortment
  • Return Management
  • Invoice generation
  • Approval processes
  • Shopping List/Order Templates
  • User Management

Enabling Services

  • Calibration session
  • Customer journey analysis
  • Digitization mapping
  • Operating model coaching
  • Process design workshop

Technology Partners

  • Tealium
  • Fareye
  • Vertex
  • Adyen
  • Balance

Customers

Success speaks for itself. See how thriving businesses are using Spryker capabilities to customize, scale and win!

Läpple

Läpple is a global provider of pressed parts, body shell components, standardized parts, rotatory tables and automation tools. They have 2700 employees and a 500M€ turnover.

Customer challenge:
Läpple wanted to maximize their online shop revenue while delivering high-performance and customized options. There were millions of products, with up to 600 variants, many continuously in stock and available at short notice. 

Solution:
Fibro (one of Läpple's brands) went live in just (4 months, including a Self-Service portal with a consolidated view on the commercial relationship. This empowered the buyers with several convenient functionalities.

Outcomes:

  • Higher customer satisfaction
  • More efficient workflows
  • Streamlined operations
  • More and better quality data from customers

PFERD

Pferd, part of August Rüggeberg, is a leader in the development, production & distribution of tool solutions for work on surfaces and material cutting. Pferd reinveted their digital commerce strategy with Spryker heavily relying on seamless integrations and business-driven capabilities.

Wöhner

Wöhner produces and distributes components in the field of utlity, specially eletricity. To transform their business into a digital-first unit, Spryker became their commerce backbone.

Biesterfeld

Biesterfeld, as one of the relevant suppliers in the chemical industry, released a transactional customer portal with Spryker to keep up with the needs and requirements of their customers.

About Spryker

Spryker is the leading composable commerce platform for enterprises with sophisticated business models to enable growth, innovation, and differentiation. Designed specifically for sophisticated transactional business, Spryker’s easy-to-use, headless, API-first model offers a best-of-breed approach that provides businesses the flexibility to adapt, scale, and quickly go to market while facilitating faster time-to-value throughout their digital transformation journey. As a global platform leader for B2B and B2C Enterprise Marketplaces, Thing Commerce, and Unified Commerce, Spryker has empowered 150+ global enterprise customers worldwide and is trusted by brands such as ALDI, Siemens, Hilti, and Ricoh. Spryker was recognized by Gartner® as a Visionary in the 2023 Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce and was also ranked as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Solutions, Q2 2022. Spryker is a privately held technology company headquartered in Berlin and New York. Find out more at spryker.com

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