Omnichannel B2B customer experience: guide and case study

In short: omnichannel customer experience in B2B means giving customers the same information, the same history and the same level of service on every channel: sales reps, website, customer portal, online store and support. You build it on reliable product and customer data first, then connect the channels to that data.

Key takeaways

Omnichannel is about channels that read the same data, not about having more channels.
In B2B the customer is a group: the person who uses the product, the one who orders it, the one who signs off.
The Euroclone case shows that data quality and organisation come before a new website.
You measure it with service and repeat-purchase metrics, not with traffic.
Someone has to own it: many B2B companies still have no one leading customer experience.

The B2B customer is no longer one person. According to Forrester's State Of Business Buying 2026, a typical purchase decision involves 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers, and procurement is a decision-maker in 53% of buying cycles. Yet a single customer view is still rare, even among large companies. In Italy, 2025 research by the B2B Digital Commerce & Experience Observatory at Politecnico di Milano found that three in four large companies are at an early stage of customer-centricity, and only 48% use a CRM or other specialised customer data software.

What is omnichannel customer experience in B2B?

Omnichannel customer experience is the set of interactions with a customer, run so that every channel recognises them and picks up where the last one left off: the sales rep sees the order placed on the portal, support sees the rep's quote. In a multichannel setup the channels all exist, but each runs on its own data and rules.

The Customer Experience in B2B Observatory at Politecnico di Milano, as quoted by CorCom (in Italian), defines B2B customer experience as the effect, positive or negative, of the customer-supplier relationship across every stage of the customer journey, from first contact to after-sales support. So it is not just a marketing topic: how an order arrives, how a return is handled and how long it takes to get a certificate all count.

Area	Multichannel	Omnichannel
Customer data	Scattered across inboxes, ERP and Excel	One record used by every team
Product data	Copied by hand to website and catalogues	One source for every channel
Orders	By email, re-keyed into the ERP	Portal or store connected to the ERP
Support	Customers explain the issue every time	Tickets with visible history

B2C revolves around one person, B2B around a buying group and a long relationship; I cover this in my guide to B2B vs B2C strategy.

Why does it matter for companies with repeat customers?

Because in B2B the value lies in the reorder. A distributor or a lab buys the same product families for years, and every recurring bit of friction (an outdated price list, a datasheet nobody can find, an order that needs a phone call) is multiplied across hundreds of orders.

And buyers use many channels within a single purchase. According to McKinsey's 2024 B2B Pulse, as reported by European Business Magazine, B2B decision-makers use an average of 10.2 channels in their buying journey, up from five in 2016, and 54% say they would abandon a purchase or switch suppliers after a poor omnichannel experience. The same survey describes a "rule of thirds": at any stage of the journey, about a third of customers want in-person contact, a third remote contact and a third digital self-service.

In practice, the benefits of an omnichannel approach come down to three things:

Retention: less friction on repeat orders means fewer reasons to look at another supplier.
Internal efficiency: fewer orders re-keyed by hand, fewer emails asking for prices or documents, fewer errors.
Differentiation: when products and prices are similar, service is what customers remember. The Politecnico Observatory describes it as a source of competitive differentiation in B2B supply chains too.

What can you learn from the Euroclone case?

That omnichannel experience is built from the data up. Euroclone is an Italian company founded about forty years ago that supplies products and services to research, diagnostics and biotech production labs; it is now part of the Swedish Life group. Annarita Conti, its Digital Marketing & Innovation Specialist, presented the project at a conference of the B2B Digital Commerce Observatory at Politecnico di Milano, as reported by Digital4 in October 2025.

The starting point: a dated, static website with no digital services, a catalogue running from reagents to instruments, and two different contacts, the researcher who uses the products and the purchasing office that orders them. A new website alone would not do. The concrete steps:

A single product data repository. A PIM and DAM platform feeds the website, ERP, catalogues and marketing. A PIM (product information management) system handles product records, a DAM (digital asset management) system images and documents.
One data model with validation rules. Suppliers, too, had to provide complete data from the start.
ERP integration. Creating product codes became automatic, cutting time and errors. PDF datasheets are now generated automatically from the latest product version as well.
Rebrand, new website and private areas. Ongoing projects with one goal: customers who find information on their own and generate their own quotes.

On the ordering side, the ERP vendor's case history reports that customers can use a web portal to draw down goods, with stock availability updated automatically, and that the online store was integrated with the ERP.

According to Conti, the hardest problems were organisational: ownership of product data moved from product managers to a dedicated team, and the company still lacks a customer experience lead and a cross-functional team. Time, people and budget also remain a constraint. You can buy the technology; you have to organise who owns the data.

Where do Italian companies stand?

Still at the start, especially smaller firms. The 2025 research by the B2B Digital Commerce & Experience Observatory (in Italian) shows how widely the tools behind an omnichannel experience are used in Italy.

