B2B Customer Satisfaction Surveys in SaaS: How to Collect and Analyze User Feedback
Creating and distributing effective B2B customer satisfaction surveys is a vital step in understanding your customers and fostering mutually beneficial business relationships.
Analyzing user sentiment can unlock valuable insights that improve customer satisfaction, and skyrocket retention.
By the end of this post, you’ll know how to create an effective B2B survey, distribute it, analyze the results, and take action on what you’ve learned.
Ready? Let’s begin.
TL;DR
- B2B customer satisfaction surveys are a great way to get feedback from your customers.
- B2B customer satisfaction surveys can also be used to understand your audience better, find areas for product improvement, personalize the customer experience and build better customer relationships.
- Here are the main types of B2B surveys: customer satisfaction score (CSAT) surveys, Net promoter score (NPS) surveys, Customer effort score (CES) surveys, and feature surveys.
Here are the best practices for creating a B2B customer satisfaction survey:
- Trigger customer satisfaction surveys contextually so that the right customer gets it at the right time.
- Rather than force customer feedback surveys on customers, give users the freedom to share their thoughts on their own terms with passive feedback forms.
- Keep surveys short, interesting, and straight to the point.
- Combine multiple-choice and open-ended survey questions to collect quantitative insights and qualitative data in your survey.
- Offer incentives to encourage customers to complete long surveys.
- Always carry out A/B testing to test elements in your survey and see what is working, what can be improved upon, and what should be removed completely.
- Follow up with the customer and inform them that their feedback has been implemented. This is what we call closing the feedback loop.
- If you’re looking for a great tool that will help you build B2B customer satisfaction surveys without using code, we hope you’ll consider Userpilot.
What are B2B customer satisfaction surveys?
B2B customer satisfaction surveys are an effective way to measure customer loyalty, satisfaction, and experience.
These surveys provide a wealth of knowledge about customer engagement and help sales representatives suggest solutions to improve your product quality.
What are the benefits of running B2B customer satisfaction surveys?
In the hands of customer service personnel, a customer satisfaction survey is a roadmap to creating a customer-focused product.
Here are some of the most common reasons for running B2B customer satisfaction surveys:
Understand your audience better and refine your marketing strategy
Surveys reveal important details about your customers, beyond surface information like their name or occupation. By collecting the right data from key customers, you can create better buyer personas that gather more accurate info on customers’ motivations, pain points, and expectations.
Find areas for product improvement
Collecting customer feedback can provide valuable insights to help you identify any potential problems with your product, so you can address them before they cause too much damage.
The more accurate feedback you can gather from real customers, the better chances you’ll have to create a product that customers love.
Create personalized customer experiences
Personalization starts by listening to your customers to understand what value means to them. Feedbacks reveal this insight and delve into customer expectations of your product so you can provide them with relevant experiences.
Show your customers you care and foster long-term relationships
Collecting and implementing feedback is a great way to build an amazing customer relationship and show customers that you care about them.
This leads to happy customers who are likely to become loyal to your brand and become power users who refer others.
Types of B2B customer satisfaction surveys
There are many different types of surveys that can be used in B2B marketing. The best kind depends on the type of business you’re marketing to and the goals you want to accomplish with your survey.
Here are a few popular B2B customer satisfaction survey types:
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) are designed to assess the overall satisfaction of customers with your product or service. In these surveys, customers are typically asked questions like “How satisfied were you with our product/service?”.
This is followed by open-ended questions so that customers can give detailed feedback on their experiences with specific areas of your business.
Net promoter score surveys
The NPS is a better measurement of future loyalty as it allows customers to consider all their B2B customer experiences, as opposed to the customer satisfaction score, which measures one event at a time.
The typical question in those types of surveys is “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to your friends or colleagues?”
Those who choose 9-10 are your Promoters, aka most loyal and satisfied customers. Passives choose 7-8 and Detractors choose 0-6. The percentage of Detractors subtracted from the percentage of Promoters is the Net Promoter Score.
