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Gathering B2B customer feedback

2 min read
With transactions in B2B often involving many different contacts from within the same organisation, you need to give careful thought to who you want to give you feedback.


Try adopting a personalised approach, using the existing relationships you have with key customers to help drive participation and increase your sample size.

Learn more about customer feedback

Contacting customers

  • Create a respondent map for each customer organisation and create rules around when each should be contacted
  • Target survey requests very carefully to ensure that the right individuals are being asked to participate
  • Make the feedback experience feel as personalised to each individual as possible – the less generic the research feels to the respondent the better
  • Leverage the entire account team (sales, customer support, etc) to optimise contacts
  • It is better to use more but smaller and very targeted surveys than larger more general surveys

Survey frequency

  • Do not over-survey your customers or they may feel spammed and stop responding
  • Generally only assess the relationship 1-2 times per year
  • Create contact frequency rules to not send transactional survey invitations to any given customer email address more than once per month

Response rates

  • Focus on achieving the response rate that minimises nonresponse bias – this requires measuring possible nonresponse bias on key individual metrics
  • Make the survey request salient to the customer by highlighting the value of the research to their experience
  • Work with the customer in advance to assure response and send a pre-notification

Blinding surveys

  • Avoid blinding (anonymising) surveys in B2B
  • In some contexts it may be worth having a blinded feedback form on a website, but in general you will always want to be able to identify which customer provided the feedback in case it is necessary to close the loop with them

Incentivisation

  • Incentivise internally based on survey response rates or closing the loop
  • Do not use monetary incentives with B2B customers
  • To add value to their participation, consider providing a report back to respondents about the data collected and actions taken by your organisation as a result (e.g. “We closed the loop with 100% of dissatisfied customers and implemented process improvements x, y, and z.”)

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