B2B Customer Engagement: How To Improve It?
According to Gallup, fully engaged B2B customers can bring you a 23% bigger profit than regular clients. But only 13% are known to be fully engaged. Customer engagement depends on the emotional connection that exists or doesn’t exit between you and your clients and can be improved if you know what works for you.
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.
When not to run a satisfaction survey
Last week a young man called from our telecomms provider, introducing himself as our account manager. He already had my email address and said that he would be sending over his contact details together with news about how they [the telecomms provider] from now on would be checking our bill every month to make sure that we were on the best tariff. He also enquired about our land lines (supplied by another firm) and said that he’d put a bid together to win that business from us, and would ring back on Friday.
I’d been satisfied with the service we’d been getting, but this young man had just raised the bar; he’d set new expectations and I was, if not “excited”, at least interested.
What happened then? Continue reading
Budgeting for a customer satisfaction survey
Over the last couple of months a lot of people have been talking about budgets. Either they are just doing them or they’ve just done them for 2012. My first reaction is, when we don’t know what is happening to the economy from week to week, how on earth can you predict [and plan for] things that are up to a year away. My second reaction is, if the all important GDP and inflation figures are changing by nought point something of a percentage point, then ninety-nine percent is unchanged and totally predictable. Then a thought comes to mind about issues much closer to home and, naturally, closer to my heart; what about if they are budgeting for a customer satisfaction survey.
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.
First of all, please let me make some assumptions about the market we’re in. Continue reading
B2B or B2C?
Can we puhlease start to differentiate between B2C customer satisfaction and B2B satisfaction?
It’s driving me crazy.
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.
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