My mother died in December and I’m an executor. In order that the estate can be settled I need to be granted an “order of probate” by Her Majesty’s Court – Probate division.

For this I went to the Probate office in Leeds for a 10-minute meeting (cost of probate – £70) where all I had to do was sign a statement and swear an oath.

The statement was simple – less than a page long. Now, I’m not thick, but there were two paragraphs on this statement that I didn’t understand and I asked the clerk to explain them to me, which she did.

Haven’t we had a Plain English Campaign running in this country for years and years? And how many thousands of people sign the same declaration up and down the country every week without really understanding it?

Then I had the cheek to ask for a photocopy of what I’d just signed – oh no, that wasn’t possible!

Then I was handed a copy of the New Testament and asked to read an oath. Not being particularly religious (and ignoring the assumption made by the clerk that the New Testament would be OK) I asked if I could simply affirm.

The clerk then made handwritten changes to the statement I had made, to the effect that I was affirming and not swearing an oath.

Then I was given the script I had to read aloud in order to make the said affirmation. In it it referred to my handwriting (this document, in my handwriting blah blah). The damned thing was typed. I had signed it, but it was her handwriting for the amendments and not mine – so I ad lib ‘ed when I read it out and that got the clerk cross. She insisted that I had to lie; otherwise I couldn’t get probate (I think, technically, this could be called blackmail).

One question is, why is the system so sloppy and rotten? Another question is, is it just me?

John Coldwell

www.infoquestcrm.co.uk

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? Well, actually, nothing happened. I don’t even remember his name, so I can’t even call back. And I’m disappointed.

You could plot my emotions and subsequent satisfaction levels on a chart.

This young man has been employed, probably a no small cost, to do a job. And the net outcome is the reverse of that objective.

Which brings me on to B2B customer satisfaction surveys.

If you are planning to carry out a customer satisfaction survey just stop for a minute. Think about what you and your senior team (yes, everyone; from finance, operations, logistics and technical support as well as sales and customer service) are going to do afterwards. Is this just an exercise, something that needs to be done in order to get a tick in the box for your Quality Assurance Certificate? Or a “good idea” that has come down from the parent company? And do you feel that your company is lacking the wherewithal, the resources and the driving ambition to do something once the results come in?

Please be honest about this. If the answer is “Yes” then please, don’t do a survey.

If you do run a survey then you are raising the bar with your customers – setting an expectation that you will listen to them and then act on their feedback. Once you’ve set the expectation then the result will never be neutral, and doing nothing on the back of the feedback will have a negative impact on your satisfaction levels which, in turn, will impact your top and bottom lines.

The micro view (do I sound like an economist?) is – are we getting their business? But it is the macro view that is more important – that is, will we be getting their repeat business over the coming years?

To achieve this, the customer satisfaction survey must be a success. For it to be a success the client needs to get a return on their investment. And to get that return, the client needs to Do Something With The Results.

Yes, I know it’s blindingly obvious. But dear reader, if it was so obvious, why do so many companies fail to fully follow through?

Here at InfoQuest we try our hardest to point clients in the right direction and give them a good push. We run full-day post-survey workshops with the client’s senior team. They develop an action plan, based on their customers’ feedback; prioritised to give quick wins and put together so that it fits any best-in-class continuous improvement culture.

But all our clients need to budget [or, if you prefer, plan] for some time and effort for that follow-through. If you want to get closer to your customers, if you want to optimise those relationships, if you want to sell more and reduce customer churn, then you are going to have to do some things differently. You will have to plan, implement and manage changes to your systems, disciplines, procedures and people – and that doesn’t happen by magic. Granted, there will be some things that you are currently doing that, based on the customer feedback, you might be able to stop doing – thereby releasing spare capacity of time, effort and money. But don’t bank on that Godsend outweighing the other issues.

So, if you are currently involved in budgeting and, by chance, are also thinking about running a customer satisfaction survey next year, please plan for some stuff to happen afterwards!

p.s. There is a 2-page pdf which looks at the Post Survey Workshop and a copy of our Brainstorm Scorer that we use to help prioritise the actions arising from those workshops available on our Downloads page at www.infoquestcrm.co.uk.

