Budgeting for a B2B Customer Satisfaction Survey
If you were going to put a customer satisfaction survey into your budget, where should it go? Who should be responsible for spending the money?
Quality might be a good place if you’ve got ISO9000 or TS16949. Those of us who’ve been around long enough know that Tom Peters was right when he said that quality always pays. The cost of rework and re-calls, mistakes and errors have cost many companies the ultimate price. And it is a huge mistake to conduct the wrong sort of survey.
What do I mean by ‘the wrong sort of survey’?
You are in B2B. You have Key Account Managers. You don’t have huge numbers of customers and your customers all have different needs and wants.
Initiating a web-based survey, such as Survey Monkey, would be wrong because the response rate would be too low.
Using someone who belongs to the Market Research Society or ESOMAR, no matter how nice a person they are, would be wrong because they wouldn’t be able to tell you who said what. And if you don’t have attributed feedback then you cannot look after your customers’ individual needs.
And the Net Promoter Score is wrong on many levels. It groups all the responses together. You don’t have a point of sale which is auditable. It doesn’t drill down. And you can’t do anything useful with the results.
Marketing is the usual place to put a B2B customer satisfaction survey. Marketing has been described as the art of preparing the customer to buy. However, marketing’s primary role is to produce a profit; and the raison d’etre for every B2B customer satisfaction survey should be to increase profitable sales.