A short survey can save you a lot of trouble
Take the guesswork out of client management
Big clients, especially in the B2B world, can be a blessing and a curse. Whilst they bring in chunky revenue and provide a real focus for product or service development they can also be the cause of the most frightening of times when the relationship stalls or stumbles.
A lot of great companies use Customer Thermometer to monitor the health of their key accounts. Why? They know that regularly asking their clients “how are we doing for you?” in a low-cost, light-touch way can mean the difference between ongoing growth and profits from that client, or a nasty split that blows a major hole in the revenue forecast.
If you’re not monitoring how your biggest customers feel about you, it’s very possible that you could be doing more to serve them better. Here are the 5 big ways that client relationships can go wrong:
- Your client is most likely to be “saving up” minor problems or issues without communicating them. Over time these grow into big problems.
- The people you know best within your client are most likely to be day-to-day contacts. They are not always the budget holders and/or the decision-makers. Over time, contact with these senior folks can drift. When that budget cut comes along or your performance is being questioned, it’s easy to be left high and dry.
- Very strong personal relationships between your account teams and clients sometimes make it hard for clients to be honest about the organisation’s overall performance, leading to assessments or tenders with competitors that the account team may be unaware of in the early stages
- You simply aren’t getting the full picture of how a big client feels about you if you don’t ask everyone impacted by your product, services or programme how they are feeling about you. Social media makes this even more dangerous.
- Traditional customer service surveys often get rescheduled or bumped by the client due to business pressure; online surveys are just ignored by the senior contacts. Months & years can go by without a review. If the client doesn’t get an opportunity to input along the way, things can rapidly go wrong.
Why not give key account monitoring a try? Sign up for a free trial of Customer Thermometer today and get real-time customer feedback without the wait.
