How to Forecast with B2B Customer Satisfaction
By: Manfred Bluemel, Zeitgeist Research
Tags: Customer Experience, Business, Market Research, B2B, Consumer Behavior

Measuring customer satisfaction is nothing new. Most companies — and indeed most of the Fortune 1000 — track customer satisfaction in some standardized form: overall satisfaction, NPS, and most often a regression analysis/driver analysis to identify the most critical satisfiers and dissatisfiers. Finally, you report the findings and make recommendations for improving customer satisfaction.

While there is much overlap in customer satisfaction methodologies for B2C and B2B companies, the opportunity to identify and address individual customers/accounts is much more available — and has much more potential impact — in B2B companies. The ability to identify which individual accounts are vulnerable and then address those vulnerabilities is a pivotal opportunity to increase sales, loyalty, and the likelihood that customers will recommend your brand to others.

In general, a single satisfaction score is inadequate because it only measures how customers feel about you at the moment. Especially for B2B customers, you need to understand how they will behave in the future toward your brand, whether they are likely to recommend your brand to others, and, most importantly, whether they intend to purchase your brand or renew the contract in the future. Creating a customer satisfaction index that reflects overall satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, and intent to repurchase/renew (or similar metrics reflective of the B2B environment) is the best way to understand the level of risk inherent in your customer base and to develop strategies to minimize that risk.

The Burke Institute created the Secure Customer Index based on those three metrics. Using a five-point response scale, respondents are categorized into four segments, creating a ladder of customers ranked by vulnerability:

Using regression analysis to uncover the key drivers that influence customer satisfaction, you can then analyze the results for those factors by segment. In this way, you can design strategies to address those factors that will move customers up the ladder and into the Secure and Favorable categories. Additionally, you can focus your marketing dollars on those factors that influence customer satisfaction and avoid spending dollars on factors that don’t.

Customer satisfaction measurement can be a powerful tool for driving business results, over and above the more traditional application to service improvement. By understanding the degree of risk in your customer base and allocating resources to keeping less risky customers, you can ensure your business’s success and future growth.

Where do you find the real power? By linking your customer security index to your database. Once you know what customers are likely to repurchase/renew and what customers are not, you will have a powerful forecasting tool to guide your actions and strategies.

Talk to Zeitgeist Research about revamping your B2B customer satisfaction program to drive business results and how to forecast next year’s revenue using C-Sat. Contact us!

Learn more about Zeitgeist Research’s customer satisfaction measurement products, here.