Can we puhlease start to differentiate between B2C customer satisfaction and B2B satisfaction?
It’s driving me crazy.
B2C is about buying a motorcar or a bar of chocolate or some music. It might be about you having the condition of your teeth checked or even having a tonsillectomy. These are all experiences, judged on the point of sale and the subsequent delivery of the product or service. Highly developed, high-volume experiences lead to brand value – BMW; Nestle; I-Tunes. B2C is where the money that is already on the table gets shuffled around and redistributed.
B2B is about buying raw materials and components, capital goods and long-term services such as buildings management and financial audits. These are all ongoing relationships, built on trust, mutual support and mutual benefit. In most cases the goal is “partnering”. The value of these relationships is measured as “good will” on the balance sheet. B2B is the wealth creation of this world.
B2C is about the EXPERIENCE. B2B is about the RELATIONSHIP.
There is a third sector, which is smaller than the B2B and B2C segments but nevertheless significant, that revolves around project-based work. Examples would be law (on a case-by-case basis), management consultancy (where you are only as good as your last project), and building and civil engineering (“oh look – it’s a different ring master but the same old clowns”).
InfoQuest has always been about B2B. We will happily turn away business that does not fit the B2B profile.
With enquiries for B2C customer satisfaction surveys, my response is always the same: make sure the senior managers (managing directors, chief executives and others) are leaving their desks and watching and listening to their customers at the point of sale (preferably anonymously, although wearing a disguise is optional) at least weekly before they even think about employing an outside firm. Dame Mary Perkins, the owner of Europe’s most successful opticians, Specsavers, regularly goes incognito visiting her shops and employs an army of mystery shoppers. Sir Philip Green, boss of Arcadia and Britain’s 9th richest person, will go and talk to shoppers asking them what they like and what they don’t like.
The advice for project-based organisations is straightforward. The project manager and the client should have a regular Friday This Week / Next Week meeting to discuss what happened this week, what is planned for next week (commitments), put it in writing immediately and both parties sign it off. It’s not foolproof, but it ensures communication and goes some way towards partnering.
For B2B customer satisfaction surveys the client needs to be measuring the relationships they have with their most important customers. They need to be drilling down into that relationship, listening to both the decision-makers and the key influencers; treating people as people and individuals individually, with different wants, different needs and different personalities. And, above all, aiming to get a minimum 50% response rate to any survey or feedback mechanism for it to be anything like reliable.
Ten years ago I made the decision to launch InfoQuest in the UK at the CRM Show. InfoQuest had been around in the U.S. for eleven years and had had some exposure in the UK but no actual launch. It was a big mistake using the CRM Show (and we’ve still got the InfoQuest Customer Relationship Management Limited official moniker – another early mistake). Oracle and Siebel were about to take the world by storm with their CRM solutions and nowadays everyone naturally associates CRM or customer relationship management with big, powerful databases that record and plan customer interactions – what they sell should, in my mind, be referred to as Customer Interaction Management, but I guess its not so catchy. We were the only non-techy stand at the 3-day show and the IT managers and Chief Technology Officers just walked past. Oh well, happy days.
But please, can the researchers and the governments and the marketing professors and the business journalists of this world understand, accept and make the differentiation between B2B and B2C?
John Coldwell
I’d like to add 2 more considerations for market research buyers.
1. Because B2B and B2C customer satisfaction studies are very different (as John says), it really is wise to pick a research partner with the right expertise. Don’t assume that a firm with lots of experience doing consumer research will be able to execute a B2B study well. B2B customer sat studies are a very different animal, and frankly, can be far more challenging.
2. People planning B2B cust sat studies should know that identifying those behaviors that reflect loyalty vary a great deal by B2B target market, category, etc. “Propensity to recommend” and other common B2C approaches do not always apply. You really do need to do some discover work to ID the items that are relevant to your company. a brief article here: http://www.researchrockstar.com/nps-is-not-the-de-facto-metric-for-telecomm-customer-satisfaction/)
Excellent post John !
