When you analyze any problem using numbers, you will need to figure out what the key performance indicators are. These are the numbers you'll immediately examine so you can assess whether things are working or not. Especially when it comes to B2B customer satisfaction feedback, you will want to use the KPIs to stay ahead of potential problems and maximize opportunities.

How does a B2B company use KPIs to achieve that goal, though? Let's look at the basics of KPIs and B2B customer feedback analysis.

What Is a KPI?

A KPI is a metric of how customers rate things. If you ask every customer about their overall satisfaction, for example, you might ask them to rate their feelings on a 1-to-5 scale. There isn't any discussion about what they feel. You ask the customer to fill out a survey and they enter a number so you can develop the overall metric. This will allow you to compare customer responses, and you can also look at changes in individual customer metrics over time.

Common Metrics

The biggest KPI for most B2B companies is going to be overall satisfaction. Usually, a company will directly ask how satisfied a customer feels overall. In some cases, a company may also aggregate other metrics to create a secondary version of overall satisfaction. This can have value in detecting unstated concerns if customers' overall satisfaction seems high, even while real-world performance appears to be different.

Customer experience is another common metric. It allows people to rate how they feel about the state of business relationships separately from their overall satisfaction. For example, a customer might love the product but hate the experience of buying it. It is important to separate these things so you can decide what to work on.

Many surveys also ask about the net value of what a company offers. Similarly, surveys will usually ask how likely a customer would be to recommend a company's products or services to others. This is often called their net promoter score.

Making Sense of KPIs

You never want to obsess about one KPI or even one set of surveys. Context matters. If you see lots of dissatisfied customers, that may be cause for concern. Also, you should monitor any changes in KPIs across all customers over time. The goal is to get a sense of how your company is performing broadly, so try to focus on what you can do generally rather than what a single customer might say.

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