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Why are we writing this blog, and why should you read it?

Practical research insights to add value

ServiceQualityWorks has created this blog to share our thoughts and experiences on how good research can help organizations improve sales enablement, customer experience, and account management. Concise and practical posts will address real-world aspects of the research process – management, design, implementation, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and/or utilization. The focus will be on B2B (or B2B2C) companies, but we expect many topics to have broader applications. Your feedback on the blog in general, and on individual posts in particular, will be welcome.

Moving Beyond Band-Aids Means Never Having to Fix It Again (05/10/2013)

Tools, Translation, Transformation: What’s The Biggest Challenge for Sales Leaders and Customer Experience Leaders?

More and more of our business is transitioning to work with clients to help them design and implement customer experience programs their businesses. Tools: Cost effective and intuitive tools make amassing customer feedback easier than ever before – though we would still argue our tools are differentiated to specifically address the needs of B2B clients. Translation: That being said, with the increasing accessibility customer information a significant challenge for B2B sales, marketing and operations leaders is to convert customer feedback into meaningful and actionable strategy and implementation plans to drive performance improvement in their businesses. There is no question that tactical customer feedback at the individual and account level produces results in the short-term. Customer-facing organizations invariably respond to customer needs and concerns when they are made explicit, yet often performance improvement is just temporary. Transformation: Without a rigorous framework to identify and address the root causes of defined customer experiences, systemic problems will re-occur and companies just have to face the problem down the line. Meaningful transformation is most often the greatest challenge since it’s not just front-line behaviors that need to change but also policy, process and systems. Successful, high growth companies use customer feedback to purposefully design and deliver differentiated experiences – that are shaped by people and supporting policies, processes and systems. If you would like to discuss in more depth don’t hesitate to contact us .

How to Improve B-2-B Sales Force ROI (04/01/2013)

Using Service Review Reporting to Make Value Explicit

In most sales forces, high performers (20%) - by virtue of their very nature - are already delivering optimized returns, while low performers (10%) - even with additional investment and support - are unlikely to improve returns. Savvy sales and marketing leaders therefore recognize that average performers (70%) are the primary driver of sales force ROI (return on investment) in many organizations.
How can Sales and Marketing leaders increase average performers’ effectiveness, and thereby appreciably improve the overall return of their sales organizations? The most obvious solutions - hire more top performers, increase training, strengthen field management, improve administration, etc. – tend to deliver mixed results, and often underperform relative to the investment required. .
So is there a solution that delivers a real return relative to the cost? In our experience, working with B-2-B and B-2-B-2-C sales and account management organizations, we have found an important link between account revenue and the quality of the conversation sales people have with the customer. When sales people (average performers in particular) periodically engage customers in discussing value and partnership rather than day-to-day operations, account revenue is more secure and the potential for growth increases.
We have designed and tested a number of tools which empower and guide sales people to have these conversations. The most effective by far is to provide the sales person with a periodic service review report, which provides a simple yet structured framework to regularly make explicit the value of what you are delivering to that customer, which makes it easier to discover additional opportunities to grow revenue (see below)
For this report to be most effective, the metrics must be meaningful to – and ideally selected (or at least customized) by – your customers. This can be achieved through a quick online survey asking customers [1] which metrics they currently use, [2] which ones they find most valuable, and [3] which ones they’d be interested in seeing in a report from their supplier(s).
Most companies can design, test, and implement service review reports in less than 90 days. Minimal work is normally required to update the company’s selling model, s, although the reports may help identify desirable changes. The return is immediate, as value-focused conversations and targeted probing translate into revenues, while the cost is very modest. There is no magic bullet, but in our opinion nothing works better to increase the effectiveness of your average sales person – get the conversation right and revenue will follow. If you have any questions or are interested in viewing a real-world example of a value report don’t hesitate to contact us .

Ignore Your Customers at Your Peril (03/01/2013)

The importance of structured data in business decision making

Groupon, who along with LivingSocial pioneered the group discount concept, is struggling financially and recently fired its CEO Andrew Mason. In a parting letter to Groupon’s employees, Mason said “If there's one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what's best for our customers.”

