Keeping the customer at the heart of your decision making process is a fundamental part of any customer focused organisation as it aligns strategic goals, objectives and decisions throughout the organisation all the way from senior management all the way down to the delivery of individual processes never losing sight of why customers prefer to buy and leveraging that in a way that helps you increase your departments revenue generating potential.

But how can organisations make use of the data they collect from research programmes and spread customer intelligence throughout to ensure that their organisation is truly customer-centric?

In this post, I hope to outline some of my key learning’s in this area and so you can ensure that when you come to use research in your organisation, you are equipped with the knowledge to squeeze every last drop of insight at every aspect you choose to research.

It all starts with the Customer

It all starts with your organisations understanding of the customer… do you know why they buy from you? What they value the most? And what keeps them coming back for more and not deflecting to your competitors’ similar products and services?

The customer is the lifeblood of any organisation, whether it’s a global multi-national all the way down to SME’s and innovative start-ups…  without them, your organisation would simply cease to trade.

So wouldn’t it be nice if you could make the customer king of your organisation and give them a best-in-class service which they would not be able to find anywhere else?

Since the economic downturn, satisfying customer needs over and above your competitors’ capabilities has become an attractive and affordable point of difference to compete on.  Moreover, by designing, auditing and measuring your customer experience, your organisation can grow itself a competitive advantage which is difficult to imitate as it relies on primarily quantifying the intangible attributes of a customer journey and re-optimising/ re-configuring your organisational processes in aid of taking a progressive and iterative approach to evolve your organisations culture into one which is customer focused.

But how does a manager see this?

So how can the marketing manager use customer insight effectively to ensure that their actions, campaigns and initiatives return the maximum value possible? More to the point, how can the marketing department speak in the same language as the customer?

For example, if you were to sell financial products to a particular customer segment, a marketing manager may want to conduct a survey into identify the reasons why some of their previous customers had lapsed from the customer lifecycle and what the triggers were behind their buying choices to offer a product/service that was better aligned to the actual needs/expectactions that their customer actually hold and value and applying these attributes into your strategy to ensure that you can maximise the reasons why customer should buy with you rather than not.

To go more in-depth, a marketer can be deliver campaigns with targeted precision by basing their campaign choices on real tangible data, facts and information that give them the insight they need to take the risk out of strategic decisions and making promises to customers that the organisation can actually fulfil.

But what about Cross Departmental Alignment?

Following on from this once that the marketers have done their job and acquired their leads, how can the rest of the organisation benefit from the same level of insight?

Here is a generic example of how it may work…

By spreading customer intelligence throughout the organisation processes, initiatives and culture, departments are better equipped to understand the underlying values that the customer holds bout the organisation and are better positioned to serve their needs in order to achieve their end goals defined by top management and a strategic level.

Stay tuned for our post next Tuesday which will aim to look into how research can help organisations increase efficiency and profitability at the Director and Stakeholder level

Telephone Survey Top Tips

Using the telephone for engagement and data capture, delivers insight as it allows you to probe the direct responses of your participants. Follow our tips below to improve efficiency and response rates.

“Loyalty is one of the great engines of business success.”
Frederick F. Reicheld, author of The Loyalty Effect

Customer economics are changing. With one of the deepest recessions to hit the business landscape since the Second World War, it is now more important than ever that organisations keep their ear to ground, listening to what their customers really think and configuring organisational resources to best serve the needs of their customers.

Great slidedeck here from Colleen Jones where she beautifully summarises the key trends emerging in multi-channel marketing and the tools organisations can use to create and analyse their customer touch points which is an element of customer experience which ends up high on the priority list as it helps identify how your organisation can and should connect to your stakeholders in order to get the best reponse rates and results.

Do intangible customer experiences influence your bottom line?  Want your customer experiences to be sticky… read on…

We constantly talk to our clients’ customers’ as well as customer service and marketing professionals; this week a customer service manager shared his challenge which sparked this blog…