With collective commute times down to zero and face-to-face meetings all but impossible, we’ve seen the B2B buyer journey become an almost exclusively digital experience. It’s time for B2B marketers to close the gaps in their customers’ digital experiences with the assistance of automated conversations created by chatbots and virtual assistants (VAs).

These solutions are already popular in B2C and B2B markets, creating experiences that:

  • Meet modern buyers’ expectations of immediacy.
  • Help marketers chase the leads sellers never get to (or the ones you never get to sales).
  • Keep opportunities moving between human touchpoints.

But rather than focusing on creating the quickest possible handoff to sales, B2B marketers need to take a more customer–obsessed perspective when deploying these technologies — and reorient their chatbots and VAs to help more buyers toward their goals, by handling more open-ended questions and making personalized content recommendations, for example.

To learn more about how you can take a more empathetic approach to shape today’s B2B buyer experience with chatbots and VAs, Forrester clients can read my report, “Chatbots And Virtual Assistants Can Help B2B Organizations Close The Digital Experience Gap.” You can also continue the conversation with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.