In our The State of B2B Account Experience report, we discovered just how much B2B brands are struggling with their customer experience (CX) programs.
According to our research, 62% of all B2B companies still can’t produce an ROI as a result of their experience programs, while 63% aren’t tracking referrals that result from their CX system.
We found a more fundamental problem when we dug deeper to discover where B2B experience programs were falling short.
Brands were overlooking the impact survey design has on the success of customer experience programs. Well-designed surveys collect actionable insights, fight churn, and identify opportunities for increasing revenue. On the other hand, poorly designed surveys fail to attract customers, produce unhelpful data, and have no bearing on your revenue growth.
More specifically, we learned that:
B2B companies need to combine relationship surveys with transactional Net Promoter Score (NPS). This provides a full view of the customer journey, offers the opportunity for faster close-loop rates, and helps standardize reporting.
Surveying B2B accounts multiple times a year drives engagement and reduces the risk of churn.
Response rates should be a major metric in survey execution and monitoring. Our research revealed that healthy response rates influence all other metrics positively, from NPS to retention.
From these insights and more we built the CustomerGauge Academy Listening to Feedback course. The course will teach you how to design and execute surveys, increase response rates, ask the right questions, and create reliable data for financial growth.
Why Survey Design Is Crucial for Successful B2B Customer Experience
An effective customer experience program built around Net Promoter Score surveys helps collect valuable feedback and take action to prevent churn and boost customer satisfaction.
The purpose of a Net Promoter survey is to measure customer loyalty and gather actionable data to improve your CX. But for your survey system to be effective, survey design is crucial.
- Quality design increases response rates. For you to collect data that’s actually valuable, it’s essential that customers actually participate in your surveys. Make it easy for them to respond, survey them at the right time, and don’t throw in unnecessary questions. Our research shows that the higher the response rate, the higher your customer satisfaction:
The right survey design ensures you collect reliable, clean data. Your survey questions should elicit responses that are valid, accurate, and valuable. They should be able to tell you exactly what you want to know about your customers without the noise of irrelevant questions.
Effective design leads to effective action. Ultimately, NPS surveys are not market research tools, they’re action tools. And, as Cary T. Self CustomerGauge’s VP of Education and Services has explained, your customers are responding to your surveys because they want action, too:
"When a customer has a pain point or thinks that something can be better and then they are brave enough to share that feedback, there's now this responsibility to take that feedback and turn it into a solution or an answer.”
Bear that in mind when designing your survey: don’t try to collect insights that won’t help you make concrete changes or take action.
What’s the fundamental lesson here? Keep your surveys short and sweet, with questions that serve a clear purpose for your company. This has concrete impacts.
With every extra minute your customers are spending on your survey, the more likely they are to abandon it altogether.
But there’s a lot more to survey design than the length of your surveys. And we’ll teach you it all in our customer survey design course.
CustomerGauge’s Listening to Feedback Survey Design Course
Learn how to better listen to your accounts and customers by conducting relationship and transactional surveys. CustomerGauge’s Listening to Feedback course provides the foundation for survey design within our Account Experience™ (B2B CX) program.
The course is available in two tiers, Gold and Platinum, with the Platinum tier offering extra modules for program owners.
Listening to Feedback – Gold Tier
The Listening to Feedback Gold tier is intended for executives, including the C-suite and executive sponsor, as well as frontline professionals, including owners of customer relationships.
Cost: $79
Duration: 1.5 hours of course material, and 3 hours of additional content.
The course starts off with a brief introduction on the importance of using surveys to listen to customers and the core content is divided into four lessons:
Relationship Surveys. This section covers the right questions to ask in your relationship surveys, including those questions which provide you with data you can act on. You’ll learn how to identify which contacts – and how many – to survey in each account, and how to avoid making your surveys a cause of friction in the customer journey.
Transactional Surveys. This section covers the right questions to ask in your transactional surveys and when to ask them. You’ll learn the key difference between transactional and relationship surveys before focusing on the important role of CX drivers.
