Your customers research products before you know they exist.
They compare suppliers, interrogate specifications, find alternatives, consult colleagues, and – increasingly – use AI to help them understand their options. By the time they speak to someone in your sales team, they’ve probably completed a significant part of the buying journey themselves.
That shift isn't particularly new. The question is whether the experience of buying from you has kept pace with it.
Gartner reported in 2026 that 67% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience, while 45% had used AI during a recent purchase. McKinsey's latest B2B research found that buyers now use an average of ten channels during the purchasing journey. Meanwhile, Deloitte found that 86% of industrial manufacturing and construction executives, thinking as B2B customers themselves, wanted an improved digital interface from their suppliers.
None of this means that complex manufacturing purchases are becoming entirely digital. Far from it. Technical expertise, relationships, advice, and reassurance remain important, particularly when products are complicated, configurable, business-critical, or expensive.
But the balance has definitely changed. Buyers increasingly expect to make progress on their terms and only involve a manufacturer when that involvement adds value. The challenge is that many of the processes, systems, and digital experiences they encounter were designed for a different way of buying.
For manufacturers, that's worth examining because the consequences extend well beyond the website.
Manufacturing buyers expect to make progress without talking to Sales
A buyer shouldn't necessarily need to contact somebody to establish whether a product meets a particular specification, compare two options, find technical documentation, check compatibility, identify a distributor, place a repeat order, track an existing one, or access service information.
Yet these are exactly the types of interaction that can still generate calls and emails for manufacturing sales and service teams.
Some human interaction is valuable. A technical sales specialist advising on an unusual application, helping configure a solution, or giving a customer confidence in a high-risk decision is doing something digital self-service may struggle to replicate. The same specialist locating a datasheet or answering a routine product question is different.
Where does the customer genuinely need your expertise, and where do they need you simply because they can't get something done themselves?
Look at the questions handled repeatedly by sales, customer service, technical support, and distributors. Look at the information people routinely send customers manually. Look at the processes employees have developed to compensate for gaps in the digital journey.
Those interactions represent effort for the customer and cost for you as the manufacturer. More importantly, they can show precisely where customer behaviour has moved ahead of the experience designed to support it.
Product discovery has become part of the manufacturing customer experience
For manufacturers with large or technically complex portfolios, allowing customers to research independently is easier said than done.
Accenture identified more than 1,600 pain points across industrial B2B buying journeys, with nearly two-thirds occurring during product-buying journeys. Reliability, convenience, transparency, responsiveness, quality, and proactivity were the six principal drivers of a strong buyer experience.
Consider somebody who knows the outcome or specification they need but doesn't know your portfolio. Can they search by application rather than product name? Can they filter products using the attributes that matter to them? Can they compare plausible options? Are specifications consistent? Can they access the relevant technical documents without hunting for them? Can they understand which products are available in their market and how to buy them?
These are basic questions, but they get to something important. Manufacturers naturally organise information around their own product structures, terminology, systems, brands, and internal responsibilities. Customers approach the same information from a completely different starting point – the thing they're trying to achieve.
The difference becomes particularly apparent in search. Customers may use a technical specification, application, industry term, product code, old product name, standard, material, or problem to find what they need. If the experience only works when someone already understands the manufacturer's taxonomy, it isn't really supporting independent product discovery.
This is also why the answer isn't simply putting more information online. Manufacturers already have huge quantities of product and technical content. The opportunity is making that information useful at the point a customer needs it.
Better manufacturing self-service starts with better product information
PDFs are an obvious example. Datasheets, technical drawings, certificates, brochures, installation instructions, product catalogues, warranties, and compliance information are essential parts of many manufacturing journeys. Customers need documents they can download, retain, circulate, and use elsewhere.
Problems arise when information that could help a customer discover or evaluate a product only exists inside those documents.
A specification buried on page 34 of a catalogue might be available online, but it isn't necessarily useful for search, filtering, comparison, product selection, or other digital services. The customer has access to the information, but they're having to do the work required to extract it.
Gartner's finding that 45% of B2B buyers had used AI during a recent purchase matters. Buyers may increasingly ask AI tools to research potential suppliers, explain technical differences, identify possible products, or summarise information before visiting a manufacturer's website.
That creates another reason to address inconsistent terminology, poorly structured product information, outdated content, duplicated information across regional sites, and important data trapped in documents.
If buyers are increasingly using AI to research and compare suppliers, the quality and structure of the information you make available becomes part of how effectively your products can be found and understood.
A fragmented digital estate creates a fragmented buying journey
Customers don't experience a CMS, PIM, ERP, CRM, DAM, ecommerce platform, distributor portal, and product database – all the technology behind the scenes. They experience you, your brand, the manufacturer.
Established manufacturing digital estates rarely develop according to a single plan. Businesses expand into new markets, acquire companies, introduce products and services, adopt new platforms, support different sales channels, and respond to changing requirements over many years.
