“The challenge lies in the ability to measure a client’s experience with a business across many different touchpoints.”

This month’s opinion comes from Ryan Higginson, Vice President and UK & ROI Country Leader at Pitney Bowes. He argues existing solutions, while useful, struggle to bring together the many touchpoints found in B2B, and therein lies the key challenge for businesses when collecting feedback.

Without processes, systems and platforms to capture client feedback and incorporate it into product design, businesses face an uncertain future. This is particularly true in a B2B environment as products and solutions are often complex and require significant client investment. Data on product usage and behaviours combined with customer experience feedback are absolutely critical for delighting customers and delivering B2B products which improve productivity and make life easier for clients.
 
Existing ways of taking a client ‘temperature check’ are always useful, but these type of solutions, often surveys, have their limitations. B2B investments often involve many different touchpoints for the client, and solutions like Net Promoter Score (NPS) can’t take all these interactions into account. For example, NPS doesn’t allow for detailed qualitative feedback, or deeper explanations into responses.
 
The greater your ability to capture feedback on customer experience, the more you can incorporate into your Quality Assurance processes, and the more your clients feel listened to.
 
For me, there are two critical success factors for B2B feedback: firstly, it must be easy for the client to provide a response. Secondly, the feedback must be timely, meaning just after a transaction or event so fresh in the client’s mind. There’s also no point collecting feedback if you don’t have the resources, systems and processes to build it into your business and generate change. We use several customer listening strategies, including:

• Prototype Testing
• AB Testing and Data Analytics
• Customer surveys, Interviews and User Groups/Communities
• Social listening across social media platforms
• Business review sites

With more SaaS type services being provided supporting the acceleration of all things digital, in-product feedback is another great way to capture thoughts and ideas from clients whilst they use the service provided, as well as gathering insight on new features and functionality they would like to see.
 
As I alluded to earlier, however, the challenge lies in the ability to measure a client’s experience with a business across many different touchpoints. For example, a client may have been delighted with their vendor at every step of the journey, but feels let down by inaccurate billing, or the length of time it takes to respond to their query. Capturing these sentiments in real-time and using them to drive change is where there’s a real opportunity to deliver an outstanding client experience.