Contemporary Marketing 16th Edition by Louis Boone,David Kurtz

Exercise 22

W. Grainger has such a good handle on who its 2 million business customers are that it recently redesigned its website to cater to two specific types: buyers in the field, using any of Grainger's 900,000 maintenance and repair products, and purchasing agents, placing orders for Grainger products from corporate headquarters. Customers who need a product right now in the field can enter their ZIP code to find out whether one of Grainger's 400 U.S. branches is nearby and has the required item. (The company has 600 branches worldwide.) If so, they can pick it up, often the same day. Purchasing agents take a longer view of their inventory, and they like Grainger's ability to recognize them online, tell them what they've ordered in the past, and help them check the status of their current orders.
Both types of customers benefit from Grainger's mobile apps. Field workers can request purchasing approval for needed items, while purchasing agents can approve the requests even if they're away from their desks, and without logging on to Grainger's website. Anyone ordering from the website can also use the handy click to chat or click to call buttons to directly connect with a Grainger customer service rep for help. In fact, the website alerts Grainger's staff when a customer is having a problem with an order, so a customer service employee can step in with a chat or call invitation to offer immediate help.
Grainger's successful development of its e-commerce division has enabled it to grow its online business more than twice as fast as its base operations, increasing it 17 percent in one recent year to reach more than $2 billion in annual revenues. According to the company's vice president of e-commerce, customers love to tell stories about how the company got them out of a bind with its huge inventory, convenient ordering process, and speedy response. Many of Grainger's customers are in government offices or schools; in heavy or light manufacturing operations; or in retail, wholesale, fleet maintenance, or asset management.
"We're doing our thinking around customer experience," the company's vice president of e-commerce says. "We're doing all we can to help our customers make the right decisions."
QUESTIONS FOR CRITICAL THINKING
1. Why is it important for W.W. Grainger to understand exactly who its B2B customers are?
2. In what other ways can Grainger provide a good customer experience via its website and mobile apps?