B2B

Hi Community,

I would like to get your thoughts on which customers should be targeted for Relationship surveying. There is debate in our organization as to whether we should focus on getting feedback from just the customers that make up 80% of our revenue or surveying all customers, regardless of revenue.

Thoughts?

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Linette Myland
Manager, Voice of the Customer
Siemens Building Technologies
Buffalo Grove IL
847-9415767
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Lynette:

My usual recommendation is to sample all your customers, not just the big ones. That's because small customers can become big ones, and also because small customers can have an effect on your reputation that's disproportionate to their sales volume.

One approach you can take is sample customers roughly in proportion to their revenue, instead of at random. That implies you will select all the big customers, but only a small percentage of the small customers. This gets around the problem of having a survey sample that's heavily weighted towards customers who only account for a small fraction of your revenue.

       -Peter

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Peter Leppik
CEO
Vocal Laboratories Inc.
Golden Valley MN
952-941-6580
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I also think surveying all customers works best particualarly in a business to business setting where the relationship often skews the results.   We work to assign some weight to the score as well based on the responses but the key is in the follow up with those dissatisfied customers no matter how small.   We have found flaws in our invoicing that were effecting all customers that only customers would be in the smallest 20% let us know about.   The larger customers did not point to it because they were in most cases more established and used to our invoicing and had a more engaged relationship with their point of contact with the business.

 As we have addressed invoicing we have seen an improvement in all scores including those large clients who may not have ever mentioned it.

Thanks,

Stephen

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Stephen Douglas
Manager of Customer and Sales Experience
Suddenlink Media
Parkersburg WV
304-4801421
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I am also in the camp which suggests you should perform the survey with all of your clients as opposed to just the ones making up the largest parts of your revenue. However, if it was possible to add an identifier to their survey link so they could be segmented or ask them to self-segment in the survey, I would do that as well. This way you can separate the data if you want and run comparisons.

 Best, 

 Jeffrey

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Jeffrey Daigle
Sr Research Analyst- CX & Marketing
E Source
Niwot CO
303-345-9183
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In a past life we looked at priority customers, customers with potential to be priority customers, and at-risk customers.  We made sure to include the right number of customers from each segment.

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Stephanie Thum
Vice President of Customer Experience
The Export-Import Bank of the United States
Washington DC
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