Gathering B2B customer 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.”)