Response rates for B2B customer satisfaction surveys (Part 2)
There is a question that is regularly asked about survey response rates – how do the different methodologies compare?
N.B. These are for B2B customer satisfaction surveys.
As a rule of thumb, the following statements are true (2013). And there are always exceptions to the rule.
Survey Scaling – for a B2B customer satisfaction survey
There has been a discussion on LinkedIn this week about how you should scale the responses on a relationship survey.
A test of spelling
Let’s talk about Christmas card lists. The list of your most important customers. In fact, in B2B, the list of your most valuable asset (just why the accountants of this world haven’t claimed ownership of the customers before now and audited them at year-end I’ll never know).
We need to take more care of that customer list. I’m not talking about security or whether the list should be stored in the cloud or not; I’m talking about spelling.
What if your B2B customers love you? Harvest Time explained.
We have just completed a customer satisfaction survey for a new client. They have no history with us. We don’t know what their customers thought of them in the past – all we have is a snap-shot of right now. And yet it is clear from these results that, on the whole, their worldwide customers either love them or think very highly of them. They are the best results for a first-time survey that I’ve seen for a very long time, if not ever. I’ve certainly seen better results for clients that have focussed on customer satisfaction over a period of years, running the B2B surveys every so often as part of their continuous improvement programme, but as a first-time survey these results are stunning.
5 Inexpensive B2B Marketing Tools
Fifteen years ago, brochures and tradeshows were enough to reach your target audience, but these days, business to business companies have dozens of marketing tools to choose from. Which ones will work best for the people you want to reach?
There’s no standard formula for effective B2B marketing. Different tools work for different products, services and audiences. But there are a number of basic tools that simply aren’t on the radar of a lot of B2B companies, and they should be. These five resources are easy, inexpensive, and can be remarkably effective in getting your message out to those who need to hear it.
#1 PR. Got expertise? Share it! PR is simple, inexpensive, and can deliver excellent results for both brand awareness and lead generation. Lots of B2B companies have a compelling story to tell, and there are a number of trade publications looking for interesting, relevant content to fill their pages. All you have to do is get a few press releases out to them (consistently – one isn’t enough), and as long as you have a story that is compelling to a particular audience, they will eventually get noticed and gain some media pick up. This coverage is one of the best ways to get your company’s name into the heads of your target customers.
#2 SEO. Many companies don’t realize just how much business is being done online. Ten years ago, a website was a nice-to-have. These days, it’s a must. Think of it this way: when was the last time you DIDN’T use Google to find a product or service you were looking for? If you’re not doing search engine optimization, you’re missing a big opportunity to get the attention of your target market. And the sooner you start, the stronger the result will be; SEO is cumulative, so the more time you put into it, the better the result.
#3 Video. If a picture says a thousand words, a minute of video speaks volumes. For B2Bs with a complex product or service, videos can communicate a lot of information in just a short amount of time. You don’t need to be Steven Spielberg – high production quality isn’t necessary to be effective – and you don’t have to spend a ton of money to make a great video that explains exactly what you do in less than a minute.
#4 Free trial. If they can try it, they’re more likely to buy it. Allowing B2B customers to use your product or service risk-free is a proven sales tool. This approach doesn’t work for every product or service, but it’s certainly ideal for products like software, where a positive initial experience makes the buying decision much easier.
#5 Lead nurturing. This may seem like an obvious one, but many B2B marketers simply don’t do enough of it. Studies show that it takes seven customer touches before someone will remember the name of your company – before they say “Yeah, I think I’ve heard of these guys.” The best way to ensure these touches are made is with lead generation software like InfusionSoft or HubSpot. These automated programs let you send emails, newsletters, video case studies and more at pre-determined times, making sure you stay on your prospects’ radar.
Effective B2B marketing doesn’t have to blow your budget – there are lots of smart, simple tools that offer solid ways of reaching customers to and influence their next buying decision. If you’re planning your 2013 marketing budget, think about including these 5 tools.
Lisa Shepherd is author of Market Smart: How to Gain Customers and Increase Profits with B2B Marketing and president of The Mezzanine Group, a business-to-business strategy and marketing company based in Toronto. She was the youngest female CEO of a PROFIT 200 company in 2007 and 2008 and is a frequent public speaker on B2B marketing strategy and execution.
Response rates for B2B customer satisfaction surveys (Part 1)
I was asked the other day whether InfoQuest guarantees a 70% response rate. My answer was an unequivocal “no!”
Yes, we have an average worldwide response rate of more than 70%, but no, we cannot guarantee it.
Your Value Proposition and the customer satisfaction survey
There was a discussion on LinkedIn recently where someone was asking what questions should be asked in a customer satisfaction survey for a software firm. After a few days the member clarified his question by saying that his firm had regular surveys aimed at users, but this time they wanted to target senior people at VP level and above (I think by that he meant CEOs).
Your Most Valuable Asset
I remember hearing Tom Peters, twenty years ago, banging on about how your employees were your most valuable asset. I disagreed with him then and I still disagree with him now. Yes, your staff might be your most valuable resource, but your most valuable asset is nearly always your customer base – or it is in business-to-business which is where I’m from; the ongoing repeatable sales of products or services.
Case study: How to apologize to your customers when things go badly wrong – by Adam Ramshaw
When things went pear-shaped over at MozLand, they did so in a big way. The result was lots of unhappy customers, but their response is a case study in how to apologize for problems that seriously affect your customers.