Good luck!

First of all, please let me make some assumptions about the market we’re in.

• Most organisations that I come across in B2B have only a limited number of customers.

• Most organisations agree that having good long-term relationships with their customers is essential to the welfare of their business.

• Most organisations have some form of key account management going on – perhaps using sales reps or agents or distributors, perhaps using lots of levels within the organisation to interact seamlessly with customers.

• Most organisations have an 80:20 customer profile (see Choosing the Most Important Customers on the Downloads page – www.infoquestcrm.co.uk).

• Many organisations do not have activity based costing (ABC) and can only make assumptions about which customers are their most profitable (again, see the chart from the link above).

• However, most organisations, with a bit of help, can identify their most important customers, as a mixture of largest revenue, most profitable and greatest potential.

So why would any B2B organisation be satisfied with, and make strategic decisions based on the feedback from, a customer survey where the response rate was less that 50%?

This year I wanted to drum up some business, and so we sent out three e-shots with a bunch of hooks – Do you need to conduct a customer satisfaction survey in the next few months? Would you like to get a higher response rate? Would you like to get more from the results? That sort of thing. I’d been told that the average “open” rate – where people open the e-mail and read it – would be ten percent. What was of greater interest to me was the quantity of “click throughs” – people coming to our website. We tracked these in real time on the days that the emails went out, and the results were dire.

So, when the lady from the marketing magazine called me, I made sure that I conducted the due diligence properly. I asked for a copy of the magazine to be sent to me and on Friday afternoon rang three of the advertisers. The three I picked were all in market research but not competitors – as it happens they were either offering omnibus surveys (where people will be asked their opinions on a range of subjects, from pet care to hair care, with clients sharing the overall cost of the research) or children’s surveys.

My survey of the surveyors was conclusive. One said that they’d had no benefits and were going to cancel (they’d signed up to twelve weeks of advertising), one said that, over the years they’d had the occasional enquiry and the third said that they only did it for brand visibility.

This got me thinking again. I’ve had a discussion running on LinkedIn as to whether marketing directors are interested in Return on Investment and whether I’d made a mistake in pushing our 10:1 r.o.i. guarantee (you can see the fabulous feedback that I got at http://linkd.in/cSUVzq). The folks at the agency who designed the e-shots and mailed them out for me were terribly laid back about the [what to me were] appalling results. And the three advertisers who’d had no enquiries from their adverts were equally laid back. Both the buyers and the sellers of advertising / marketing appear to have such low expectations.

My background, prior to joining InfoQuest ten years ago, was fifteen years as a management consultant specialising in change and cost-reduction. We had to hit the ground running. The results of our efforts were being measured within weeks of a project starting. We were often in a situation of having to turn round the fortunes of a business. It was all about the bottom line. Lost opportunity was measured when a particular initiative was late in starting by just a few days. I fell in love with InfoQuest because it affected the top line and didn’t mean “people off the payroll”. Over the years I saw that InfoQuest delivered time after time, particularly when we ran the powerful top-team post-survey workshops (at one recent workshop, for a company that manufactures rubber hoses for diesel engines, my client’s top-team ended the day with 165 ideas, based on the feedback we’d got for them, for how the company could increase it’s profitable sales). So much so that I wanted to share the benefits and eliminate the risks for potential clients – and introduced the money-back guarantee.

There is an old saying that if something looks too good to be true then it probably is. And if marketing people are so used to their efforts being wasted (or is it wasteful) then perhaps our guarantee is actually frightening them off?

By the way, please feel free to contribute to the discussion on LinkedIn, or call me on 01484 868395 (+44 14 84 86 83 95 outside the UK) and I’ll be delighted to talk you through any questions you might have.

John Coldwell

It’s driving me crazy.

B2C is about buying a motorcar or a bar of chocolate or some music. It might be about you having the condition of your teeth checked or even having a tonsillectomy. These are all experiences, judged on the point of sale and the subsequent delivery of the product or service. Highly developed, high-volume experiences lead to brand value – BMW; Nestle; I-Tunes. B2C is where the money that is already on the table gets shuffled around and redistributed.