Tool	Adoption	What it is for
CRM	46% of large companies	Customer data, order history, targeted offers
PIM	21% of large companies	Consistent product records across channels
DAM	18% of large companies	Product images and documents
EDI (electronic data interchange)	25% of companies, 57% of large ones	Orders and invoices between systems
Own B2B portals and web stores	About 16% of companies	Self-service orders and information
B2B marketplaces	9% of companies	Selling on third-party platforms

On maturity, only 14% of large companies count as "Strategic Deployers": they have a customer experience lead, tailor the experience to customer characteristics and collect feedback systematically. Among SMEs the share drops to 3%, while 68% are still at the earliest stage.

The gap is organisational as well. In Politecnico's 2023 research on B2B customer experience, reported by CorCom, 69% of companies had no function responsible for customer experience projects, and only 17% rated collaboration between customer-facing functions positively. For a company starting now, that is a real chance to get ahead of competitors.

How do you map the B2B customer journey?

List the stages of the customer relationship and, for each one, ask who is involved, which channel they use and what data they need. A starting template for a company selling to repeat customers:

Stage	Who is involved on the customer side	Typical channels	What they need to find
Supplier search	Technical staff, department heads	Search, website, LinkedIn, trade fairs	Datasheets, use cases, certifications
Evaluation and quote	Buying group, procurement	Sales rep, email, video calls	Clear quote, terms, delivery times
First order and onboarding	Procurement, accounts	Sales rep, portal	Portal access, account price list, named contact
Delivery	Warehouse, users	Email, portal	Shipment status, delivery documents
Use and support	Users, technical staff	Support, private area	Manuals, batch certificates, tickets with history
Reorder and renewal	Procurement	Portal, online store, sales rep	Order history, contract prices, stock

For each row, mark where customers currently have to ask twice or wait for an answer: those are the first things to fix. Keep the rule of thirds in mind: every stage needs both a human contact and a self-service option.

Which channels do you need, and what should they share?

The channels your customers already use, connected to the same data. In most B2B companies it looks like this.

Channel	What it is for	Data it must read
Sales team	Deals and key accounts	Order history, open quotes, tickets
Website and private area	Information and documents	Product records, certificates, account price lists
B2B store or portal	Orders and reorders	Customer pricing, stock, payment terms
Support	Issues, returns, technical questions	Orders, batches, request history
LinkedIn and events	Relationship with the buying group	Companies and contacts in the CRM

For a few high-value customers, account-based marketing works well; for recurring orders you need a proper digital channel, as covered in my guide to the future of B2B e-commerce. Trade fairs and events are channels too: the contacts you collect belong in the CRM, as I explain in the article on integrated communication for B2B events.

Do you really need a single CRM?

Yes, if more than one person talks to the same customer. A CRM (customer relationship management) system stores companies, contacts, deals, quotes and requests; "single" means sales, support and marketing work on the same record. In its public account, Euroclone started with product data; the customer record is often the next step, with three integrations:

ERP to CRM: orders, invoices, overdue payments, customer price lists.
Catalogue to website, portal and store: product records, stock, documents.
Website, portal and support to CRM: enquiries, tickets, customer-generated quotes.

No huge platform needed: Make or n8n can connect your existing systems; see my guide to business process automation.

A note on privacy: in B2B, too, data about your contacts is personal data. According to the European Commission, an address such as name.surname@company.com falls under the GDPR, while a generic one such as info@company.com does not. Before merging records, check notices, purposes and retention periods with whoever handles data protection in your company.

How do you personalise the experience for each B2B customer?

By using the data your CRM and ERP already hold, not by guessing preferences. According to the summary of McKinsey's survey, customers expect a personalised buying experience on the channel they prefer and the ability to switch easily between channels. In B2B, useful personalisation is concrete:

Contract terms: each account's prices, discounts, payment terms and price lists, visible on the portal.
A relevant catalogue: only the product families the customer buys or is allowed to buy.
Content by role: datasheets and certificates for users; prices, invoices and documents for procurement.
Suggestions from history: reorder reminders for consumables, items related to past purchases.
Preferred channel: some customers want the sales rep, others the portal or email; record it in the CRM and respect it.

The Politecnico Observatory notes that the CRM is what enables advanced personalisation of sales offers. The relationship still sits behind it: see my article on relationships in B2B marketing.

What belongs in a customer portal, and what stays with support?

The portal handles what customers ask by email today and what the data can answer with certainty; support keeps whatever needs judgement. A customer portal is a private area where each business customer sees its own terms, orders and documents.

Self-service: reorder from history, contract prices, stock, shipment status, invoices, datasheets and batch certificates, quote requests.
Support: technical issues, complaints, non-standard returns, new supply agreements.

Shipment status and invoices are among the most common requests to move to self-service; for more on both, see the articles on digitising logistics and on B2B payments.

The right sign: tickets arrive with the order and history attached, and the agent never asks for something the company already knows.

What role does AI play in B2B customer experience?

