B2B Personalization: Agilent’s Success Story

Agilent Technologies is a world-leading measurement company. Its singular focus on measurement helps scientists and engineers alike with its designs and manufacturing of scientific instrumentation. The company is organized into four business groups: Chemical Analysis, Life Sciences, Diagnostics and Genomics, and Electronic Measurement. You might remember Agilent’s birth in 1999 as a spin-off from HP. This case study reflects customer experience and marketing evolution at the Electronic Measurement Group of Agilent.

Agilent is an illuminating example of how – and why—companies can succeed with personalization initiatives.

Companies struggle with establishing and executing an integrated customer engagement strategy. What are the goals? What are the steps to success? What are the projects and programs to achieve higher engagement, and how are they identified? Who owns the integrated customer experience? What is the value? Agilent’s answers to these questions, and how they achieved the answers, provide insight for those still wrestling with transformation.

This is the first of four blog posts detailing how Agilent answered those questions to achieve a successful, integrated, customer experience that supports marketing and pleases customers. The four posts are as follows:
1. B2B Personalization: MyAgilent Delivers the Experience Customers Crave
2. MyAgilent: Personal Portal Becomes Keystone of Effective Marketing
3. Agilent Personalization is Tactic, Not Strategy
4. Four CSFs for B2B Personalization Tactics

B2B Personalization: MyAgilent Delivers the Experience Customers Crave

“I just want to go to one page, and see everything about my relationship: products, warranties, contracts, updates, alerts, projects, everything.” This has been a consistent refrain over the years from hundreds of Patricia Seybold Group clients’ business customers. This simple sounding request is not simple to deliver.

MyAgilent, the customer’s personal page for Agilent’s Electronic Measurement Group, delivers the personalized page customers have been asking for. It provides a single destination that merges more than a dozen separate systems and passwords. It allows customers to tailor the information they receive, and with one login and from one page, access the capabilities relevant to their jobs.

A complicating factor: Each individual customer has a different idea of just which capabilities are relevant.

For example, purchasing agents spend time with open orders and contracts. They are not interested in information on how to calibrate equipment. Measurement engineers, on the other hand, spend their days using Agilent products, and they need to access to warranty & calibration information, product updates, service schedules, and product support. Engineers in design and production have tasks that require measurement equipment, and these engineers are interested in insights on new measurement technology and insights on how to make measurements effectively.

All of these roles are satisfied by MyAgilent by providing information and tools specific to the person and role. As seen in the screenshot above, customers can view information specific to the products they use – as separate from the products they are “watching” (e.g., interested in buying or using). They see a list of the Agilent contacts that are specific to their account and equipment, so they have ready access to the right person. They see news relevant to their equipment and watch list. They can check order status or warranty data relevant to their equipment. They can seek advice from forums, repair service, technical documentation and updates for their equipment – uncluttered by a deluge of information on the vast array of equipment Agilent offers. Anyone who has ever wasted time studying an answer that, in the end, doesn’t apply to the OS version you’re actually using, appreciates the blessing of stripping out all the non-relevant information.

Customers love it.

This is because Agilent’s enhancements for MyAgilent are guided by customer requirements and relentless attention to customer testing and customer feedback. “We test everything with customers, and then analyze every element of feedback we get and optimize the designs accordingly. You can’t get the customer page right without customer involvement,” said Carl Daw, who headed up the MyAgilent project. In developing MyAgilent, the team was seeking a customer experience breakthrough. Customer satisfaction scores, though excellent, had stalled in their upward trend, and MyAgilent was the opportunity to move the needle. In this, MyAgilent has been successful, significantly improving customer satisfaction scores over the past two years.

Agilent Electronic Measurement Group measures the quality of MyAgilent in customer satisfaction scores, customer feedback, the percentage and number of customers registered for MyAgilent, and the rate of growth of MyAgilent usage.

The value to customers of MyAgilent is:
• Having a single access point to all Agilent apps – one page, one login – reduces password management efforts and login frustrations.
• MyAgilent users are not asked for credentials when they request downloads and other information, which saves time.
• Information is more useful and more visible. It is personalized to customers based on their country, company, products and specified preferences, so important information is no longer buried among notifications of no interest to them. The greater visibility of the important information helps customers avoid problems and seize opportunities for learning, maintaining, replacing, updating and using Agilent equipment.

Agilent Technologies is a world-leading measurement company. Its singular focus on measurement helps scientists and engineers alike with its designs and manufacturing of scientific instrumentation. The company is organized into four business groups: Chemical Analysis, Life Sciences, Diagnostics and Genomics, and Electronic Measurement. You might remember Agilent’s birth in 1999 as a spin-off from HP. This case study reflects customer experience and marketing evolution at the Electronic Measurement Group of Agilent.

Agilent is an illuminating example of how – and why—companies can succeed with personalization initiatives.