When we were writing our book on business-to-business customer satisfaction surveys, Howard Plomann and I also researched the key benchmarks. The four key criteria we uncovered for the most successful (profitable) B2B customer satisfaction surveys are: –
1. A high response rate to the survey.
B2B organisations don’t have thousands of customers.
The benchmark is ~70%
2. Posing lots of questions
There is a need to drill down into the detail of the relationship.
The benchmark is a survey with 62 questions and statements
3. Fully attributed feedback
Knowing who said what is vital in B2B because each customer is different.
Members of the Market Research Society and ESOMAR are not allowed to provide this.
4. Help with interpreting the results to gain commercial benefit
Without an action plan the survey is a waste of time and effort.
The benchmark is a project with a 10:1 ROI guarantee.
Last week I wrote to a number of senior people in B2B. I wanted to find out which of the four key satisfaction survey attributes they felt was the most important.
At first there appeared to be one clear winner…….. Which, over a couple of days, changed.
And there was one of the four options that no-one chose. Perhaps it was taken for granted!
Overall I found it very interesting, and not quite what I was expecting.
The results have been posted – www.infoquestcrm.co.uk
