As the retail industry has learned, customer satisfaction research provides an efficient and effective means to learn about customers’ perceptions. From the fast-food industry to the automobile industry, customer satisfaction surveys are used to continuously monitor the pulse of market perceptions and to adjust product and service offerings accordingly.
Customer perception measurement is equally useful and important in business-to-business markets. Because B2B firms have fewer total customers than retailers.
It would seem that it is easier to monitor the health of a given account relationship. Such is not the case, though, because measuring the relationship health of a critical account requires determining how each of the key players at that account (and there could be 30 to 90 of them) values the supplier.
Throw in the fact that most of those people will not fill out even a simple survey and you are faced with a big challenge: how do you truly learn about the health of the relationship?
