Research projects help organisations gain a better understanding of the part of the business they are researching…

It could be an organisations customer segments, purchasing behaviour or even the sentiments held by your customers, an organisation is always better informed to make better decisions when the basis of their decisions are centred around the core of the organisational challenge at hand.

For example, your organisation may want to increase sales, the effectiveness of marketing campaigns or the ability of their call centre reps.  In all cases, having a clearer understanding of the customer is key to success of any improvements you make to achieve operational excellence.

But how can an organisation ensure the initiatives and steps it takes generates new revenue, increases efficiency and benefits the organisation as a whole?

Building a Business Case

Building a business case for your research programme helps your organisation set goals and objectives which can in turn, be clearly communicated to members in your team and senior leaders.

It also helps the organisation as whole understand the benefits of running such programmes and ways it will increase the likelihood of reaching top level goals such as retaining customers, reducing customer acquisition costs as well as taking steps to influence a higher share of customer spend.

As buying decisions generally affect departments across the whole structure of an organisation, it is important that you gather support for you initiative and this only comes when you have the ability to communicate it’s organisational benefits, its payback period and expected return on investment.

In turn, this will help you build confidence and credibility around the initiative that you’re trying to push through…

The key points to use in your report here should focus on…

• Which benchmark metrics are you going to use?
• What are the expectations you need to communicate?
• How will you gain the acceptance of the initiative by management?
• Can we create a scalable model for measuring success of improvements made?

Download your ROI worksheet here

Case Study

Taking our clients as an example, we helped design a research programme around enhancing the customer experience delivered by the organisation but more precisely focusing on the quality and training surrounding their call centre staff.

With our online dashboard, they were able to visually recognise that the quality delivered by call centre representatives differed greatly from across the globe…

The result? The organisation was better informed, and make decisions on tangible facts.  In this case they were able to re-route their customer support calls from the UK and US which averaged on £10 to £12 a call to Hungary which equated to £8 a call whilst at the same time, maintaining the quality of service that their customers expected.

This helped the organisation make a £4 saving per call which resulted in a win-win for both the customer and the organisation.

By building this picture around call centre quality, price and customer expectations, they were able to see and measure the effectiveness of the changes made over time using the initial data gathered as a baseline measurement.

What do you think? have something to say? Feel free to discuss this article below..