The study found that 71% of B2B customers are ready and willing to move their business because of the way that the companies manage their relationships.

While 29% of B2B customers were fully engaged – i.e. emotionally and psychologically attached to the companies they do business with – the remaining 71% are willing to switch business.

One in five B2B customers have encountered problems with a company or product, with only 40% of customers believing the company resolved their problem. In addition, only 5% of these customers say they are ‘very satisfied’ with the way the company handled the problem.

Gallup found that businesses that have high customer engagement scores outperform those with lower scores by at least 30% across profitability, sales and customer attrition.

The Gallup study was based on 108,989 respondents across 19,093 business units looking at engagement levels of almost 18 million customers.