Why Do 70% Of Businesses Fail To Take Action From Customer Satisfaction Surveys?
The most successful B2B companies sincerely care about their customer relationships and truly listen to the voice of the customer. They allocate budget to survey their customers once or twice a year, or even after every major business transaction. They bring in the data, analyze it, and then act upon it. It’s a continuous, informed evolution. But only 30% of businesses behave this way. According to Forrester, the other 70% may bring in the customer satisfaction data, but they fail to act on it. Why?
Caring about customer relationships is cultural.
In our experience for a great majority of those 70% the reason the survey data isn’t actioned is because there is a lack of accountability and senior leadership support. It is hard to take the time to review and act on customer feedback when daily operational challenges get priority. Where to even start when supply chain issues seem more urgent?
Caring about customer relationships requires cultural commitment. Senior leadership must not only require customer surveys be executed, but also require that the entire leadership team as well as the account teams review the feedback, internalize it, prepare action plans, and track progress. A growth mindset in the organization is necessary to truly (and honestly) look at how to do things differently.
Only when others in the organization witness the leadership team’s commitment to act will the voice of the customer actually become an important KPI. And only when it’s an important KPI will action be mandated with positive shifts expected in the next round of the survey.
Prove to customers you take their opinions seriously.
According to research, 43% of companies do not answer customer satisfaction surveys because they think the surveying companies don’t really care. So a critical part of any company’s action plans following a customer survey is to clearly communicate what you heard and your planned actions back to the customers.
Communicate to all customers regardless of whether their responses were negative or positive. Even to those who didn’t respond at all, as seeing how you’re actioning the data may inspire them to respond next time. Your report can include the things you’re working on as well as the things you understand you’re doing well.
The important thing is to close the loop with your customers, so they know you take their opinions seriously. And it’s in your interest to do so.
It pays to listen to your customers.
Successful B2B businesses welcome the criticism of their customers because it is more profitable to do so. If you know where you fall short vs. your competitors, you can then actively fix those problems and fend off competitive threats. If you understand where your customers’ future needs lie, you can adapt and actively grow your business.
You may not always be able to fix the problem in the short term (e.g. supply constraints or price inflation), but specializing in customer feedback, we see that it is often more important how you deal with the issue than the issue itself. In fact, it becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy that if you show you are listening and that you care, customers will feel better about the relationship. We see this borne out with higher ratings in the next survey.
In general, if we look at our clients who achieve the highest average ratings, they are well practiced in internalizing the survey data, developing action plans, and then communicating those plans to their customers. And we also know that our most successful clients, who achieve high ratings and are disciplined about following up on their customer feedback, also have higher revenue growth rates than those who do not. Because healthy customer relationships are simply good business.