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B2B Customer Feedback Surveys – Practical Tips to Improve Your Program Now

Excellent B2B Customer Feedback surveys must start with thinking about what you really want to find out from your customers; i.e., begin with the end in mind. Ultimately, a successful survey allows the customer to tell you how they really feel and think about you. It’s so much more than numbers and scales. In this edition of Success Strategies, we will focus on helping you improve your CX program with practical tips, an introduction to our CX Maturity Assessment, some interesting CX articles, and an excerpt my recent blog, What are the Best Practices for Customer Feedback Analytics Tools?.

Let’s start with a few tips to help you improve your program.

1. Set Clear Survey Objectives for Actionable Results

Define what you need to know from your customers. For instance, some goals may be overall satisfaction, likelihood to refer, specific product needs, service call quality, etc. Then, identify how you help your dealers to improve with the feedback data.

2. Develop Quality Questions

You can’t ask a question about every single component of the interaction. If you do that, your survey is too long, and your customers will be annoyed with you. Consequently, we’ve learned the best way to get this information is to ask open-ended questions. For example, after a scale response question (e.g., Overall Satisfaction), we ask:

(1)”What went well? (with the service or product transaction)

(2)”What could have been better?

3. Get Complete Customer Contact Data

Contact data is the key to actually getting a completed survey. We literally cannot say this enough. How can customers be contacted if you don’t have their full name, phone number, and email address? In other words, better data produces better results for dealers and customers. Additionally, we also recommend revisiting your Do Not Contact list periodically. Some may want to be willing to participate now. Finally, we have developed a plan to prevent survey fatigue. You might be surprised to know that some on your DNC list will be willing to be contacted once a year. See chart below:

4. Utilize all B2B Customer Feedback Survey Methods

Blend multiple ways to collect feedback to give customers a choice of their preferred channel. Moreover, providing options can reduce the number of customers on your DNC list as well.

    • Phone (Higher response rates and more actionable feedback)
    • Email*
    • Web*
    • Text*

*Digital methods are best if the transaction is “simpler” and are performance dimensions easier to measure

5. Set Clear Action Steps following Each Completed Survey

Identify who needs to read the surveys – not an onerous task at the branch level. Primarily focus on NPS performance at this level as well. Furthermore, it would be best to determine how you plan to recognize top performers and help those who are not there yet.

6. Employ Data Analytic Tools for B2B Customer Feedback Surveys

Business Intelligence tools allow you to understand your CX data in real-time. BI complements CX/CI and shows you where to focus. In my recent blog, “ What are the Best Practices for Customer Feedback Analytics Tools?,” I discuss these tools and share how to get the best results.

To summarize our tips to improve your program, here’s a list of Do’s and Don’ts.

To learn where your company needs to improve its CX program, take our Customer Experience Maturity Assessment based on our extensive customer feedback data from our 30+ years of surveys and market research across multiple markets. Key Focus Areas: Goals & Governance, Customer Listening, Employee Engagement, Analytics & Continuous Improvement, and >Closing the Loop.

Take the Assessment

Finally, I’m always searching for articles to share on Customer Experience.  Here’s two that I found beneficial:

Entrepreneur: This Is Why Word-of-Mouth Referrals Should Be Your Number One Metric of Success

This one explains why referrals are so important to your business success and provides tips to improve yours.

Strategy + Business: The untapped potential of B2B customer loyalty programs

This article recommends B2B take some ideas from B2C on customer loyalty programs to keep their customers happy.

As we finish up our vacation season and get our children back to school (and some off to college), we hope everyone stays safe and healthy.

Lynn Daniel
CEO
704.749.5018

What are the Best Practices for Customer Feedback Analytics Tools?

New business intelligence tools (BI) like Power BI and others have made it even easier for you to understand Customer Feedback data in real-time. Unfortunately, with almost any new and highly effective tool, there are often better ways to use them. Let’s discuss the best practices for Customer Feedback Analytics tools to get the most out of your data.

Please note that while our work at The Daniel Group is focused exclusively on customer experience, much of what I say is helpful for other business intelligence applications we well.

Best Practice – Begin with the End in Mind 

Design your surveys with clearly defined outcomes. One of the benefits of a well-designed survey is the opportunity to collect unstructured customer feedback. But all this unstructured feedback comes with a problem—how to get it structured to identify clear customer messages? In addition, it is challenging to read through comments from even a relatively small number of surveys and determine what signals the customers are sending. Nevertheless, we’ve found ways to provide structure to this unstructured customer feedback data. 

 

 

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