My 7 "Rules" For B2B Customer Surveys

Being in the business of selling, supporting and using web survey tools mostly for supporting customer surveys, I’ve seen hundreds of them. I’ve found that customer surveys and particularly B2B surveys need to be clear, concise and sensitive to the customer’s time. So, I’ve developed a set of “rules” that I try to follow when helping my customers with their customer surveys.

Rule #1 – Clearly define the objective for the survey

Many customer surveys I've run across have multiple (and sometimes conflicting) objectives. This happens a lot to businesses that survey their customers just once a year. In this situation, the customer survey ends up being everybody's vehicle for capturing "something". In the end it often results in too many questions, low response and completion rates, unclear follow-up actions and ultimately, annoyed customers who don't want to take your surveys.

So, I always try to define the “one critical data point” the survey must develop. And, only ask questions that provide qualification to that one data point. If that task can be achieved with less than 10 questions, secondary – but related - topics can be introduced.

A survey methodology that does this well is the net promoter method developed by Fred Reicheld. What I like about net promoter is it's based on one question - "How likely are you to recommend [company] to your family and friends". Other questions in a net promoter survey are designed to qualify responses to the "recommend" question. Done well, net promoter surveys are short and take less than a couple of minutes, while also providing insights, clearly interpretable data and clear follow up actions that have a purpose (enhance relationship quality).

Rule #2: Survey customers regularly.

It may seem counterintuitive where people complain about getting too many surveys. Yet, I think people mainly complain about "bad" surveys (i.e. too long, irrelevant questions, etc.). If you get a reputation as a "bad" surveyor, your response rates will be low. And, "opt outs" will be high. But, if your customer surveys are well done, i.e. short, easy to complete and always followed-up, your customers will interact with you in relatively high numbers even in quarterly surveys.

Rule #3: Always keep surveys short.

Personally, I don’t like to ever ask more than 10 – 15 questions in a customer survey.  And I try to avoid long matrix type questions. If you are using a regular survey process, after asking your 10 core questions you can ask some secondary related questions.  In a quarterly feedback process different sets of secondary questions can be rotated into the questionnaire.

Rule #4: Only send surveys to those people who can give you the data you need.

Blasting a survey to people who can’t give you the information you need just guarantees that you’ll annoy most of them.

Rule #5: Always act on each customer's survey response at an individual level

Acting on survey responses is critical. Customers take their valuable time to give you feedback. You have an obligation to tell them what, if anything, you are doing in response to it. Not following up tells customers there’s no point to giving you future feedback.

Rule #6: Avoid irrelevant questions at all costs.

A common mistake: Asking a purchasing contact to evaluate a product's technical capabilities. It happens all the time, but shouldn’t. And, it’s to be avoided wherever possible. It makes you look bad when it happens. After all, a customer almost always has to provide some level of documentation about who he is, where he’s located, what he does for the company, etc. If multiple roles are being surveyed, use question branching, data piping or question routing to only present relevant questions to those people. Most good feedback management systems support question branching, routing and piping. So, there’s no reason not to use those capabilities.

Rule #7: Never ask a customer a question you already have the answer to.

It amazes me how often I’m asked in surveys for data that I’ve supplied to the company many times in the past. I hate doing it each and every time. I feel that whoever built the survey was too lazy to look up relevant information about me. And worse, was willing to waste my time getting the information again. So, when a survey crosses my desk where I’m asked “dumb” questions like what’s my name, what products do I have, how long I’ve been a customer or the like, I simply terminate the survey.

More importantly, it's not considerate of a customer's time to ask questions you should have the answers to. Think about this. You are asking your customer to use his time to give you information that you could have used your time to develop.

I help businesses with customer surveys all the time.  If you'd like help with a survey project you're planning, please feel free to ask me for advice.  

My e-mail is: stew.nash2010@gmail.com
I use QuestBack for my survey projects. 