Listening to customers can take many forms, but we believe that the linchpin should be structure. Without structured data, business decisions are too often made based on either anecdotal or no evidence (e.g., opinion of the most senior member in the room), which can lead to regrets. To get the biggest bang for the buck, especially in B-2-B, we suggest applying the following principles when surveying customers:
- In your communications, emphasize that you’re trying to build better working relationships, not just see how you’re doing;
- Also in your communications, promise that you’re committed to acting on the results – and make good on that promise;
- Try to collect data from all relevant contacts within an account, look for differences across those contacts (e.g., you may have a good product or service but be hard to do business with), and analyze the data at multiple levels – company, region, division, account, and even individual;
- Give the same survey to front-line employees, so you can see how well they understand customers’ actual needs and perceptions;
- Collect qualitative data (interviews, focus groups, open-ended questions, etc.) to complement the quantitative data; and
- Where applicable, ask customers to rate either specific or best-in-class competitors so you can identify your relative strengths, not just your absolute strengths.
A common – but we believe unfair – criticism of customer experience research is that it’s a lot of money to confirm what you already know. That’s a good “problem” if true, since it means you know your customers unusually well. Even so, there is value in verifying and quantifying your intuition. More often, there are insights to be gained which can make a big difference to your business through increased growth and/or improved retention. For example, identifying and saving a single at-risk account can pay for such research many times over. Trust your intuition if that’s all you have, but you’ll be much better off with real data behind that intuition. If you have any questions or comments don’t hesitate to contact us .

BEYOND RECOMMENDATIONS: TURNING RESEARCH INTO ACTION (01/23/2013)

Making research actionable

A lot of good B2B (and B2C) business research is underutilized, and there are many reasons for this. Sometimes it’s due to financial, strategic, organizational, or management changes on the client’s side. Sometimes it’s politics - the client doesn’t like or want to hear what the researcher is saying. And sometimes the researcher does not provide sufficiently actionable insights:
- - - Did you ask the right questions, in the right form, of the right people?
    - Did you obtain a sufficiently large, valid and reliable sample?
    - Did you integrate all available information (qualitative data, previous studies, client reports)?
    - Did you perform follow-up research on key issues or with key groups if applicable?
    - Did you draw all of the right conclusions - and none of the wrong ones?
Sometimes the researcher comes up with actionable insights but doesn’t do enough to help their client take appropriate actions. Based on our experience, we have four recommendations:
- Don’t just look for quick/superficial fixes. If you ignore more fundamental underlying issues (customer experience, value proposition, sales and service models, etc.), the impacts of most actions will at best be temporary. For example, marketing tactics sometimes can’t be effectively implemented without first changing how a sales force is organized and compensated. A performance improvement framework helps identify the underyling levers.
- Recognize that changing customer behavior often requires changing company behavior, which depends upon the what (products/services), who (people), and how (systems/processes) of your client’s business. We have found that a structured, systematic approach is essential.
- Think of your job as being done when the research is used, not just when it’s completed. There are often many potential opportunities – small and large - to add value. For example, we have successfully run in-house workshops focused on specific issues identified in our research to help client’s articulate barriers and come up with solutions.
- Finally, how long and intensively clients want researchers’ continued involvement will vary, so you need to be both versatile and flexible. Very few researchers can do everything themselves, so we have partners who are experts in customer engagement, sales effectiveness, talent management, and other fields as needed If you have any questions or comments don’t hesitate to contact us .

(S)he’s making a list, (s)he’s checking it twice! (12/15/2012)

Making measurement meaningful

Many researchers focus too much on how to measure and too little on what to measure. No matter what question and answer formats you choose, if you don’t have the right product/service/brand attributes your results will suffer. Here are five pitfalls to avoid when building an attribute list.
- Too many attributes: Asking respondents too many questions, even if they’re all good ones, can lead to early terminations, item non-response, or answers given without sufficient thought - and bad data are worse than no data. Our experience has been that data quality and quantity fall off sharply once you exceed about a dozen attributes, but this limit can vary by audience, mode, and/or topic.
- Omitting meaningful attributes: Econometricians know that excluding meaningful variables from a regression can bias the coefficients of the included variables (specification error). While exclusions may not directly affect survey statistics, they can lead to misleading conclusions (relative importance, etc.).
- Mixing apples and oranges: Attributes which vary widely in level of detail are harder to compare – and often harder to interpret. For example, asking about overall quality plus some specific aspect of quality can confuse respondents and confound analysts.
- Asking two questions in one: It’s easy to come up with an attribute that combines two aspects about which respondents may have different opinions. An example might be “replies quickly and completely to my requests”. What if replies are quick but not complete, or vice versa?
- Being too vague or too technical: If respondents don’t all interpret a statement the same way, then some are effectively answering a different question than others and you can end up with a mess. Up-front qualitative research can help you develop attributes that are written in the “voice of customer”.

HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU SURVEY B2B CUSTOMERS? (11/20/2012)

Align survey frequency to your ability to drive change in your business

One of the most common questions we hear from our clients is, “How often should we survey our customers?” In our experience, once companies see the value of engaging their customers in a structured dialog their natural inclination is to want to survey their customers more frequently, logic dictates more is better, however it’s not always the case. So before making a decision for your program here are some of our experiences you may want to consider:
- Survey fatigue: The more you solicit customer feedback the lower response rates trend overtime
- Reliability and bias: Transactional/ post transaction customer feedback may not be true reflection of relationship
- Managing change: Most businesses require time to improve performance, soliciting customer feedback without having addressed reported concerns creates dissonance
To summarize, in B2B populations are increasingly becoming over-surveyed, it is becoming more and more difficult to solicit feedback from customers, if you are going to ask your customers to take time out their day, make it count. Let your customers know what you learned from their feedback and share your strategies for improvement. Execute on those strategies, and only once you feel confident that you have positively impacted the customer experience, survey again. If your customers experience the tangible benefits of participating in this structured dialog, it will not only guarantee elevated response rates for subsequent surveys but also create the platform for growth and retention in your business. If you have any questions or comments don’t hesitate to contact us .

What Makes B2B Research Different from B2C? (10/15/2012)

Best practices for quantifying B2B relationships

Conducting quantitative surveys of business populations seems like it should be basically the same as for consumer populations. It isn’t. Researchers who don’t recognize and account for this are unlikely to achieve the best possible results. Here are some of the many things that make B2B research unique and need to be addressed to make program outputs meaningful and actionable:
- Methodology: In B2C, sampling a small portion of your customer base can provide valid and reliable insights. In B2B, sampling and only producing aggregate level outputs greatly limit the utility and value of measurement programs. Within a B2B buying unit, it may only takes one dissatisfied economic buyer to lose the business, even though users and influencers may be singing your praises. The key take-aways are (1) start with the objective of doing a census, (2) design your program to maximize response rates, and (3) be sure to produce disaggregated outputs (see below).
- Analysis: Linked to methodology, it’s important to decide at the outset whether the effective unit of observation is the individual respondent, account, segment or the organization he/she represents. As noted above, generally in B2C research aggregated data views are most meaningful whereas in B2B all views are important. The more you can tailor program outputs to specifically meet the needs of users the better - e.g. account managers to value the program they need customer feedback at the account level and must be able to drill-down to review individual responses from across the buying unit. Additionally, business sample sizes are often smaller, making certain aggregated statistical analyses appear less valid. Don’t get too caught up in examination of aggregate data, if you can drive performance improvement at the account level and individual levels, aggregate metrics will improve.
- Questionnaire: Business people are busy, so surveys which are longer, more complex, less engaging, and/or require looking something up are less likely to be completed than comparable B2C surveys. As a rule of thumb our standard sales enablement survey instrument takes respondents less than 10 minutes to complete. The time constraint puts pressure on survey design, only collect information that is mission critical.
- Participation: The secret to elevated B2B response rates is convincing respondents that it’s in their interest to participate. Messaging which emphasizes that feedback will help build “more collaborative”, “win-win” business relationship works well. Communications from people in their own organizations usually pushes up response rates. Incentives are generally not applicable or effective with these surveys, especially for senior level respondents. Selected phone recruiting targeting high value individuals such as key economic decision makers can also significantly boost response rates.
In the end, there’s no substitute for experience. ServiceQualityWorks performs both B2C and B2B research, but specializes in the latter. If you have any questions or comments don’t hesitate to contact us .