The resulting systems can work perfectly well individually, but create problems when customers – without knowing so – have to move between them.
Product information may differ between the public website and distributor portal. Availability information may require a phone call because it isn't connected to the customer-facing experience. A regional site may contain different technical information from the global site. Customers may have to enter information the manufacturer already holds because two systems don't share context.
McKinsey's B2B research identifies inconsistent information and fragmented experiences across channels among the factors that can contribute to customers switching suppliers.
This is why we'd be wary of assuming that a disappointing manufacturing customer experience can be solved simply with a website redesign.
Your website might be where customers encounter the problem. But the cause might be the information, processes, governance, integrations, or systems sitting behind it.
Understanding that before choosing the solution can make the difference between genuinely improving the buying experience and simply putting a better interface over the same problems.
Digital customer experience can change the economics of serving customers
Making it easier to buy can also make customers easier to serve.
Better product information can reduce routine enquiries. Effective self-service can remove unnecessary manual administration. Connected order information can reduce calls to customer service. Distributor portals can allow partners to complete routine tasks themselves. Better integrations can remove duplicated work internally. Digital aftermarket services can extend the commercial relationship beyond the initial purchase.
Accenture reports that 82% of industrial companies see opportunities to generate additional revenue through digital services and tailored, integrated solutions, while 71% of B2B leaders report increased use of digital channels by existing customers. Deloitte similarly found manufacturers looking at digital customer experience across pre-sales, design, production, delivery, aftermarket, and ongoing operations.
This broadens the business case for a better digital experience considerably.
Not only can a better digital experience lead to an increase in enquiries or revenue, but it can also deliver lower cost-to-serve, greater distributor efficiency, fewer support requests, faster internal processes, increased customer retention, and new opportunities for aftermarket revenue.
How Karndean Designflooring redesigned its digital experience around different customer journeys
Our work with Karndean Designflooring is a good example of what this looks like in practice.
Karndean operates internationally across both consumer and professional markets. Its B2B audiences include architects, interior designers, and tradespeople, alongside an approved retailer network. Those groups have different reasons for engaging with Karndean and need different information at different points in their journey.
Rather than beginning with assumptions about what a new website should contain, our redesign work started with research across the UK, US, and Australia.
For professional audiences, that helped shape an experience that made it easier to identify appropriate commercial flooring solutions and access technical documentation during different project stages.
For consumers, the work informed improvements to product discovery, search, navigation, taxonomy, and retailer finding.
The work behind the experience was just as important. Centralised product management, automated product imports, a re-usable design system, and new retailer-management capability, helped improve consistency and reduce internal effort across markets. Karndean subsequently reported a significant reduction in website support queries and faster regional website roll-out.
Our earlier work moving Karndean's B2C websites and B2B self-service retailer portal from Sitecore to Optimizely also demonstrates the operational value that can sit behind customer experience improvements. The move delivered a 56% year-on-year cost saving, an 18% reduction in costs through consolidating third-party dependencies, and 30% faster editorial workflows.
The important point isn't the platform Karndean chose. It's that the technology supported clearly identified customer and business requirements, rather than becoming the reason for the programme.
Where should manufacturers focus their digital investment?
As manufacturing buyers change, it's tempting to respond with more digital: more self-service, more personalisation, more automation, more AI, or another major transformation programme.
It’s better to start where customers are already showing you that their experience with you isn't keeping up with their expectations.
Look at recurring sales and service enquiries. Analyse what customers search for and whether they find it. Identify important information that’s difficult to discover or trapped in documents. Look at where distributors still rely on manual processes. Find the journeys customers abandon or struggle to complete. Identify inconsistencies between channels and markets. Speak to customers and watch how they actually research and complete important tasks.
Then, look at the business impact. Is the problem creating unnecessary service cost? Slowing a sale? Making products harder to discover? Creating work for distributors? Preventing customers from completing routine transactions? Limiting the ability to generate aftermarket revenue? Making the digital estate expensive to operate or difficult to change?
That gives you a much stronger basis for deciding what to do next.
For one business, the answer might be better product data and search. For another, it could be a distributor portal, ecommerce, improved technical content, better integration between existing platforms, or a new DXP. In some cases, fixing a small number of high-value customer journeys may achieve more than replacing the technology estate.
Manufacturing buyers have absolutely changed, and will continue to do so. AI will alter how products and suppliers are researched. Digital self-service will become more capable. Buyers will move between channels according to what is most useful at a particular moment.
Manufacturers don't need to predict every change that comes next. But they do need to understand whether buying from them reflects how their customers want to buy now.
At DotCentric, we work with manufacturers to understand how their customers actually buy, where digital is making that harder than it needs to be, and where changes could make a meaningful commercial difference.
If you want to understand where the biggest opportunities are in your own customer experience, get in touch.
