Surveys are a cornerstone of understanding and improving the customer experience (CX) for business-to-business (B2B) companies. By directly asking for structured feedback from customers, B2B organizations gain invaluable insights into satisfaction, needs, pain points and more across the entire customer journey.
However, creating and fielding effective B2B satisfaction surveys is both an art and a science. This comprehensive guide provides best practices, real-world examples and data demonstrating the business benefits – equipping your organization to maximize the value of your customer listening strategy.
10+ Best Practices for B2B Satisfaction Surveys
Let‘s explore over 10 key best practices for developing and conducting surveys that deliver actionable insights:
1. Choose a Flexible, Scalable Survey Platform
Your survey technology foundation is crucial – it needs to adapt to changing needs as your program matures while seamlessly handling survey distribution for tens, hundreds or thousands of respondents.
Leader: Qualtrics’ enterprise-grade CX platform is renowned for its flexibility, scalability and powerful analytics. Companies like IBM and SAP leverage Qualtrics to understand their B2B customers.
2. Map Surveys to Key Moments in the Customer Journey
To systematically gather feedback, plan surveys to launch after major touchpoints or interactions, such as:
- User onboarding & activation
- Feature releases or product upgrades
- Support case resolution
- Contract renewal or milestone moments
For example, Zendesk surveys customers immediately after case closure to capture satisfaction while the experience is fresh.
3. Ask Relevant, Targeted Questions
Every question should connect to a clear purpose for your business, whether that’s diagnosing issues, identifying expansion opportunities, gauging ROI or more.
Avoid vague questions that seem disconnected from actions you can take. For example, “How satisfied are you with Company X?” is not nearly as constructive as “How would you rate our delivery timelines?”
4. Blend Quantitative Ratings and Qualitative Feedback
Include rating-scale questions to quantify satisfaction alongside open text responses that capture richer customer sentiments in respondents‘ own words.
The combo delivers comprehensive insights. For example, a poor rating on documentation resources could be explained by comments about the materials being outdated, not searchable, or missing key tutorials.
5. Keep Surveys Concise
Long surveys lead to survey fatigue and drop offs. Stick to 5-8 questions that focus on the highest priority outcomes.
6. Define an Ongoing Cadence for Key Surveys
While it‘s good to have ad hoc surveys as needed, also develop a regular pulse survey program that gathers feedback at consistent intervals. This could be quarterly, bi-annually or annually.
Compare results over time to reveal trends and measure the customer experience impact of initiatives you roll out.
7. Incentivize Thoughtful Responses
Encourage survey completion by providing small rewards, such as:
- Entry into sweepstakes or prize draws
- Early access to new features
- Discounts or exclusive promos
Incentives boost response rates by 4X on average![1]
8. Promote Multichannel Survey Participation
Give customers options to complete surveys via web, email, text messaging, QR codes, or third-party panels. This omnichannel approach boosts response rates by catering to diverse preferences.
For example, long-time customers may be most responsive to personalized emails, while newer clients prefer in-app messaging or SMS surveys.
9. Tag and Theme Customer Verbatims
Catalog open text feedback by topic area, sentiment, use case and more using keywords. This organization reveals major recurring themes in the voice of the customer data.
Powerful analytics tools like Qualtrics Auto-Coding[2] speed up this process by auto-tagging huge volumes of text.
10. Close the Loop with Follow-Ups
Let customers know you’re listening by following up on specific issues raised in feedback. These personalized outreaches demonstrate you take action on survey insights to nurture each B2B relationship.
11. Track Survey Metrics Over Time
Measure response rate, completion rate, dropoff rate, question performance and satisfaction trends across survey initiatives. This drives continuous improvement by revealing best practices and areas needing refinement.
For example, if completion rates decline among sales reps receiving in-app surveys, test SMS or web intercept surveys instead for that segment.
Now let‘s explore 5 compelling benefits strong B2B customer satisfaction programs deliver.
5 Benefits of Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Robust, thoughtfully orchestrated customer satisfaction surveys provide manifold commercial benefits:
1. Drive Product/Service Improvements (63% Higher Revenue Growth)
Ongoing customer feedback fuels innovation by providing precise, real-time insights into pain points and enhancement opportunities across the end-to-end customer journey.