B2B is about buying raw materials and components, capital goods and long-term services such as buildings management and financial audits. These are all ongoing relationships, built on trust, mutual support and mutual benefit. In most cases the goal is “partnering”. The value of these relationships is measured as “good will” on the balance sheet. B2B is the wealth creation of this world.

B2C is about the EXPERIENCE. B2B is about the RELATIONSHIP.

There is a third sector, which is smaller than the B2B and B2C segments but nevertheless significant, that revolves around project-based work. Examples would be law (on a case-by-case basis), management consultancy (where you are only as good as your last project), and building and civil engineering (“oh look – it’s a different ring master but the same old clowns”).

InfoQuest has always been about B2B. We will happily turn away business that does not fit the B2B profile.

With enquiries for B2C customer satisfaction surveys, my response is always the same: make sure the senior managers (managing directors, chief executives and others) are leaving their desks and watching and listening to their customers at the point of sale (preferably anonymously, although wearing a disguise is optional) at least weekly before they even think about employing an outside firm. Dame Mary Perkins, the owner of Europe’s most successful opticians, Specsavers, regularly goes incognito visiting her shops and employs an army of mystery shoppers. Sir Philip Green, boss of Arcadia and Britain’s 9th richest person, will go and talk to shoppers asking them what they like and what they don’t like.

The advice for project-based organisations is straightforward. The project manager and the client should have a regular Friday This Week / Next Week meeting to discuss what happened this week, what is planned for next week (commitments), put it in writing immediately and both parties sign it off. It’s not foolproof, but it ensures communication and goes some way towards partnering.

For B2B customer satisfaction surveys the client needs to be measuring the relationships they have with their most important customers. They need to be drilling down into that relationship, listening to both the decision-makers and the key influencers; treating people as people and individuals individually, with different wants, different needs and different personalities. And, above all, aiming to get a minimum 50% response rate to any survey or feedback mechanism for it to be anything like reliable.

Ten years ago I made the decision to launch InfoQuest in the UK at the CRM Show. InfoQuest had been around in the U.S. for eleven years and had had some exposure in the UK but no actual launch. It was a big mistake using the CRM Show (and we’ve still got the InfoQuest Customer Relationship Management Limited official moniker – another early mistake). Oracle and Siebel were about to take the world by storm with their CRM solutions and nowadays everyone naturally associates CRM or customer relationship management with big, powerful databases that record and plan customer interactions – what they sell should, in my mind, be referred to as Customer Interaction Management, but I guess its not so catchy. We were the only non-techy stand at the 3-day show and the IT managers and Chief Technology Officers just walked past. Oh well, happy days.

But please, can the researchers and the governments and the marketing professors and the business journalists of this world understand, accept and make the differentiation between B2B and B2C?

John Coldwell

Last week on Twitter I tweeted that I: -

Would love to publish a list of Managing Directors who have told us they are not interested in customer feedback. Anyone want to buy a list?

Although the Tweet was a joke, in my mind the two events are inextricably linked.

If I’d got loads of spare cash lying around the house (which, by the way dear Mr Burglar, I haven’t) then I’d use the following criteria for investments: -

• InfoQuest had conducted the survey on the organisations most important customers.

• The results had come back showing that the organisation average levels of customer satisfaction ± 15%.

• In the post-survey workshop the senior team had come up with at least 50 original ideas, based on the feedback we’d given them, for increasing the organisations profitability.

• And I’d been impressed by the professionalism of the senior team and felt convinced that they would be capable of pushing through many of those ideas in a prioritised action plan in a relatively short time frame.

I’d be screaming “Buy, buy, buy!” for shares in those organisations and feeling happy that we’d offered them a 10:1 return on investment prior to the survey.

The corollary is that every time I hear a director, chief executive or vice president tell me or my staff that they are not interested in customer satisfaction surveys I immediately think “Sell, sell, sell!”

We had carried out an international customer satisfaction survey on three continents in five languages for this firm and had got responses back from more than 72% – 143 responses from 200 surveys that had gone out.

