Keeping your customers coming back for more requires knowing both the good and the bad about their interactions with and perceptions of your company. The nature of those interactions dictates whether your customer satisfaction strategy is supported by transactional surveys, relationship surveys, or a combination of both.

Evaluating the Ongoing Customer Relationship
Relationship customer satisfaction surveys, typically conducted once or twice a year, are appropriate when interactions with the customer are ongoing or very frequent, making this type of study common among many business-to-government and business-to-business companies. They measure satisfaction and performance levels in areas such as price, value, quality, service, innovativeness, and responsiveness as well as the company’s ability to meet customer expectations and needs.

Furthermore, they may include the input of several people at the customer organization. For example, a government contractor needs to know not only the opinions and perceptions of its daily points of contact at the agency, but also senior officers who would approve or disapprove the contract renewal.

Evaluating the Specific Customer Transaction
On the other hand, transactional surveys are appropriate when customer interactions are straight forward or only slightly complex. They are utilized for measuring infrequent, event-driven interactions, such as installing a network or buying a car. It’s best to conduct these surveys immediately after the transaction, when the experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind.

Transactional surveys are highly effective for specifically measuring the quality of customer service. In fact, some call them customer service surveys. They differ from relationship surveys in design in order to measure a contained customer experience all the way down to the specific employee involved.

Utilizing Both for a Complete Customer Satisfaction Picture
Some types of companies may require both survey types in order to implement a comprehensive customer satisfaction strategy. For example, a large federal solutions provider that has consulting, integration, and/or program management engagements with its agency customers certainly requires annual relationship surveys. But, that same company may also sell servers or other COTS products that result in infrequent, event-driven interactions with other customer points of contact. In this example, the company also requires transactional surveys in order to measure customer satisfaction in all areas of the business.

Federal contractors invest a great deal of time and money developing what they hope will be winning proposals, striving to effectively discriminate themselves in each area of government agencies’ RFPs. But, unfortunately, those RFPs don’t always accurately reveal and/or prioritize the agency stakeholders’ true pain points and decision-making factors. As a result — even with the help of expensive proposal consultants and thorough Red Team review processes — many contractors are not maximizing their win rates on lucrative government contracts.

Utilizing third-party professional researchers to conduct interviews with decision makers at targeted agencies can help contractors develop a more effective “playbook” or sales strategy. This type of qualitative research uncovers agency officers’ perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs relevant to vendor selection. It delivers invaluable insights into how much emotional weight they place on various factors. From there, contractors can improve their win rates by tailoring their pitch approach to each agency.

The Small Business Administration’s recent announcement about its new requirements for recertifying small business status makes contractor size a timely example. With some agencies, being a small business is going to help. With others, it’s going to hurt. Such business intelligence can effectively guide the small contractor on whether it should lead with its small business status in the proposal or, instead, put heavy emphasis on how its specialized capabilities coupled with partners’ offerings delivers a compelling solution. Conversely, the large contractor will know whether or not it should partner with a small business to be seriously considered by a particular agency.

Interviews with key agency stakeholders can also reveal and prioritize other key decision-making factors, such as location, fast turnaround, flexibility, innovativeness, history, location, backgrounds of team members, predispositions to particular vendors, and more.

Remember — the RFP doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes certain factors seem very important on paper, but have much less importance in the hearts and minds of the decision makers. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Often, some factors that could make a difference aren’t even explicit in the RFP. And, even if your organization has worked with a particular agency before, it’s not safe to assume that views there have remained stagnant or are consistent among all relevant stakeholders. The only way to truly know is to ask them.