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

Measuring customer satisfaction is an integral building block for any organisation wanting to leverage the knowledge gained from customer insight programmes.

Depending on your end goal, survey research can help your organisation to gather and understand information surrounding your customers, employees and key stakeholder groups in order to design relevant and effective processes, technology, management structures and programmes centred on the needs of group being studied.

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know, we also know there are known unknowns”

Originally said by Donald Rumsfeld from a Press Conference at NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium, June 6, 2002, this statement couldn’t be better to sum up the benefits that market research brings organisations.

From a top level, market research helps organisations gain the insight to allow managers and decision makers alike to reduce the associated risks in making difficult strategic decisions to make the organisation grow and to be closer aligned to meet your customers need of your existing or new products or services.

For customer centric organisations, the market research process is an intergral part in knowing opinions and thoughts on a product… but to delve in further, it can help managers and decision makers make decisions on how best to optimise their new products they are taking to market as well as shape the product concept, price point and identify communication channels which are best utilised to reach your customer groups.

In a nutshell, the role of market research helps solve the problem of bringing the voice of the customer into an organisation and and create and develop an up-to-date and relelvant portfoloio of products and services aligned to an identified set of customers wants, needs and preferences.

Applying a customer-centric philosophy throughout your organisation allows customers the opportunity to voice their opinions directly to an organisation so that their views are taken in account allowing a healthy amount of two way communication flow between your key customer groups and your organisation.  Interestingly, an in-direct benefit to this is the associated PR and Word or Mouth awareness you can build with your customer groups at the same time as your market research programmes.

The catastrophic events that led to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has left BP with one of the biggest natural and human disasters since the Ixtoc oil spill of 1979.

However, the case of BP is an interesting one due to the strategic decisions made before, during and after the disaster but could they have managed it better?

Although they have spent over £67.5bn to clean up the oil spill, as of October 2010, there was still 93 miles of shore line still suffering moderately to heavy oil pollution with 7% of the gulfs fishing area still closed affecting not just the local communities in the area but the whole supply chain associated with the industry.[1]

According to report by Moody’s Investment Analytics, the oil spill is predicted to impact 17,000 jobs and cost $1.2 billion dollars to the local economy.

What would CSM do?

In a hypothetical situation, how would CSM help? What research tools would we use and how could we make them understand the opinions held by their stakeholders, increase sales and the reasons why people would do their business with them rather than not.

The problem presented to BP is identifying how this natural disaster has affected the choices their customers are making when filling up their vehicles and getting the voice of those lapsed/defected customers from a grass roots level and into the executive board meetings where the right strategic decisions can be made to build back BP’s positive brand equity to levels before the disaster.

Although this may be a set a long term strategic decision made over several years, in our opinion, having the voice of the customer central to any decisions made should ensure that any steps taken are always aligned to the hearts of consumers.

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.