Action Management & Tracking Survey Results Available

I've been running a non-scientific survey (see sidebar) targeted at people who use customer feedback processes and also CRM systems. Additionally, I've been collecting information via LinkedIn posts and conversations with serious practitioners of Voice of the Customer (VOC) processes.  To get survey results just click here: http://www.nash-efm-consult.com/Action_Tracking_and_Management_Survey_Results.pdf

I've found that most companies that employ feedback management systems and a case management approach have two challenges. One is verifying that follow-up occurred - and was in some way effective (i.e. contributory to boosting NPS, CSAT or other metric). Second, is evaluating at a higher level the types of issues that are being responded to by front line people and, of course, creating strategy or higher level actions (and then communicating them) that are the "real" organizational response.

I found that a large minority of organizations (48%) don't get much value from their Alert processes. This finding bothered me because 52% report receiveing significant value and 75% report that Action Management & Tracking are very important to the success of their customer feedback initiatives.  So, I think this number shows one of a variety of possible issues, including (but not limited to):

• Taking follow up actions is too resource intensive to justify
• Follow up actions aren't perceived as effective (possibly because people aren't empowered to fix issues), so aren't being pursued.
• The Action Management process isn't well supported by tools (CFM tools un-integrated with CRM?)
• Others?

And another issue that I think should get looked into, but I don't think often does is: Staff perceptions of their follow up tasking. i.e. Do Account Managers and Support people provide:

- mostly lip service when doing survey follow up
- solve real issues that benefit the business
- feel that they are provided with the tools and resources to "add value" for customers

I think companies need a metric that reflects the employees perception of the enterprise's effectiveness at dealing with / acting on customer feedback. I think it could be quite useful to be able to gauge that sentiment on feedback "response effectiveness" as compared to CSAT or NPS.

Some of the issues with Action Management and Tracking can be dealt with by using surveys to revisit feedback customers provided 30 or 60 days earlier.  And, by surveying the employees periodically (quarterly?) on "response effectiveness" of their actions.  

Issues with Managing Actions on Customer Feedback

I've been posting recently on "Customer Feedback Action Management".  My thought is that by better managing feedback based actions, enterprises can do a better job of "Closing-The-Loop" with customers.
What I've found in discussion forums, personal contacts with experts in the VOC field, my survey on the subject and my personal experience is that the "Managed Alert" process that most companies use is really insufficient to ensure that the feedback loop gets effectively closed. And, that the managed alert is more of a beginning of the action management process rather than a process unto itself.

To be sure, certain types of feedback can be effectively managed using a CRM case management based process. Examples are product or service complaints, low satisfaction or loyalty scores, expressions of desire for more products/services, etc. Things that are, by definition, resolvable by front-line (Sales, Support, Administration) or near front-line staff (their management). These staff tend to be daily users of the CRM platform and are able to incorporate "managed alerts" follow-up into their daily activities.

Where the CRM based process seems to break down is when loop-closing requires input from non-front line parts of the business. Some examples might be contract terms the customer doesn't like but which the finance department insists upon. Who closes that loop? And how? Other examples: Product capabilities desired but not yet available, Needs for services that aren't offered, needs for solution integration or partnering with other entities. These are issues that require a management decision or action and that take time to implement and communicate back to the customer. But, in truth this type of feedback occurs regularly yet is hard to pull together and act upon. And, these are just some examples which I can think of or have heard of. I'm sure there are others.

One of things I'm finding in my research is that in addition to the hard-to-manage feedback I've talked about, a percentage of "alerts" that get entered as "closed cases" are improperly "closed".  Another is determining if the action taken, and which "closed" the case, actually had an impact on the customer who provided the feedback.

A couple of thoughts occurred to me about how to validate the effectiveness of "loop-closing" activities.

My first thought was, why not simply re-survey everyone who responded to the original survey? As it happens, some advanced organizations already do this. It seems to me that asking a couple (2-3) of follow-up questions within 30 days of a survey being responded to would be a good idea. Especially for certain categories of feedback like: service or billing problems or expressed need for more or updated products/services, but in just in general to get a sense from customers about their perception on the effectiveness of loop-closing actions.