I don’t agree with everything but I do agree wholeheartedly that B2B and B2B are completely different and not just for surveys.
My current and previous roles are in B2B but my first jobs were in B2C and there is a world of difference.
You simply can’t take the same attitude and the same strategies for dealing with them both. We need to look at the objectives of our business and plan accordingly.
Thanks!
Eric
@ericjacques
My first instinct was to agree wholeheartedly with you on the point that B2C is about the experience and B2B is about the relationship. Then it occurred to me that there may be some businesses who are large enough so that they can mandate actions by their vendors. Take Walmart for example. My understanding is that they told General Electric to make more energy efficient bulbs available or they would find someone who could meet that need. Same with packaging and with the RFID chips. I know that Walmart is very strict about the ethics involved in interacting with their vendors. A vendor can’t so much as offer a Walmart employee a bottle of water.
Based on this, Walmart probably carries less about the relationship and more about the experience, that is, getting the vendor to meet Walmart’s needs.
On the flip side, a soft drink company probably uses an account management model with grocery chains (including Walmart). Account management is based, IMHO, more on relationships than experience. Most chains probably go along with that.
Except for customers with clout like Walmart. Of course, this may be one of the few exceptions that proves the rule.
Thank you Glenn.
I started thinking about commodities where there is no relationship and very little experience. But then my head started to hurt!
I was waiting for someone to write this post, thank you! I agree with what’s written, as well as with Kathryn’s comment concerning the “propensity to recommend” question and its applicability in a B2B environment. There is great benefit to managing, measuring and evaluating the relationship as a whole, but we have to remember that at the end of the day it is comprised of multiple single interactions at all levels of the organization and each of those has to be managed, measured and evaluated.
Haim
Surely the reason that Infoquest is focused on b2b is that it’s too expensive to send out the little plastic boxes to consumers? And that there is not enough space in the box to make the 11-boxes needed for Net Promoter Score measurement… Jus’ sayin’…
Thank you for your comment Ms Tractor. It is a shame you felt unable to leave your true identity. Actually, our research suggests that we are between 25% and 50% cheaper than telephone surveys (even NPS telephone surveys) and its not that we don’t have sufficient compartments in our box, it’s that it would be such a waste sending out a box with only one card in it!
Very interesting blog post here John. I have to agree that B2C vs. B2B Satisfaction questionnaires are very different and to approach them with the same strategy would be a horrible mistake. However, I feel that the rest of your blog post dismisses the importance of B2C satisfaction surveys. While I do understand that most B2C transactions are on a more experience level as opposed to a relationship that is built I think that its the B2C relationship that drives the ability to create B2B relationships. Yes, initially much of the investment a company makes to develop a product focuses in B2B for vendors and manufacturing but once a product/service is available for B2C it will live or die on how satisfied customers are.
John – I agree that B2B and B2C are very different, but I tend to think the key difference is that B2B involves multiple people on each side having interactions with their counterparts. Does that make it a relationship or just a multi-person, multi-touchpoint experience? Don’t know. Obviously what simplifies this is that there still tends to be a single decision-maker. What complicates is that decision-maker may not be the person who has most contact with your company. From a research point of view, it is easiest to focus on the decision-maker, but from an improving the customer experience point of view, that may not yield the best insight. Research is always complicated by the range of stakeholders, especially if a desire for simplicity results in an underestimation of the influence some have, the result of which is both an incomplete picture of the experience and an inaccurate assessment of likely future buying behaviour.
Personally I believe the approach you advocate for B2C works for B2B too – take a cross-functional team of your people to visit selected customers and look at every interaction from their point of view. That will yield masses of insight about how the experience for that customer – and similar customers – could be improved. While B2B relationships tend to be more complicated, the number of customers is typically fewer – often just a handful. You can obviously only do this with a few customers, obviously so selection is critical – picking either representative customers or, ideally, those that are representative of where the mass will be in the future (the leaders that others will seek to emulate).