I asked the CEO directly, how many of the customers he knew.  He started going through the list (we have a chart of who responded; and another which lists out the serious issues, by customer; and in yet another section of the report we produce a page for each and every respondent, in alphabetical order).  The first one he’d spoken to a couple of times.  On the second one, he asked if e-mails counted (yes, of course).  He denied knowing the third customer on the list at which point both of the people on either side of him said in unison “you do” (which was very funny to watch and got the debate going).

My point was that we were talking about people, not segments or statistics.  And benchmarks can be a HUGE distraction.  Forget about how you compare with ABC or XYZ – the best companies that are at the top of their game focus on long-term continuous improvement.  Or, as I call it, the Toyota mountain of a thousand little ideas.

By the end of the workshop my new best friend the CEO was setting a target for the overall satisfaction question – “On an overall basis, how satisfied are you with our company?” (this question has been included in every single survey that InfoQuest has conducted since 1989 and it is always posed last – it’s the last card in the deck, so it gets a very considered response, as the responder has already been through up to 59 other questions and statements about the business relationship of the two entities).  The directors and senior managers (15 of them) were balking at the target being proposed by the CEO.  The CEO was talking about a 20 percentage point increase by the time they repeated the survey next year.  His team said that was too tough and it should be reduced.  Then he came out with a marvellous statement.

The CEO said that to get the 20 percentage point increase they simply had to move 30 individuals who were currently “somewhat satisfied” into being “totally satisfied”, adding the magic “That’s just two contacts for each person sitting round this table.  Who’s telling me that we can’t do that?”

I’ve had clients that have segmented their customers between desktop and mainframe applications; those that have received consultancy in the past year and those that haven’t; new customers versus legacy customers; Gold, Silver and Bronze customers (whatever the hell they are); and those where there is between 12 and 24 months of a service contract left to run.  These segments are all useful to an extent (well, nearly all) in that they provide labels that my client is comfortable with.  But in business to business, where there aren’t that many customers and they all need and want slightly different things, please just treat them as individuals!

Among the reasons are:

To Avoid Preventable Losses

There are three operating areas in which most customers will openly express displeasure if you fail to perform to expectations – price, quality and on-time delivery. The problem is, there are dozens, sometimes hundreds of additional touch-points in the average business to business relationship in which customers tend to bottle up displeasure. Sales rep performance, tech support, customer service in its many and varied forms, finance administration, all means and manner of communication, placing orders, processing returns – it can be a long list.

The Forum Corporation of America analyzed the causes of customer
migration in 14 major manufacturing and service companies and found that 15 percent migrated because of quality issues, and another 15 percent changed supplier because of price issues. The remainder, 70 percent, moved on because “they didn’t like the human side of doing business with the prior provider of the product or service”.

Tom Peters, The Pursuit of Wow

And as if that’s not bad enough, they don’t “just” leave. Additional studies have consistently determined that the typical dissatisfied customer will also end up telling 8-10 people about their problem or experience.

The good news is, seven of ten complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favour.

The bad news is, for every customer complaint that you hear, there will be, on average, 27 others that will never be brought to your attention. Stated another way, roughly 96% of customer complaints will never be openly voiced.

Why do so many successful companies employ customer satisfaction survey programmes?

Among the reasons are:

To Drive Continuous Improvement

An old truism says that it’s far easier for great service to overcome a second-rate product than it is for a great product to overcome second-rate service. Within that realm is a simple reality that many
business operators fail to recognize:

Your customers know your company’s strengths and weaknesses, and they usually know them better than you do.

They know what it’s like to buy your products and services, from placing an order to having it delivered. They know how well you solve problems.

They know how responsive you are to questions or special needs.

They know if you make it easy to conduct business with you, or if it’s a painful process that’s riddled with red tape. They know if your employees are competent and courteous.

They know if you keep promises or return phone calls.

They know if you value their business, and show it to them, or if they are just taken for granted. They know if your products or services represent value for the money, and they know why or why not.

And…….if that’s not enough…..

Customers can be the best source of innovative new ideas. Throughout history, in all sectors, it’s often customers who come up with new ideas for improving an old product or launching a new one.

Why do so many successful companies employ customer
satisfaction survey programmes?

Among the reasons are:

To Build Market Share

The economics of customer satisfaction speak for themselves.

Industry studies.

