Many of our customers ask me how they should treat non-respondents from their customer experience management (CEM) solutions. I call this the sound of silence. But how do you identify if that silence is meaningful to your business?

In the research world we often refer to this phenomenon as non-response bias. Some researchers have reported that people who respond to surveys answer questions differently than people who do not. All that is well and good, but we need to dive a little deeper. Classifying people in the business world (particularly within B2B businesses) as respondents vs. non-respondents is not quite granular enough because different types of individuals have different roles to play within your sales process. Clearly, Net Promoter Scores help you gauge your success and ultimately drive growth for your firm. But before you can make sense of the difference between Promoters and Detractors, you need to know who's who and what type of influence they have on your business.

To understand why this is so important, I'd like to suggest a scenario, in three easy steps.

Step 1 - First, let's imagine that you have a fully stocked database of customers. Perhaps your sales team has helped create and refine this database over time, and that team is responsible for periodically "blessing" the information. That's important, because you are counting on the accuracy of this data to make good business decisions about your customers--and not just any customers, but your most profitable ones.

Once you examine the data more closely, you discover that you obtained many "bounced" responses when you tried to solicit feedback. You also uncovered plenty of bad email syntax, and you learned that some of the people you have been contacting have changed jobs, which means they no longer occupy the roles you thought they occupied. These are the first signs that something is awry. Many of you know the story: just because you have a CRM database doesn't mean it's accurate.

Step 1 is simple: can you trust the data? If the answer is no, go to step 2.

Step 2 - Now it's time to take charge. You tell the CEO that you can't get accurate data from the CRM database. This helps you gain the cooperation of Sales Leaders and Executives, Regional Managers, and Country Managers, who offer to help clean up the data. But it takes a lot of work. Either you can start from scratch and bypass the CRM database, or you can spend laborious hours asking people to clean it up. However, everybody is looking to you to tell them which customer names should and shouldn't be "in." However you do it, you successfully navigate step 2 by garnering corporate buy-in (no small feat) and plunge ahead to step 3.

Step 3 - Now comes the fun part: determining which customers matter most to your business. This is one of the most critical ways to obtain reliable, accurate feedback from your CEM system, yet it is often overlooked because it is assumed that individuals wouldn't be in the customer database if they weren't good customers. But remember, CRM databases are commonly used for prospecting, contact management and many types of marketing activities. In short, not every one of the contacts has a perspective that is meaningful to the business.

Let's say you work for an enterprise software company in the B2B space that primarily targets CIOs. On a day-to-day basis, most of these CIOs don't pay attention to the ins and outs of the software implementation process, let alone all the hard work your Account Team is doing on their behalf. However, many of these CIOs do value the business relationship you've established with them. They see you are a trusted advisor that helps you meet their business objectives.

Meanwhile, there are many other people who work for these CIOs who are intimately familiar with your product. They can tell you about the success of the implementation, about meeting required service levels, and about how your solutions are integrated with their businesses.

Finally, there are individual contributors (sometimes called end-users), who may not be tuned in to the subtle nuances of the actual implementation, but who definitely have a sense of the end result—such as whether or not your software helps them do their jobs.

You've now identified three main types of customer relationships, or roles, each of which has a different perspective on your business. How many people within each role should you select to represent that role when you sample your customer base? That all depends on your business. You can strive for one (which is of course true at the CIO level) or more. Either way, you need to establish a model that makes sense with respect to your marketing and sales strategies, and communicate that model to the sales organization. This will establish a context by which you can obtain feedback, and ultimately make sense out of your Net Promoter Scores.

In my next blog, I will address how to apply a role matrix according to designated customer segments. For example, is it important to apply some logic around big accounts (enterprise), medium accounts (mid-market) and small accounts? How will this affect your view of non-respondents?

If you have insight into these issues, we would love to hear from you. Silent respondents need not apply. In the mean time, stay tuned for more information that will help you succeed with your CEM and Net Promoter initiatives.