Customer Survey Consulting for B2B Companies

Consulting is an Option Before Your Project Begins

Not every project starts with consulting. Some leadership teams have already settled on the basic architecture, and we head straight into writing your survey questions. Survey consulting is an option, and we offer it so you can intentionally decide whether it’s right for you.

In the Consult we’ll determine whether your survey should tilt toward satisfaction with your products? With your people? Whether competitor questions are relevant? And much more.

Read more about our survey process and the steps inside each phase.

When Does a B2B Company Need a Survey Consultant?

Sometimes you can feel it before you can name it. The survey goes out, the results come back, and something’s off.  Your response rate is low. Or the findings land and no one acts. These are the problems a survey consultation solves.

If a survey consultation is needed, it’s not for lack of effort or tools. Plenty of companies have a capable in-house team and a full tech stack but still come up short. That’s because managing survey software is different than designing a survey that produces proven facts.

In addition, consider this: Companies have staff who manage survey software like Qualtrics or Medallia, and directors across marketing and operations who can follow deployment steps. What they don’t have is a consultant outside the feedback loop, someone asking whether the survey is measuring the right thing in the first place.

Managing survey software is different than designing a survey that produces proven facts and insights. The hard questions sit upstream and require specific expertise:

• What to ask
• How to ask it
• Who to survey
• When to send it
• What the invitation should say
• What to do with the responses once they arrive

When your B2B accounts are worth thousands or millions, getting your customer feedback strategy in place is an investment that will pencil out.

Can Survey Software Replace Survey Strategy?

Organizations buy an enterprise VoC platform and assume the software will handle their research problems. Others reach for synthetic panels or pre-built templates to get answers fast. But software gives you distribution and dashboards. It can’t fix a customer research strategy that was flawed from the start.

• Software provides tools, not judgment. A platform collects and displays data. It won’t tell you which customer voices are absent or why your last survey failed to move anyone to act.
• Templates break down in B2B. Pre-built questions and generic rating scales were built for broad consumer use. Applied to B2B, they produce averages that hide the operational problems you need to see.
• Synthetic panels miss the real end-user. Simulated respondents can’t stand in for the decision-makers and technical leads who actually control whether an account renews.
• Garbage in, garbage out gets expensive. Field a survey before you’ve calibrated your audiences and your research goals, and you get dashboards full of low-signal data that leadership quietly ignores. The platform isn’t the problem. What went into it is.

Survey software platforms and CX research firms aren’t competing for the same job. Software is how a survey gets turned into a URL, combined with a campaign, and sent. We rely on software for that, which is why we license several platforms, so we can work with the one that’s optimal for your questions and objectives.

However more than access to the leading survey software, you get our research mindset: judgment about which questions belong in your survey, what the answers mean, and more.

Some of our clients use a survey software platform they already license, and that’s fine. The platform handles distribution. We handle whether the survey was worth distributing.

Many Companies Think They’re Ready

Clients often arrive with a survey already drafted. Fair enough. Somebody put work into it.

Then we start peeling back the onion. What looked like a survey turns out to be a collection of interests. Marketing wanted one thing. Product added four more. A VP asked about something last spring and it never came back out. Every question has a sponsor. None of them share a focus.

This means that sometimes we tell a team that their questions, or the way they’re written, shouldn’t be used. Culprits include leading questions, scales tilted toward the answer somebody hoped for, a dozen topics competing for one respondent’s patience, and more.

A finished draft and a good survey are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where the work begins. Skip that work and you get a survey that does a lot of things and none of them well.

How Does Survey Consulting Work?

Consulting is a series of working meetings with your team, ending in a concise Project Brief that articulates your survey’s main objectives and metrics.

Minimum effective dose is our approach to survey consulting. We do as much as your survey project needs and move right into the phases of survey design and deployment. Survey consulting moves through three stages.

Survey Consulting Versus Customer Experience Strategy 

Here’s the distinction that usually gets blurred. Plenty of customer experience and business consulting firms will tell you they run surveys, and they do. But running a survey and customer research are different disciplines.

A management consultant reaches for a standard template. A researcher asks whether that instrument can even answer your question, then designs one that can.

We’re researchers first, and that’s the line between us and most customer experience consulting services. We don’t start with a metric we like. We start with what you need to uncover, then we shape your customer research strategy around that. CX consulting has a role for sure; it’s just not the same as a research discipline.

Have a Survey? Start With a Free Survey Audit

Nearly every client starts the same way. They have a survey; we review it, and we go from there. Companies like LSI, Convergix, and Yaskawa America came to us exactly that way, with a survey and plenty of ideas.

That’s the Survey Audit, a free survey review. Send us your survey, and we’ll examine a sample of your questions and tell you straight whether they’re good, fair, or not working. No pitch. Just an honest read on where your survey stands.

Who Leads Your Customer Survey Consulting? 

Martha Brooke leads Interaction Metrics consulting engagements. She’s a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) and a Six Sigma Black Belt. As a customer experience consultant, she works directly with B2B leadership teams to audit their feedback frameworks and raise the analytical bar on their VoC programs.

Read more about Martha Brooke ➔