“Totally Satisfied” customers have a repurchase rate that is 3 to 10 times higher than that of “Somewhat Satisfied” customers. This is documented by research at Xerox and in other in

“All or nothing: Customers must be ‘Totally Satisfied“ Steve Lewis, Marketing News. Chicago: Mar 2, 1998. Vol. 32, Iss. 5; pg. 11.

“Its “Totally Satisfied” customers were six times more likely to repurchase Xerox products over the next 18 months than its “satisfied” customers.

Why Satisfied Customers Defect. By: Jones, Thomas O.; Sasser Jr., W., Harvard Business Review, Nov/Dec95, Vol. 73 Issue 6, p88, 14p

“The relationship between satisfaction and actual share-of-wallet in a business-to-business environment is not only a positive relationship but the relationship is nonlinear, with the greatest positive impact occurring at the upper extreme of satisfaction levels.”

Timothy L Keiningham, Tiffany Perkins-Munn, Heather Evans, Journal of Service Research : JSR. Thousand Oaks: Aug 2003. Vol.
6, Issue. 1; pg. 37

“By examining contract renewal rates (Johnson Controls) found a one point increase in the overall satisfaction score was worth a $13 million increase in service contract renewals annually.”

American Society For Quality, February 2003

“IBM Rochester determined that if customer satisfaction levels increased one percentage point, an additional $257 million in additional revenue would be generated over five years. The ratio of revenue growth between very satisfied and satisfied customers was 3:1.”

American Society For Quality, February 2003

And, of course, the old adage that we’ve all heard and lived by for years. It costs six times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an old one.

Why do so many successful companies employ customer
satisfaction survey programmes?

Among the reasons are:

To Create Checks and Balances

Various studies performed over the years, beginning with one conducted by Xerox in the early 90’s, have consistently shown that a Totally Satisfied customer is, on average, 3-10 times more likely to buy from you again than a customer who is merely Somewhat Satisfied.

Later studies conducted by InfoQuest took those findings a step further with development of a statistical model which determined that the financial relationship between customer satisfaction and revenues is both measurable and predictable. It found that, over time

• A Totally Satisfied Customer contributes 2.6 times as much revenue
  to a company as a Somewhat Satisfied Customer.
  A Totally Satisfied Customer contributes 14 times as much revenue
  as a Somewhat Dissatisfied Customer.
  A Totally Dissatisfied Customer decreases revenue at a rate equal to twice what a Totally Satisfied Customer contributes to a business.
• That last finding is particularly noteworthy in that it highlights that you can have twice as many satisfied customers as dissatisfied customers and still be losing ground.

What it all means in terms of revenue is simple. Maximizing business performance means doing everything possible to:

1. Turn Dissatisfied customers into Somewhat Satisfied customers.
2. Turn Somewhat Satisfied customers into Totally Satisfied customers.
3. Avoid undoing anything with customers who are already Totally Satisfied.
And that’s where the checks and balances come into play.
Do key decision-makers in your company know which of your top accounts is dissatisfied, and why?

Are priorities and initiatives aimed at improving customer satisfaction systemically known, universally pursued and routinely measured?

Is everyone in the company, all departments at all levels, hearing and focusing on the same things?

When your team looks at your business, do they see the same things your customers see? Do they know what your customers see?

Does everyone understand who your top accounts are and what needs to be done to keep them?

Fundamental questions, right? Yet in many companies, purely informal means are employed to try to maintain a sense of customer needs. Using a combination of in-house metrics, anecdotal field tales, passive data collection and an abundance of hindsight, they wage a valiant attempt to keep their fingers on the pulse of customer sentiments, often collecting information with one hand and fighting fires with the other.

Of course, bad news does not travel up the corporate hierarchy very well, and the vast majority of customer complaints are never openly voiced, which means that informal means are rather like estimating the depth of the ocean by looking at the surface. Add in the effects of
preconceived notions, wishful thinking, attitudinal biases and even the occasionally fragile corporate ego and…….. ……well, good luck.

So customer satisfaction surveys have been developed and adopted to fill the knowledge void.

Which leads to the next challenge. Not all customer satisfaction surveys are created equal, so how does one go about finding the one that will best meet your needs?