CX & Customer Success resources

B2C

B2B

Why gather feedback?

• Does the product meet expectations?
• Is the company easy to work with (support, service)?

• Gain a proactive warning of churn
• Optimize expansion opportunities
• Gain new sales opportunities as contacts can be activated for referrals and/or move to new employers

From whom will you acquire
feedback?

• The people that made the purchase decision
• The end users who interact with the products
  & services
• The people that will make repurchase or
  renewal decisions

What feedback to acquire and
analyze?

• Airlines shouldn’t combine feedback from first-class or million-mile passengers customers with economy
• Retailers shouldn’t combine feedback from in-store vs. on-line

• Understand the relationship strength and health of each strategic account individually, by understanding the sentiment of all contacts across the various personas (decision maker, end user, program manager, etc), enabling CSMs to see what’s working/not-working within their accounts, individually
• Aggregate feedback for small-accounts in which the decision maker is likely also a user, by segment (products and other differentiated customer treatment / segmentation)
• Aggregated feedback for each key step in the customer lifecycle, based on persona (contact “role” in the product purchase and utilization)

When to get feedback?

• For Decision Makers & Budget Holders (and potentially also for key influencers), “expectations” are generally around business outcomes – results – that your sales and marketing efforts evangelize.  And since these executives don’t generally use your products and services directly, the overall relationship needs to be assessed periodically.
• For End Users that interact with your products and services, “expectations” are generally around overall ease (including quality) of the overall experience.  Sentiment around the individual experiences is key for End Users, but still be cognizant that the End User outcomes are critical to measure.

For example, the outcome from an End User for interacting with your product *should* be that their jobs are made better/easier.  An outcome of using the product is NOT if they are satisfied (a very low bar — ‘satisfaction’ isn’t why companies buy from you — they want outcomes!) or likely to recommend your company (a brand attribute, not a product attribute)

How to collect feedback?

1. How census (not sample) of the entire customer (account) base is critical – especially for large strategic accounts that contribute a large portion of revenue – versus a “representative” sample that may not represent the emotions and needs of an individual strategic account.
2. The definition of “representative-ness” – unlike B2C where most customers are essentially equal revenue contributors in any given segment, B2B businesses should understand the percentage of revenue they are hearing from, and how well that feedback represents the business (in financial terms).

Where to capture feedback?

• Periodically throughout the customer lifetime, and especially in support of QBRs (for large/strategic accounts).  For example, getting feedback following a QBR will only tell you if the customer found the QBR useful, which isn’t much of an outcome to measure.  But getting feedback in ADVANCE of a QBR helps drive the QBR agenda and enables effective prioritization and planning DURING the QBR.  The mere presence of an effective account plan, that was jointly agreed by you and by the customer decision makers, is good evidence of a CSM doing a good job.
• Also, connected to individual experiences – especially for end users of your products and services – so you can understand where product and process improvements might be required to attain the necessary outcomes faster.

For example, you conduct “onboarding” processes to ensure that customers are effectively positioned to get the results (outcomes) they expect. That is, an “onboarding” experience isn’t about their satisfaction with the onboarding processes, but instead should be about the customers’ ability to utilize your products and services to do their job following the onboarding phase.  Therefore, continuing this example, collecting feedback about onboarding needs to occur within a sufficient time following the onboarding phase to make sure there are no gaps or concerns.  AND the “onboarding” phase needs to be CONTINUALLY re-utilized as new employees come and go – both end users that might not have received the initial training and also decision makers, since they can come and go and have changing requirements around business strategy or outcomes.