Account risk stays hidden when Key Account Teams assume the customer trusts them.

Watch: Account risk stays hidden when Key Account Teams assume the customer trusts them

Account risk stays hidden when Key Account Teams assume the customer trusts them.

What happens when the Key Account Team measures the relationship from the inside, by how the last meeting felt and how the last renewal went?

You get a confident team and an uncertain customer, and the gap stays invisible until something tests it. Risk hides in the stakeholders nobody on the team has talked to this quarter. Risk hides in the business unit where your champion left and no one replaced them. Risk hides in the issue that was marked handled and never followed up. Risk hides in the renewal that got signed because switching was inconvenient that year. Risk hides in the competitor who is already in the building through a different door.

The research lines up with what we saw. PwC asked executives and customers the same question about trust. 90% of executives believed customers highly trust their company. 30% of customers said they did (Trust in US Business Survey, 2024). The same survey found four in ten customers had stopped buying from a company after losing trust in it. And McKinsey found 54% of B2B decision makers would switch suppliers after a poor-quality customer experience (2024). Most of the time the gap comes from where the team is standing. From inside the account, the relationship looks like the last conversation. From the customer's side, it looks like every conversation, across every department, since the contract was signed.

Seeing the account the way the customer sees it is one of the main reasons we built the Vitality Index: it surfaces the gaps across 7 partnership domains in real time, so the Key Account Team finds the weak spots before a renewal or a competitor does.