Introduction
This book has been written specifically for those who work in a B2B environment who want to get more from their customer satisfaction surveys. You know that you are in B2B because you don't have thousands of customers; you have key account managers looking after many (if not all) of your customers; and your customers are all different, in terms of what they need, want and demand from you – and what they contribute to your business in terms of volume and profit.
You may want to get a higher response rate to your surveys. You might want to pose more questions and wish that those questions could drill down further into the customer relationships. Or you might have seen how, when carried out using best practice, feedback from satisfaction surveys can lead to huge increases in both the top and bottom lines.
This book was written to explain best practice based on what has been seen and done – not on theory. Howard and I have, between us, spent nearly 40 years specialising in business to business customer satisfaction surveys working with InfoQuest. We have seen poor practices, ranging from ignored feedback through to really bad customer data. And we have seen best practices that we want to share with you, such as how to get a 90% response rate to a 60 question survey; and the best way to ensure that the feedback links directly with your company's continuous improvement (or kaizen) programme.
It should be clear that customer satisfaction is not simply an altruistic goal, trotted out as a platitude in the corporate annual statement. Totally satisfied customers will give your company references, referrals, case studies, more business and better margins for a fraction of the cost of gaining new customers. Our own research, based on 20,000 InfoQuest surveys, showed that a totally satisfied customer is worth 1.8 times as much revenue as a somewhat satisfied customer.
A well-planned and carefully implemented survey which is properly followed through should result in a minimum of a 10% increase in sustainable revenue. Howard and I have witnessed much higher results than this. Hopefully this book will help you to do the same.