A growing one, but it is still early days. In Salesforce's State of the AI Connected Customer report, 46% of business buyers say they would work with an AI agent to get faster service. In Italy, according to the Politecnico Observatory (in Italian), the share of large companies with AI projects in this area rose from 8% to 14% in one year; among companies using AI, 51% plan to invest in automating and classifying support requests and 33% intend to try generative AI chatbots.

The most sensible uses start from the data you already have:

Ticket routing to the right person, with the order and customer already identified.
Answers about orders, stock and documents drawn from the ERP and catalogue.
Draft replies for support staff, checked before sending.

The limits flagged by the same Observatory: B2B data is often less available and less granular than B2C data, projects start in isolation and risk creating new silos, and skills are scarce. AI agents only give good answers when they read clean data; to know whether a project pays off you need clear metrics, as covered in my guide to KPIs for measuring AI value.

How do you measure B2B customer experience?

With a handful of service and repeat-purchase metrics, read per account as well as per channel.

Metric	What it measures	How to calculate it
Net Promoter Score (NPS)	Likelihood to recommend you	% of 9-10 scores minus % of 0-6 scores
Customer Effort Score (CES)	Effort to get something done	"How easy was it?" after an order or ticket
First response time	Support speed	Hours between request and reply
Self-service orders	Portal adoption	Portal orders over total orders
Repeat purchase rate	Account loyalty	Reordering customers over active customers

NPS is Bain & Company's index that subtracts detractors from promoters, as set out in the Net Promoter System methodology; CES measures how much effort a task took. In B2B, ask several roles within the same account: the people who use the product and the people who order it, like the researchers and purchasing offices in the Euroclone case, judge different things.

Who should lead the project?

One person with a mandate from senior management, backed by a small cross-functional team. That is exactly what Euroclone, and most companies in the Politecnico research, were missing. The minimum roles:

Role	Accountable for
Customer experience lead	Priorities, metrics, coordination across teams
Product data owner	Catalogue completeness and updates
Sales	Quality of CRM customer records, quotes, key accounts
Support	Tickets, response times, self-service content
IT or external partner	Integrations between ERP, CRM, website and portal

In an SME these roles may sit with two or three people; what matters is that each has a name and a metric.

How to apply it in your company: first steps

A typical scenario: a technical supplies distributor with a few hundred repeat customers, orders by email and price lists in Excel.

Map one quarter of contacts. Price requests, order confirmations, chasers: that becomes your list of things to move to self-service.
Clean up product data. One catalogue with mandatory fields and a named owner. Target: no incomplete records among best sellers.
Connect the CRM and the ERP. Target: no orders re-keyed by hand.
Launch a minimal portal for 20-30 pilot customers. Target: their share of self-service orders.
Measure and appoint an owner for CES, first response time and repeat purchases, with a monthly review.

See how I work on these projects in solutions, and related articles in the lead generation and CRM hub.

Mistakes to avoid

Starting with the website: a new site on old data puts the same errors on one more channel.
Opening channels nobody staffs: an unanswered chat makes the experience worse.
Leaving data without an owner: someone has to be accountable for its quality.
Ignoring the buying group: users and buyers need different content and access.
Adding AI on top of scattered data: an isolated assistant becomes another silo.
Removing the human contact: self-service sits alongside sales and support, it does not replace them.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

What is the difference between multichannel and omnichannel in B2B?

Multichannel means a company is present on several channels, each with its own data and rules. Omnichannel means every channel reads the same customer, product and order data, so customers never repeat themselves when they move from a sales rep to the portal or to support.

Where do you start with an omnichannel customer experience?

With the data, not the channels: a complete, consistent product catalogue, then a CRM connected to the ERP, then a portal or online store. Euroclone, too, started with product data and a PIM and DAM platform, before the new website.

How much does an omnichannel customer experience project cost?

It depends on how many systems need connecting and what you already have. A first project that reuses your CRM and ERP, with Make or n8n integrations and a minimal portal, costs far less than a new enterprise platform. Start with a pilot on a few customers.

Do you need a B2B e-commerce store to be omnichannel?

Not always. If customers reorder the same items often, a reorder portal or B2B store saves time on both sides. If you sell custom projects, a private area with quotes, documents and order status matters more.

Can AI improve B2B customer experience?

Yes, for answering questions about orders, documents and stock, or for routing tickets. It only works if it reads clean data and if customers know when they are talking to an AI agent. Fix the catalogue and the CRM first, then add the assistant.

What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?

Customer service is support: it answers questions and problems when the customer raises them. Customer experience covers every interaction, from the supplier search to the quote, order, delivery and reorder. Good customer service is part of customer experience, not all of it.

Can a small or mid-sized company build an omnichannel experience?

Yes, by starting small. According to the Politecnico di Milano Observatory, only 3% of Italian B2B SMEs are at a mature level, so even a few steps make a difference: a clean catalogue, a CRM connected to the ERP and a minimal portal for the customers who reorder most often.

Sources

If you want to know which data and channels to start with in your company, book a free assessment.