Optimize Response Rates. This section covers how to calculate response rates, why response rates and coverage are important, and how they impact growth. You’ll learn how to improve your response rates and account coverage (including how to improve individual metrics, like click-through and completion rates).
Gaming the System. Gaming the system refers to any method that inflates the scores in an upcoming NPS survey or provides a non-representative sample of customer data. This section covers what gaming the system is, common methods for gaming the system, and how to shield your NPS program from these tactics.
Sixteen PDF files containing transcriptions for each module.
Practice quizzes for each section.
Listening to Feedback – Platinum Tier
The Listening to Feedback Platinum tier is intended for the program champion/owner, who is typically responsible for program creation, management, and communication. This extensive tier offers detailed content to arm program owners with the essentials needed to design and conduct successful NPS surveys.
Cost: $99
Duration: 1.5 hours of course material with 3 hours of additional content.
As with the Gold tier, the Platinum tier starts off with an introductory lesson (called “Listen”), and the remaining course is divided into four lessons: Relationship Surveys, Transactional Surveys, Optimize Response Rates, and Gaming the System.
However, the Platinum tier has one extra module in the Gaming the System section, and four extra modules in both the Relationship Surveys and Transactional Surveys lessons.
In total, learners will complete nine extra modules, including:
In the Relationship Surveys section, the extra modules cover how to build better surveys based on insights from CustomerGauge’s research. You’ll also learn the importance of knowing your customers for survey design and the right time to ask for a survey.
In the Transactional Surveys section, the extra modules cover additional customer experience metrics, including the Customer Effort Score (CES) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). You’ll learn when and why you should combine relationship and transactional surveys.
In the Gaming the System section, the extra module discusses how to mitigate gaming tactics.
Twenty-five PDF files containing transcriptions for each module.
Practice quizzes for each section
How You’ll Learn
The lessons are taught through on-demand video sessions that you can access from the CustomerGauge Academy. Each module also comes with a transcription, in .pdf format, that you can download or view from your browser.
If you have any questions from the instructor, you can pose them using the “Ask Question” tab. You can also “Start a Discussion” for a given topic.
At the end of each section, there’s a quiz to help you assess how much you’ve learned. You can view all the quizzes directly from the “Quiz Builder” tab.
Meet Your Instructor
The Listening to Feedback course is designed by Cary T. Self, CustomerGauge’s Global VP of Education and Services. Before joining the team, Cary was a CustomerGauge customer for three years, so he knows the Account Experience (AX) methodology inside out.
Cary believes in the importance of actively collecting customer feedback, wherever it’s coming from, and taking action accordingly:
“There are customers beating the drum with feedback on all different channels. Social media surveys, data usage logins. We can go into going to events or not going to events, not showing up for webinars, not consuming emails and messaging I'm sending them. These are all different channels of feedback.
And if we're not listening to those channels and doing something about that, we are completely ignoring our customers and their lifetime value to us. And I think these are the small chips that we chisel away at customers where they become disengaged or less loyal over time.”
Collecting this feedback starts with designing surveys that ask the right questions, from the right people, at the right time. And that’s what the Listening to Feedback course teaches, among other things.
Prerequisites
The Listening to Feedback course provides students with the fundamental skills and knowledge to design and execute surveys to collect actionable data for your experience programs. Students are encouraged to take the Achieving Customer Loyalty and Understanding Your AX™ (B2B CX) Program courses as prerequisites for the Listening to Feedback course.
Is the Listening to Feedback Course Right for You?
Designing and executing successful CX surveys helps you collect accurate, actionable data to improve customer experiences, prevent churn, and grow revenue.
Here’s what students have to say about the course:
“As someone who has never implemented a survey strategy, this is very helpful in understanding best practices.” T.C.
“If someone said that the Academy was like someone handing you a puzzle and every new section is auto-completing this AX puzzle, I wouldn't have believed them until I saw it with my own eyes. Very smooth and transparent section.” P.G.
Whether you’re working on the frontline or are a CX program owner, the Listening to Feedback course will equip you with the fundamentals of survey design and execution.
Sign up for the Listening to Feedback course today!About the Author
