How to improve customer satisfaction in B2B?
Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25–95% and the success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60–70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5–20%. Therefore, companies should focus more on nurturing their current customer base, improving their offering constantly, and staying ahead on innovation, this will allow companies to build a stronger relationship and improve their brand image.
The starting point to improve business customer satisfaction is to know the current level of satisfaction and what is driving it. For example, a survey has been carried out and a company achieves an overall satisfaction score of 7.8 out of 10. Deeper research shows that the key drivers of the overall satisfaction score are the speed of response to inquiries, certain aspects of quality, and a general lack of innovation. From the survey results, we can assume that these three factors have a strong effect on the overall satisfaction score for the company. Now you know what your customers value the most about your offering and what you need to improve to make them happier, then, what should be the next steps?
The way forward is to address systemic issues, not individual ones. Improving a customer satisfaction score requires sorting out those factors which are pulling the score down. Following up on the earlier example, this would mean improving the speed of response to customer contacts, rectifying aspects of the quality problems, and becoming more innovative. How to do this? Every business should understand that customer satisfaction initiatives are not only the responsibility of the marketing department, the solution to improving customer satisfaction should be a responsibility of the whole company. Once you have identified what you need to improve, you can allocate tasks to different groups, for example, there could be a group dedicated to improving quality, one taking responsibility for customer service, and the other for driving innovation.
Any plan to improve business customer satisfaction must address fundamental issues, some of which may be strategic or long-term and which likely require a financial investment, these are the improvements that will create the strongest positive impact.
A customer could be highly satisfied with a company’s products and services, but that doesn’t mean they are also loyal. A competitor could take them away with a more attractive value proposition. One important thing to do is mapping all customers. For example, an elevator manufacturer supplied elevators to large office buildings and residential complexes. Contracts were negotiated with the buildings’ facility-management teams, and the manufacturer understood well what satisfied this group. However, the manufacturer overlooked two major customer groups. Presidents of housing-owner associations turned out to be strong influencers in purchase decisions on elevators. What’s more, the actual users of the elevators, the residents or office employees, experienced elevator performance daily. Their complaints ended up with facility managers. The company started to map the entire journey and all of its relevant stakeholders and started to track customer satisfaction for each of these groups separately, finding new insights about how to boost key stakeholders’ satisfaction. So don’t only take into consideration your direct customer, but every person that might influence their decision making.
In conclusion, a constant improvement in customer satisfaction should be in the plans of every company. The benefits are huge. There will be increased loyalty as well as profitability. In work carried out by Anderson, Fornell, and Lehmann, they determined that for every 1% per year increase in customer satisfaction over 5 years, there is a cumulative increase of 11.5% in net profitability. Increasing customer satisfaction is not complicated, but it is hard work, and it is worth it.
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