At B2B International, we literally wrote the book on B2B customer experience. Delivering a satisfying experience to customers across their journey with you is critical for long-term loyalty and lifetime value1, but approaching customer experience (CX) measurement in the right way is just as important to ensure that the results can create meaningful impact within your organization.
Through this article, I will explore some of the key considerations and common pitfalls of CX research, with a particular focus on what can be overlooked when conducting this type of project in-house.
The distinction between B2C and B2B CX research
CX research is typically a very different ballgame when your customers are businesses rather than consumers. This is in large part because of the increasing complexity of organizational structures, the greater deal value, and the variety of different customer types to consider.
Here at B2B International we have worked on hundreds of B2B CX programs in many different industry sectors and countries, and it is rare for only a single type of customer to be relevant to speak to. As we know from B2B International and dentsu B2B’s proprietary research, The Superpowers Index, the average B2B decision making unit is made up of 7 individuals within an organization, but different types of customer business are also key to consider.
From brokers, distributors, OEMs, to end-users, any well-formed B2B CX program will consider different stakeholders within each customer organization, as well as all customer types to ensure a well-rounded view of the experience.
B2B is also generally much slower moving than B2C, meaning that the frequency at which it is appropriate to track your customer experience may also be very different. Unless meaningful organizational improvements are possible between waves, conducting CX measurement too frequently can lead to nothing more than disgruntled customers and near-identical datasets.
Once a year remains the gold standard to target any individual customer with a CX survey, but what about transactional touchpoint surveys?
Many organizations rely on these to capture quick feedback on a given interaction on a more regular cadence. However, as you may recognize from your own experiences with brands, many people only share feedback in these surveys when they have had an exceptionally good or poor experience, rendering them suboptimal for capturing a comprehensive understanding of that touchpoint. This means that more structured CX measurement which covers the broader experience in more depth remains most relevant.
Despite the rapid innovation impacting the research sector, B2B CX doesn’t lend itself as readily to many of the AI research solutions that are flooding the market. In the consumer space, AI may readily be adopted to scrape review websites and other online conversations in order to determine what existing customers are thinking, but for B2B, conversations rarely take place in the public arena, meaning it remains essential to actively speak to customers to understand their experiences of your brand.
Now that we have established a few key considerations in relation to B2B CX, I would like to home in on a viewpoint which tends to uniquely impact this type of research.
The inherent bias of in-house CX research
The Superpowers Index tells us that customer experience is the 2nd most important strategy that B2B businesses are prioritizing over the next year. This is unsurprising when we consider a focus on customer experience management can help to differentiate a company from its competition2.
However, probably not everyone would agree that commissioning an external agency is the best way to measure your CX performance, particularly in the ongoing climate of economic uncertainty – why spend the money when you can do it in-house, right?
After all, you already have the contacts, you have the ability to send emails, set up surveys and talk to your customers on the phone. Is there really a need to go any further than this?
We at B2B International would argue, yes. Although there is no denying that the financial investment is greater up front, collaborating with an external partner to deliver your CX research program can deliver a greater return on investment over time. Here’s why.
Closeness breeds bias
Imagine a work colleague that you know well. You work closely together. You talk often. Let’s call them Colleague A. Now imagine that Colleague A has asked you for some feedback on how you find working with them. Or even that a different colleague, Colleague B, has asked you for feedback on Colleague A – there is a degree of separation there, but the proximity still feels very real. How honest would you be in this scenario, particularly if you think there is room for improvement?
This is the first potential issue with conducting CX research in house. You may not be colleagues with your account manager, but the chances are that you would feel at least a little badly about giving them less than glowing feedback, especially if you worry it could get back to them and make things awkward in the future.
The truth is, no matter how many reassurances you give to customers that their feedback won’t be shared widely within the organization, or will be anonymized, the doubt can often still exist in customers’ minds.
They may have been told this before when giving feedback to a different organization, only for their account manager to reference what they said in a call a few months later. They may have been invited to take part by their account manager, and encouraged to be positive, as the results will impact their bonus at the end of the year.
The psychological, and physical separation that exists when you work with an external party can have a profound impact on the data collected.