My second thought was why not survey the employees who are assigned loop closing actions to see how they perceive its effectiveness. It seems to me that it would be useful to learn quickly if staff feels they were able to really "close-the-loop" on an instance of feedback, or if they feel they were unable to address the issue effectively.

A third thought: Does it make sense to cross reference the results of both follow up surveys to see if any expressed issues were being highlighted by both customers and employees as being a challenge to get the loop closed on.

I'm sure there are other issues with managing actions to close-the-loop on customer feedback.

Issues vs. Cases for managing Actions on Customer Feedback

Sophisticated enterprises have long employed “Case Management” within their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms to document and resolve customer support / service issues. But, today many of these organizations also use CRM Case Management to manage customer relationship feedback. The question is: Should they? And, is there a better way to structure the action management process spawned by customer feedback?


Most Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) systems can generate an e-mail “Alert” based on input from customer survey respondents. The the most obvious way to “manage” these alerts is to create “cases” in the CRM system, where the system then assigns tasks to relevant people in the enterprise – usually in sales and support.

It seems to me that CRM based Case Management is inefficient for managing customer feedback driven actions. Though certainly some customer feedback should spawn a "Case". 

First of all, a lot of survey based customer feedback doesn’t really require management with a “Case”.  It may only require a simple follow up call or e-mail from a sales representative, or an accounts receivable clerk. An EFM system “Alert” that creates a task or event which is then tracked and managed probably would be more effective as well as less a costly approach. Especially since significant parts of an organization (accounting?) may not even have access to, or be trained on, the use of CRM systems.

Secondly, there is the difficulty of changing customer surveys after they've been integrated into the CRM system. This "hard coded integration" of customer surveys makes changes (a necessity as the business changes) complex, expensive and driven by the information technology organization. An exact opposite approach to how customer feedback management is typically deployed.

Is there a way to create a simpler, less expensive and more flexible process for managing customer feedback driven actions? I think there may be. And, the technology is called Issue Management. Issue management currently is mainly employed by software engineers for managing the change process for software during development. It is a “Case Management Lite” approach both from a technology as well as a cost perspective.

There are a number of low cost commercially available issue management systems that I believe would work well as action management tools, if integrated with EFM systems. The cost to achieve a fully managed “closed loop” customer feedback process using this approach would be much lower than it is today, in the neighborhood of $20,000 per year versus the current cost of $50,000 and up (sometimes way up).

Commentary on Temkin's 8 Customer Experience Trends for 2011

I closely follow Bruce Temkin's Customer Experience Matters Blog (http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/).  Earlier this week Bruce posted some updated thoughts on his report - 8 Customer Experience Trends for 2011.  Since I'm on an Action Tracking and Management thought path these days, I immediately interpreted his blog post through that prism. 

When looking at Temkin's eight trends and reading his more recent remarks, what struck me was how closely related all eight are to the concept of taking action on customer feedback.  And, especially so for the first four:

- Customer Insight Propagation.  Why propagate customer insights unless you're trying to facilitate action taking?
- Unstructured data appreciation.  The purpose of doing a better job understanding unstructured feedback is again, is to generate actions.
- Customer Service Rejuvenation.  An action in and of itself.  Designed to facilitate imporoved action taking on feedback.
- Loyalty Intensification.  Which relys almost entirely on actions taken on customer feedback to produce the loyalty level changes business executives seek.

So, are companies deploying solutions or process improvements for acting on and managing customer feedback data streams?  Except in certain processes - mainly customer support - the answer seems to be mostly - No.  Outside of CRM supported transactional feedback, it seems to me that enterprises generally don't have systems in place to accumulate, propagate, assimilate and act on the myriad types of feedback they get.  Some of which will be rapidly increasing in volume over time. 

Doesn't necessarily bode well for a lot of the spending these companies are going to be doing within the 8 trend areas.