Customer effort score surveys
Customer effort score surveys (CES) measure customer satisfaction based on the amount of effort they made to achieve their goal. These surveys, also known as satisfaction surveys, are used to assess the effectiveness of the customer experience.
The key difference between this type of survey and the others is that it measures the customers’ actions. Instead of asking about their opinions or feelings, the survey asks them how easy it was to perform a certain task.
By asking about the ease of performing tasks, you can see if there are any patterns or trends in your data. For example, a result leaning toward the negative would indicate a friction point in your customer journey or user experience.
Customer effort score surveys can help you:
- Understand the reasons behind customer dissatisfaction.
- Identify areas for improvement in your customer journey that may not be apparent in other survey responses.
- Assess how well your team is performing in terms of delivering on customer expectations.
Feature survey
Feature surveys are the best way to gather feedback on the specific functionality of your product. Insights from these surveys will help you to prioritize your product backlog and also reveal opportunities for improvement.
Suppose they love feature A more than features B and C, then you should invest more time in developing feature A.
Another scenario where data from these surveys can be detrimental to your growth is when you launch new features.
A brand new feature in your app would benefit from feedback to help improve it. Among the questions you might want to ask are: Is the feature helpful, is it easy to use, and is there anything missing?
Best practices for creating and distributing B2B customer satisfaction surveys
Now that we’ve established the numerous benefits of measuring customer satisfaction in relation to a product’s growth, here are some best practices for carrying out customer satisfaction research.
Trigger customer satisfaction surveys contextually
Be mindful of the user experience when collecting user feedback. If triggered too soon, it could disrupt the customer experience and prevent customers from completing certain tasks.
Target survey requests very carefully to ensure that the right individuals are being asked to participate. Using the advanced segmentation tool in Userpilot, you can target the right user at the right time.
Asking questions contextually will lead to more accurate feedback since the user experience is fresh in their minds. For example, when collecting feedback about a feature, ask for feedback right after the user engages with the specific feature or process.
Don’t be tempted to trigger in-app surveys before a user engages with the said feature, or even as they are using the feature. Let them explore the feature, understand it, and decide how they feel about it before you trigger an in-app survey.
Let users provide feedback on their own terms
Forcing customer feedback ends in two ways: an insincere response or complete ignorance from customers.
To avoid causing a nuisance, you need to employ both active and passive feedback collection methods. It’s one thing to ask users for their opinion, but giving them the freedom to share their thoughts when they want to is priceless.
Making it easy and frictionless will help you collect relevant insights. It will also make users feel heard, cared for, and valued, thereby, encouraging them to become power users.
Miro, an online collaborative whiteboard platform, collects customer insights with feedback widgets that blend in with the UI. The button is present at major touchpoints so that customers can leave feedback immediately after experiencing any bugs.
Keep the surveys short and to the point
Keep the length of your survey short—around three minutes is ideal—so that respondents don’t get bored and lose interest before they finish it.
Stick to one topic per survey, and let logical questions flow. Don’t tire out your audience with long surveys; you risk them just abandoning it in the middle.
Instead, have users fill out short microsurveys at different touchpoints. This could come after users complete an important task like ‘completing a purchase.’
Collect both quantitative and qualitative data with your surveys
Collecting quantitative insights will help you track your KPIs over time, but in order to drive real change and increase them, you need to understand the reasons behind those scores.
You can combine multiple-choice questions (quantitative data) to focus on the ‘what’ questions, e.g., “What do you think about our [new feature].”
This should be followed by open-ended questions (qualitative data), which focus on the “why” questions that let users dive deeper into why they feel that way.
Offer incentives for completing long surveys
Who doesn’t love a reward after completing a task? Everyone does!
Because your customers are real people with very busy schedules, you need to respect their time and, if you can, offer small gifts for in-detail feedback. Not only will this encourage them to take your survey, but it will also give them a reason to answer it honestly.
