Watch Tom Taber’s MAPP Session on B2B Voice of the Customer Research

The Five Factors that Determine Customer Loyalty

Tom Taber shared key takeaways from two decades of Voice of the Customer research at the Manufacturers Association for Plastics Processors (MAPP) Benchmarking & Best Practices Conference. His session, Growth Through Customer Delight, covers the five factors that determine whether a B2B customer stays and how a Voice of the Customer study shows where you stand on each one. The examples come from hundreds of studies, spanning companies whose customers describe them as partners and companies whose customers cannot get anyone to return a phone call.

Voice of the Customer: Growth Through Customer Delight

The five factors that drive customer loyalty:

1. Quality and delivery are table stakes, so compete on lead time. Customers assume a good product will arrive on schedule. When describing a preferred supplier, they single out flexibility: shorter lead times and a willingness to accommodate urgent requests. Larger competitors tend to be rigid here, which gives smaller suppliers an opening.

2. Service and care move Net Promoter Score (NPS) more than any other variable T4 measures. In an analysis of 523 customer responses, customers who rated their supplier 9 or 10 on service and care produced an NPS of 64. A rating of 8 dropped that to 31. Ratings of 7 and below produced negative scores. Complaints behind the low ratings rarely concern the salesperson; they concern engineering, quality, and production groups that don’t consider the customer their responsibility.

3. Ease of doing business is half culture and half process. A can-do attitude gets you partway, but customers judge you on how long it takes to get a quote, a sample, or a CAD file back. Tom describes a packaging client whose NPS sat at 15 for years until a new leader assigned someone to examine every customer-facing process in the business. She found 37 touchpoints and reworked about 20 over two years; by then, NPS had reached 55, and the company was growing double digits annually.

4. Complaint handling is the tipping point. The Four Seasons trains for it before almost everything else and authorizes frontline employees to spend up to $1,000 to resolve a problem on the spot. Most B2B companies lack a defined process and comparable frontline authority.

5. Engagement extends past sales. Tom first measured it for a metal packaging manufacturer whose VP of sales wanted to know whether his people were in front of customers often enough. Engagement ratings for the salesperson correlated closely with NPS, closely enough that he has asked the question on every study since.