Making Customer Experience Meaningful for Sales Organizations - Sales Enablement! (09/15/2012)

Connecting customer experience and sales enablement

“Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation (with the right set of customer stakeholders) at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.” (Forrester Research) We are often asked two questions by our prospective clients: (1) “Are you a sales effectiveness or customer experience firm?” and (2) “What does a sales enablement solution look like?” To answer question 1, we are both. We use customer experience inputs to power our sales enablement solutions. We harvest customer feedback with the explicit purpose of providing sales organizations with meaningful and actionable insights to shape customer engagement strategies and tactics. In our experience many firms have customer experience programs yet few purposefully package customer feedback to specifically help sales organizations retain and win more business. Part of our success is due to the fact that we make customer feedback accessible at all levels - individual, account, region, division, and company To answer question 2: Effective sales enablement solutions provide valid and reliable insights to support the following mission-critical objectives: Most organizations are able to deploy fully integrated systems like this for a tiny fraction (often less than 0.01%) of sales revenues. Improving operational visibility for sales leaders, and helping front-line teams solve problems and focus on value, delivers an immediate ROI.

A picture is worth a thousand words (09/01/2012)

Perceptual mapping makes measurement meaningful for front-line teams

- Visually meaningful outputs can increase the effectiveness of customer feedback programs. Many customer experience teams focus on methodology and metrics, but fail to realize that if the data are not communicated effectively they may not be understood or accepted by their internal customers. Let’s face it not all users, especially sales organizations, have the time or inclination to get up close and personal with the data. We’d like to illustrate this point with an example from our own work. A core element of our standard research approach is helping our clients understand which experience constructs are important to their customers and how they perform relative to those constructs. When we started our business we used to represent the outputs as a table.

- At first we were puzzled why our client’s sales organization was often not as excited about the findings as we were. Then we realized that we needed a different way to represent these data so they’d be more useful to our audience.

- We therefore, developed value maps, which are easy to create at multiple levels (respondent, account, region, company). More importantly, they are easy to interpret.

Account managers and sales staff gravitated to these maps. They would print them out, make notes on them, use them to prepare for client meetings, and even bring them to those meetings. It became evident that insight – now in an accessible form – was driving behavior change. The choice of program outputs depends upon the material and the audience, and need not be an either/or decision. In fact, we still produce tables as well, because we find that they’re preferred by many marketing and strategy teams. The point is that presentation deserves careful thought – and sometimes experimentation. You want to avoid ‘all sizzle and no steak’, but you also want to avoid ‘all steak and no sizzle’.

Internet Surveys Can Be Completed Quickly, But Shouldn’t Be Completed Too Quickly (08/15/2012)

Get a representative sample, not just a large sample

Internet surveys generally require shorter data collection periods than phone or mail surveys. With enough outgoing solicitations, sufficient completions can be obtained in as little as 24 hours. This speed is very attractive to researchers (and their managers/clients).
However, people who respond immediately are often not representative of the overall target population. Researchers familiar with phone surveys know that it’s important to get responses from people who do NOT answer the initial call. However, fewer researchers seem to be aware of the similar risk with online surveys.
We recently completed a customer experience study which clearly illustrates this point. One of the key questions was how likely customers were to recommend our client, from which we calculated a Net Promoter Score (NPS). Daily results revealed that unhappy customers had something to get off their chests and were therefore more likely to respond right away. This is a pattern we have seen repeated time and time again. As shown in the chart below, had we ended the field period sooner we would have met our quota but produced a lower – and we believe inaccurate – overall NPS.
Internet surveys are easy to do but hard to do well. Resist the temptation to rush data collection, or you could end up with misleading results.

Why are we writing this blog, and why should you read it?

Moving Beyond Band-Aids Means Never Having to Fix It Again (05/10/2013)

How to Improve B-2-B Sales Force ROI (04/01/2013)

Ignore Your Customers at Your Peril (03/01/2013)

BEYOND RECOMMENDATIONS: TURNING RESEARCH INTO ACTION (01/23/2013)

(S)he’s making a list, (s)he’s checking it twice! (12/15/2012)

HOW OFTEN SHOULD YOU SURVEY B2B CUSTOMERS? (11/20/2012)

What Makes B2B Research Different from B2C? (10/15/2012)

Making Customer Experience Meaningful for Sales Organizations - Sales Enablement! (09/15/2012)

A picture is worth a thousand words (09/01/2012)

Internet Surveys Can Be Completed Quickly, But Shouldn’t Be Completed Too Quickly (08/15/2012)