You can segment users based on NPS and trigger a modal to invite them to take the survey. A great tip here would be targeting customers with either high or low NPS scores to learn the weak and strong points of your product.
Avoid bias in your survey
How you ask customers questions matters in your customer satisfaction survey. Sometimes, the way you phrase questions might make your research irrelevant if you don’t pay attention to potential bias.
Bias could stem from a couple of things; for example, adding the word “happy” to your survey question is already framing the answer toward a positive response.
The same goes for questions that are ambiguous, difficult to understand, or without a straightforward answer.
Compared to a general question, where customers are given the freedom to choose the answer they wish without any subconscious influence.
Always A/B test your surveys
Running A/B testing is a brilliant way to see which surveys are working and which are not. This survey test shows how respondents respond to randomized elements, including text, images, color, or the order of questions in your customer satisfaction survey.
To get appropriate results for your A/B testing, test each element appropriately. With Userpilot, you can A/B test an in-app flow (this will have your microsurvey built inside of a modal, tooltip, slideout, etc.) and test it against a goal.
From there, you can see which type brings more responses in without causing user friction.
Tag responses and identify recurring patterns
Analyzing qualitative responses can be hard, but don’t worry; there’s a tool for it. The task is to identify recurring themes and then cross-reference the data with product usage data to try and understand what’s most frustrating for users and what keeps them coming back.
In the example below, we use the NPS tool in Userpilot to analyze the results of a customer satisfaction survey.
Each element that’s A/B tested is listed, and customer response is tagged on the right so that anyone analyzing the results can see what’s working and what should be improved on.
Follow up with respondents after the survey and close the loop
When users respond to your survey, don’t leave them hanging. Thank your customers, since they have taken the time to support you.
Tell them how their feedback drives change, but don’t just tell them; show them. Update them on your next steps and when they’ll start seeing the impact. You should also offer help and answer questions if needed.
And when you act on the customer’s feedback, follow up with the customer and inform them that their feedback has been implemented. This is what we call closing the feedback loop.
Best tools for creating B2B customer satisfaction surveys
Now let’s examine some amazing tools for creating B2B customer satisfaction surveys, how they work, and how you can use them to create better customer satisfaction surveys. Let’s dive in!
Userpilot (that’s us!)
Tools like Userpilot are great for creating multiple types of in-app surveys, embedding them on your website, and analyzing feedback surveys.
You can fully customize each survey to automatically trigger by segment, user behavior, cohort, and other advanced targeting criteria. This ensures that the right users are asked the right questions at the right time.
You can also automate in-app experiences based on answers from each respondent. Use the data collected from the survey results to build a personalized customer experience tailored to each user’s journey.
As the responses come in, you can track the results of the survey within Userpilot. These results can be tagged and grouped by satisfaction scores so you have an overview of the performance at a glance.
With Userpilot, you can also customize your surveys to match your brand identity, e.g., colors, layouts, etc.
The best part of using this tool? You can do all these without writing a single line of code.
Typeform
Typeform is best for creating long-form surveys. You can embed these surveys in emails, websites, or your app. Typeform also has a special feature called Logic, which lets you build a survey form that responds to people’s answers.
With Logic, you can customize your audience’s questions based on their initial response. For example, if you were to ask a simple question like: “Are you a cat or dog person?” then people who choose cats would only be shown questions about cats.
This is a great way to segment users based on their responses, but it is also a great way to gather deeper insights about their preferences.
The sad thing about building surveys on Typeform is that it doesn’t give you an in-depth analysis of your feedback surveys. But, you can integrate it with Userpilot to get these analyses.
Conclusion
Here’s the bottom line: B2B customer satisfaction surveys are an efficient way to gather feedback from your customers.
By including clear, easy-to-answer questions and triggering those surveys contextually, to the right user at the right time, you’ll be able to gather meaningful data that you can use to improve your business.
If you’re looking for a great tool that will help you build B2B customer satisfaction surveys without using code, we hope you’ll consider Userpilot.
