Keeping your customers engaged

Did you know that 95% of potential customers visit your website and, of these, as many as 70% of them will eventually purchase from you or your rivals? These days B2B customers tend not to place orders straight away, so keeping them interested in your brand until they finally do buy should be your top priority. This includes providing them with timely relevant information in the form of newsletters, blog posts, videos, eBooks etc.

Talking to customers in social networks

Your customer engagement campaign should also be based on the findings of customer satisfaction surveys carried out among your existing customers. In a recent study involving a dozen industries, almost 60% of B2B customers complained about the absence of social media communication with vendors and over 30% said their impression of the business would have been better if they had used Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as engagement means.

For information on CRM tactics, B2B customer engagement and digital body language, join the first B2B Marketing Summit on June 14. All in all, there will be 4 major topics covered at the summit, such as content marketing, data insight, social media and lead nurturing. Detailed event information is available from www.b2bmarketing.net/summit2012

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.

Now I’ve had this before with other clients, and sometimes the delivery issue has affected just a small number of customers, is specific to one or two products, and the problem is well on its way to being sorted.  In which case my advice is to recognise the problem in the letter that goes out to those customers that are affected and confirm that corrective action has been taken.  And carry on with the survey.

However, in this case my contact explained that there were already discussions in LinkedIn forums about my client’s ability to deliver product on time.  Now that is public.  And my advice in this situation is to fix the obvious first, and, only when it is fixed, conduct the survey later.

What do you think?

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%?

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?

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!