The better you plan your B2B customer satisfaction survey, the more you'll get out of it. Done properly, the survey should be a significant source of additional revenue rather than a chore.

1. Acting on the Feedback

If you have to conduct a survey because your quality standards say that you have to, or any other outside influence is telling you to and you feel that, maybe, your company, your organization, is lacking the commitment to make any changes, then consider running an in-house paper-based survey. This way, your customers won't expect any commitment from you, and they won't feel let down when nothing happens.

If, however, your company wants to hear from those important clients and it has the drive to make changes based on the feedback and wants to grow, then please read on and use this checklist. Remember, the better you prepare for your customer satisfaction survey, the more you'll get out of it.

2. Choosing Who You Want to Hear From

You are in B2B, right? You have an ongoing relationship with your customers who buy from you over and over again. You might have one or some large customers with lots of contact points—not just someone in Purchasing, but also Design Engineers, Production Engineers, Operations Directors, Logistics Managers, Supply Chain Directors—decision-makers as well as key influencers.

You have salespeople who need to be involved in the selection of who you want to hear from. If they are not involved, they could feel left out at a critical stage—and, after all, the feedback is designed to help them sell more. But don't let them choose just their friends (those they play golf with), because that's not the point.

Don't choose non-customers. A sales director recently talked about customers that his firm had never sold to. They are suspects or prospects, but not customers. Their perception of your internal systems, disciplines, and procedures is not right for this sort of customer satisfaction survey. Include only your customers.

3. Attributable Feedback

You're going to target your most important customers. Now make sure that you'll find out who said what.

In B2B, people buy from people. Different people (firms) have different needs—it's not a one-size-fits-all—and finding out from an anonymous survey that just one person wants something to be changed is quite different from finding out that your most profitable customer has a personality clash with the key account manager that has been assigned to look after them.

Most survey firms belong to the Market Research Society or ESOMAR (the European equivalent). Those societies have a code of conduct that prohibits the unauthorized attribution of feedback. Work with a firm that can provide attribution.

4. Questions

Some argue that you need to ask only one question: the Net Promoter Score. However, a single NPS score can often be very frustrating for an operations person who is looking for levers to pull. It's like saying "the train is running late," without any other feedback. Did it set off late? Is there a problem with the track or the engine? Was the driver given the wrong set of instructions? Is it because of the weather? Has the train taken the wrong route? Or is your expectation of when the train should arrive misguided?

You need '"useful" rather than "interesting" feedback, so you need to drill down, ask as many questions as possible (PDF).

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10-Step B2B Customer Satisfaction Survey Pre-Survey Checklist

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of John Coldwell

John Coldwell has been the UK managing director of InfoQuest since 2000. He has run post-survey workshops for clients in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, including Russia and China.

LinkedIn: John Coldwell