You can read the full text of their apology over on the SEOMoz site but here are the elements of what they did right. Continue reading
The forensic analysis of a customer satisfaction survey report.
For this blog I am going to refer you to the sample customer satisfaction survey report on the Downloads page.
I’m lucky in that I work with two computer screens – a client’s Finance Director showed me how he’d increased productivity not just in his department but in all the administrative sections by investing in two screens per person – and I tried it and found it worked.
The assumptions here are that you don’t have thousands of customers; that you do have Key Account Managers (KAMs); and that the KAMs will review the customer list prior to the survey and make a best guess as to the share of wallet or percentage penetration that you have with each of your most important customers – Your Customers.
And Our Top Customers Are….??? : by Howard Plomann
The delivery of InfoQuest surveys is built around a multi-step pre-validation process, which in plain English means that that we only send surveys to people who have agreed to receive them in advance. Though we will never be able to validate an entire customer list – there are always customers who, for a myriad number of reasons, either can’t be reached or who simply prefer not to participate – we still enjoy a pretty high participation, or “hit rate”; usually in the 80-90% range.
The operative word in that last sentence is, “usually”.
The Cassandra Phenomenon and customer satisfaction surveys: by Howard Plomann
The Cassandra Phenomenon sits atop the list of biases and influences that undermine the candour and accuracy of customer satisfaction surveys. It is defined as –
- In a survey environment where the respondent believes their identity is or may be known, a strong positive bias filters into responses.
- In a survey environment where the respondent believes their identity is or may be known, a strong positive bias filters into responses.
The problem is simple. When customers believe that their identity is or may be known, roughly 70% of the population will hesitate to openly voice a strongly negative opinion for fear of the potential consequences. That hesitancy is driven by concern over possible reprisals, the “hassle factor” of potentially being asked to explain or defend such comments, even misgivings about getting a business partner into trouble (however deserving) and thus detrimentally altering whatever relationship is currently in place.
Selling a solution
Nowadays we’re told to sell solutions rather than features and benefits. Sometimes it’s taken to extremes – haulage companies offer “logistics solutions”. And most of us smile wryly when we see Waste Management Solutions emblazoned on the back of a vehicle. Continue reading
Going the Extra Mile for Customers: When It’s Good Business, When It’s Bad by Patrick Del Rosario
The Customer Is ALWAYS Right
With few exceptions, the statement above is nearly always the case for anybody who offers goods or services to another, especially in a retail environment. However, the case may not always be the truth – customers are often wrong – but pointing that out, or proving it, is not worth the fight considering the cost to your business and the wear and tear on your mental health. Continue reading
B2B CUSTOMER SURVEYS TOP 10 CATEGORIES AND QUESTIONS
Over the years, we here at InfoQuest have found that our clients sometimes find it difficult to determine the best way to structure a survey given such a wide variety of available choices. While you have total flexibility in determining the overall content and direction of the survey, some clients have found the information below to be helpful. It is a composite of the ten most commonly chosen question sets used by clients over the past few years. Remember as you review it that this is merely a possibility for a starting point. The actual final content is entirely up to you.
Selecting the right model for your B2B loyalty initiative – by Peter Clark guest post
Business to business loyalty programmes and incentive schemes seem, on first consideration, to be a great idea: a way of encouraging one business to continue doing business with another. But they also come with their own pitfalls that don’t occur in consumer-based loyalty programmes. For example:
1. Is it ethical to reward a client’s employees to make decisions based on personal gain?
2. Who should be rewarded: the business owner, management, employees, the business itself, or all?
3. Is the person who gets the benefits always the one who makes the actual purchase decisions?
Building a relationship with your customers online – by Adrian Flux guest post
The internet has become an integral part of our lives. We use it for our work, we use it to keep in touch with friends, to find information or to just while away the hours. Gone are the days of slow dial-up connections and low-quality websites. With the rise of social media, sites like Facebook and Twitter have enabled people, and businesses, to interact and share content, stories and opinions.
Today’s internet culture means that businesses have to be savvier than they have been in the past. They need to build long-lasting and sustainable relationships – and this can be hard if you sell products which don’t exactly set the world on fire!
Response rates for satisfaction surveys
I want to ask a question about survey response rates in B2B. No one else seems to want to talk about them, which makes me feel that this is the elephant in the room.
B2B or B2C?
Can we puhlease start to differentiate between B2C customer satisfaction and B2B satisfaction?
It’s driving me crazy.
What’s the real issue
Yesterday I had a call from a client saying they were going to postpone their survey for at least 6 months.
I’ve been working with the client for a few months now. They have chosen their questions, and were busy collecting the contact details for their international customer base. My contact said that he had asked the key account managers (kams) to identify their most important customers and had then seen internal e-mails between the kams saying it was a stupid idea doing a survey when “everyone” knew that the big issue was on-time delivery.
Treating customers as individuals
I have just come back from running one of our full-day post-survey workshops with an international IT firm. It was an excellent session. The results weren’t good, but the team came up with a bunch of ideas, which were prioritised so that the low-cost quick-wins came first. But the best part of the session (for me, anyway) was the change in attitude of the CEO as the day progressed. Early on he was asking about statistics and benchmarking (and so were some of the directors). Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got nothing against statistics and benchmarking in their right place. But here we had a company that has just over one hundred clients with, at most, two or three key contacts at each – that to me is a 250 person Christmas card list.