Evolving methodologies
This independence becomes particularly significant when we consider that many CX programs are now moving in the direction of combining in-depth telephone interviews with more traditional surveys. It is of course impossible to conduct these anonymously in house, but the value they bring is undeniable.
Through having more exploratory conversations with particularly important customers as part of your CX research program you increase the chances of hearing their views, as telephone interviews typically garner much stronger response rates. They are also appropriate for better mirroring the closeness of the relationship. Online surveys offer obvious advantages for reach, cost and time efficiency, but supplementing an online approach with this kind of interview can be immensely valuable in providing more of a deep dive into what truly matters to customers and how the experience may be bolstering the relationship, or damaging trust.
When you work with an external partner, they collect the data entirely separately and can anonymize it before it ever gets back into the hands of the client. As the client, you need not ever know who participated, never mind what a specific individual said, if that is a customers’ preference. And this creates psychological safety for a customer to be as open and honest as they see fit, without the fear of risking their relationship with you.
Now let’s think about the implications of a customer giving inflated positive feedback. The project is complete, you are reviewing the final data, and everything looks great. There are a couple of responses with a negative slant, so you feel confident in a lack of bias, but in general the feedback in glowing. How do you then know how to improve?
The CX programs that succeed are the ones that don’t exist to capture metrics for metrics’ sake but are in place to identify genuine areas for improvement. If everyone is sugar coating their feedback, you lose this opportunity to become better.
The importance of objective analysis
Another benefit to working with an external partner to deliver your CX measurement program is a greater degree of objectivity to the analysis. Most organizations already have a sense of where their strengths and weaknesses may lie, and it can be difficult not to be (at least subconsciously) led by this when converting the raw data into the final key insights and reporting.
Confirmation bias, a well-known phenomenon in the worlds of psychology and market research, can lead us to seek out information that confirms what we already think we know, and place less weight on information that is contradictory to those beliefs. This can be particularly problematic when analyzing qualitative data, when there are no objective quantitative data points to fall back on, and it is entirely up to the individual conducting the analysis to determine which themes warrant closer attention.
External research partners hold no such prior ideas about where the data may lead. This can also support at the questionnaire design stage, to ensure that questions cover all bases, and are not leading the respondent to favor certain types of responses. In the end, if the final data reflects some of the expected themes, you can be confident that these have been independently validated at scale, but it may just be that a theme your organization believed to be common was actually only held by a particularly small but vocal cohort of your customer base.
The results in context
Finally, one of the key challenges with CX metrics such as NPS, can be understanding what your results mean in context. What is a ‘good’ NPS in your industry? What would be considered best in class?
Having access to a provider with a solid set of benchmarking data for different industries (such as The Superpowers Index) means your results become more meaningful in comparison to others in your industry, giving a more confident assessment of how well you are really doing. The ability to ground your results in this way can be powerful when sharing findings with broader stakeholders and gives greater credibility to the narrative.
Conclusion
In short, we have established that customer experience in the B2B arena is significantly different from B2C, and that working with a specialist insights partner on your CX research project is the best way to keep things objective, at both data collection and analysis. If that partner is also a B2B specialist there are additional benefits to be gained, through in-market benchmarking, and greater contextual understanding of how buying decisions are made by B2B customers.
Conducting CX research in-house will definitely save you money in the short-term, but by investing in a strategic B2B CX program with an external partner, your return on investment, through the strategic insights and recommendations you will receive, is arguably worth digging a little deeper.
For more guidance on best practice B2B Customer Experience research, check out our Best Practice Guide to Assessing CX in B2B Markets, or get in touch for a confidential discussion about your CX challenges. You can also check out my recent podcast with a global manufacturing client, where we deep dive into CX trends and priorities from the client viewpoint.
References:
1Ali, N., & Shabn, O. S. (2024). Customer lifetime value (CLV) insights for strategic marketing success and its impact on organizational financial performance. Cogent Business & Management
2O’Gorman, S., & Schuster, G. (2024). Customer Centricity Innovative Unternehmenspraxis: Insights, Strategien und Impulse. [in German] Springer Gabler Wiesbaden, as referenced in Duss, C., & Sriyothin, S (2025) B2B customer centricity: A structured literature review and future research directions. Humanities Arts and Social Sciences Studies.
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