Companies excelling at customer experience generate revenue growth rates 63% higher on average than CX laggards over 5 years, according to Qualtrics XM Institute research.[3]
For example, Autodesk develops detailed product roadmaps for each of its SaaS solutions. One input that informs planned enhancements across the portfolio is direct customer ratings and verbatims from in-product and web-based satisfaction surveys.[4]
2. Strengthen Customer Relationships and Loyalty
78% of customers say merely seeking feedback makes them feel more loyal to vendors.[5] By giving clients an organized way to share input, companies foster goodwill, trust and emotional bonds – the foundation for lasting B2B relationships.
Salesforce service reps even use pop-up surveys to capture real-time customer sentiments during support calls as cues to further customize interactions based on needs.
This human-centric approach drives impressive loyalty – over two thirds of Salesforce customers have been clients for at least 5 years.[6]
3. Understand True Needs to Cross-Sell/Upsell
Surveys diagnose evolving customer challenges, goals and use cases – crucial to tailoring expansion opportunities.
For example, insight that customers struggle building certain analytics reports provides the impetus for proposing value-added services uniquely solving that pain point.
Nutanix "Customer for Life" surveys uncover emerging needs and workloads which inform cross-sell and renewal pitches to boost deal values by over 20%.[7]
4. Benchmark vs. Competitors
Many B2B surveys include comparison questions rating experiences with competitors. This intelligence reveals where businesses lead or lag on key CX metrics including satisfaction, ease of doing business, ticket resolution and more.
Armed with these insights, leadership can mobilize employee experience teams company-wide to double down on differentiating strengths while improving weaknesses.
5. Inform Sales Enablement and Content Strategy
Feedback around onboarding, adoption challenges and desired content resources steers better sales enablement. For example, survey verbatims about setup complexity led Autodesk to create specialized onboarding packages reducing time-to-value by 30% for new accounts.[8]
Likewise, common requests for more troubleshooting guides or self-service scenarios signal opportunities for helpful new documentation, training modules and more.
Now that we‘ve covered best practices and benefits, let‘s explore steps for activating insights from surveys.
Turning Survey Data into Action
Surveys only generate ROI if fueling concrete improvement across all areas of the business. Here is a framework to convert feedback into progress:
1. Analyze Text Responses with NLP Sentiment Analysis
Natural Language Processing (NLP) rapidly parses huge volumes of open text survey comments to categorize the underlying sentiment as positive, negative or neutral.
These quantified sentiment metrics spotlight areas earning praise vs. driving dissatisfaction – illuminating priorities for enhancements.
2. Identify Major Themes
Powerful analytics, like Qualtrics Text iQ, auto-tag open text feedback with keywords to reveal high frequency topics.[9]
These automated insights make it easy to zero in on common pain points or scenarios needing improvement across large sample sizes.
3. Foster Idea Sharing Between Teams
Centralize survey findings in a CX portal or dataset accessible company-wide. With visibility into the voice of the customer, different groups can brainstorm innovations tailored to feedback.
For example, sentiment around support resolution times might prompt DevOps to streamline and automate more repetitive tickets.
4. Define Actions and Owners
Align leaders across departments to spearhead enhancements targeting the biggest customer experience gaps and opportunities.
Track progress via action logs updated by owners as improvement initiatives launch. This accountability accelerates change rooted in customer truths.
5. Close Feedback Loops with Customers
Notify clients of system updates, new educational collateral and other improvements inspired by surveys to complete the feedback loop.
These wins nurture each B2B relationship by demonstrating you act on buyer insights to meet needs.
In summary, customer satisfaction surveys deliver a wealth of customer intelligence to guide initiatives company-wide – but only if acted upon. Use the steps above to pave the road from feedback to positive outcomes improving experiences, NPS and retention.
To discuss how leading B2B CX platform Qualtrics could amplify your survey process, request a personalized demo here.
[1] SurveyMonkey, "Reduce survey abandonment and improve completion rates"
[2] Qualtrics, "Auto Text Analytics"
[3] Qualtrics XM Institute, "2023 Global CX Insights & Trends"
[4] Qualtrics, "Autodesk"
[5] SurveyMonkey, "10 Proven Ways to Increase Survey Response Rates"
[6] Salesforce News, Salesforce Speeds Customer Service with New Service Cloud Features"
[7] Qualtrics, "How Nutanix Creates Customers for Life"
[8] Qualtrics, "Autodesk"
[9] Qualtrics, "Getting Started with Text iQ"
