Why Your Best Customers Still Order by Phone (And How to Change That Without Losing Them)

By Eda Gumusay, Director of Marketing at Atwix, with insights from the Atwix Delivery Team

Most B2B companies don’t have an adoption problem. They have a trust problem.

When customers choose to call instead of using your portal, it’s easy to assume they’re stuck in old habits. That they prefer the relationship, or that they’ll eventually come around with enough time and encouragement. But if your best customers, the ones who order the most and know your business inside and out, are still picking up the phone, they’re telling you something more important.

They don’t trust your digital experience enough to rely on it and in B2B, trust is what drives behavior.

Your Best Customers Aren’t the Problem. They’re the Clearest Signal You Have.

The customers who continue to call are usually the ones you rely on most. They know your catalog, your quirks, and your shortcuts. Over time, they’ve figured out how to get things done quickly, often faster than newer customers ever could.

Which is exactly why their behavior matters. They’re not struggling. They’re making a decision.

When they avoid your portal, it’s not confusion. It’s a judgment call based on speed, clarity, and confidence. They already know there’s a faster way to get what they need, and right now, that way is your sales team.

So instead of asking how to change their behavior, it’s worth asking a better question:

What about the experience makes calling feel like the better option?

“Calling isn’t the habit. It’s the fallback.”

Where Adoption Actually Breaks (And Why It’s Not Obvious at First)

From the outside, this often gets framed as a change management issue. Internally, it gets labeled as something that just needs more time. But when you look closer, adoption rarely breaks because of one major flaw. It breaks in smaller, less obvious ways that add friction over time.

The experience asks the customer to pause, double-check, or second-guess, and those moments add up. Sometimes it’s search. A customer types in something that feels obvious to them and doesn’t get the result they expect. In many cases, this is one of the first places friction shows up. Other times it’s pricing. If there’s even a small amount of uncertainty around whether the price shown matches what they’ve negotiated, confidence drops immediately. Sometimes it’s structure. Products don’t look familiar, even though the customer has ordered them dozens of times before. None of these issues are dramatic on their own. But together, they create just enough resistance to make someone stop and think: “I’ll just call. It’ll be faster.” And in most cases? They’re right.

This is also where teams tend to underestimate how interconnected these issues are. What looks like a simple UX problem is usually tied back to how data is structured in the ERP, how pricing is exposed, or how workflows are handled behind the scenes.

Without that alignment, even well-designed interfaces struggle to gain adoption.

Learn more about how Atwix approaches ERP integrations and data alignment

The Part That Gets Missed: It’s Not Just Ordering

One of the biggest gaps we see is how narrowly digital experiences are scoped. Most portals are designed around placing an order. But your customers aren’t just placing orders. They’re checking past purchases, referencing invoices, reordering variations, and coordinating internally before buying.

When the experience only supports one piece of that workflow, it forces customers to fill in the gaps themselves. That’s where adoption starts to fall apart. Calling your team doesn’t just help them place an order. It helps them complete the entire task in one interaction.

In many cases, that gap shows up most clearly in quote-to-order workflows. Customers receive a quote, review it offline, and then have to restart the process digitally if they want to place the order themselves. Bridging that gap, turning a quote into something actionable inside the experience, is often where adoption starts to improve quickly.

This is exactly where solutions like Atwix’s Sirius come into play, connecting ERP-generated quotes directly into the buying experience so customers can act immediately instead of restarting the process.

Why “Pushing” Customers Online Usually Backfires

At some point, many teams try to solve this by pushing harder. They limit phone orders, require portal usage, or introduce policies meant to drive customers online. On paper, it makes sense. In practice, it often creates friction where there didn’t need to be any.

You end up asking your best customers to change how they work, without giving them a clear reason why it benefits them. That’s where frustration builds. Adoption doesn’t come from pressure. It comes from preference.

If the digital experience is clearly faster, clearer, and easier, customers will use it naturally because it helps them do their job better.

What Actually Moves the Needle

The teams that get this right don’t try to fix everything at once. They focus on making a few key moments noticeably better. It usually starts with visibility. Customers need to immediately recognize that they’re in the right place, which means seeing their pricing, their products, and their history without having to search for it. If that layer is missing or unclear, nothing else really lands.

Then it moves to speed. Not theoretical speed, actual usability. Can someone come in and reorder something they’ve purchased before without thinking about it? Can they move from search to cart in a way that feels obvious and predictable? If not, they’ll default to what feels faster.

Finally, there’s confidence. Familiar naming, clear structure, and consistent behavior across pages all help reduce doubt. This isn’t about adding more features. It’s about removing uncertainty. This is also where we’re starting to see AI play a more practical role. Not in a flashy way, but in helping surface the right products, predict reordering behavior, or guide users based on past activity.

(Link opportunity) Explore Atwix’s approach to AI for ERP-driven commerce

When layered on top of a well-structured ERP and commerce experience, it can quietly remove friction in ways that are difficult to achieve manually.

A Practical Way to Start (Without Turning This Into a Big Project)

Improving adoption doesn’t require a full redesign. Start with your highest-value customers and look at what they’re actually doing:

• What are they calling about most often?
• What are they trying to accomplish in those moments?
• Where does your current experience fall short?

This is exactly the kind of gap that structured audits are designed to uncover.

Learn more about Atwix ERP & experience audits

Not just what’s broken on the surface, but what’s causing it underneath. From there, focus on one or two workflows and make them meaningfully better.

You might start by:

• Making reordering feel almost automatic
• Surfacing previously ordered items more clearly
• Aligning search and product naming with how customers actually think

These are not massive initiatives, but they have an immediate impact. In fact, many teams are surprised to find that they don’t need to start with a full replatform.

When and why to consider a B2B replatforming strategy

Most meaningful gains come from improving how existing systems are connected and experienced before making larger technology decisions.

The Shift That Actually Matters

The goal isn’t to get customers online. The goal is to make the online experience feel like the easiest way to get things done. That requires a shift in mindset. Instead of designing around what the system can do, you design around how your customers already work.

When that alignment is there, adoption doesn’t need to be forced. It happens naturally, because it just makes sense.

A Quick Reality Check

If your best customers are still calling, ask yourself:

• Can they quickly find and reorder what they need?
• Do they trust what they’re seeing when it comes to pricing and availability?
• Does your experience support their full workflow, or just part of it?
• Does using your portal actually feel easier than calling someone they already trust?

If those answers aren’t clear, there’s your starting point.

Identify Your Biggest Adoption Gaps

If you’re trying to improve adoption but aren’t sure where to focus, we can help. We’ll look at how your customers are actually interacting with your experience, where they’re falling back to offline channels, and what’s creating friction. Then we’ll map out what’s actually worth improving first, without turning it into a massive project.