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Archive for the ‘Customer Satisfaction Research’ Category« Previous Entries Next Entries »The Office In My PocketFriday, September 24th, 2010
In his first Thursday Night Insight, Peter Mullarkey looks at how the Smartphone has drastically changed since Michael Douglas portrayed the Greedy Gordon Gekko in 1987. On seeing the trailer for the new Wall Street movie, I noticed the size of the mobile phone Gordon Gecko is handed as he leaves prison; to be honest I would have been hard pushed to have missed it, it’s huge! This led me to think about the development of technology within mobile phones and how in 23 years since the Motorola DynaTAC, a phone made to make and receive calls only, has changed into a device with such diversity that we are seeing the leading manufacturers develop differing mobile phone handsets for the needs of the modern consumer. Cellular mobile phones are a fairly recent innovation; however, they have been freely available in the UK for over 20 years. This takes me back to my first mobile phone in 1999, the Motorola Colorado. This large bulky telephone, with an antenna, was the first time I had used text messaging and apart from calls, it didn’t do much else. But the latest phones offer so many different features.  Smart phones are reinventing the modern office. With access to e-mail, Internet, calendar and more advanced OS systems, with the ability to view attachments, meaning that work can be dealt with in the palm of your hand. But it is not just these features which have helped them to become such vital additions to pocket. Applications are also adding to the way that we use mobile phones. Apple and Android lead the market, which means I can now check the weather, to make sure I don’t get wet when running for my next train home that I know will be running two minutes late, While sat on the train I check my bank account to make sure there is enough cash for the Tesco shopping delivery that I did yesterday on the new Tesco Groceries App, while on my lunch. It can also find the answer to the little questions that pop up during conversations and pub quizzes (I know it’s cheating, but it is usually for a gallon of cider!), all this at the click of a few buttons. Last week I wanted to remember the name of the shop at the end of my road, but for the life of me I’d forgotten, I reached into my pocket, opened a new browser and soon Google street view was feeding the picture of the shop on to my screen. I find that this saves time in the short term which is what makes it such a great tool. In my house I don’t have a landline as the mobile phone has replaced this for me. I am not alone in this, I found that at the end of 2009 14% of all adults in the UK live in this same way and this number will keep increasing. My thought on this is why pay for two contracts a month when my mobile makes all the calls I need, has a voicemail facility, caller ID and with “Say No To 0870” I can usually find a landline number for these rather expensive calls. Here at B2B International, With all the telephone based market research that is undertaken we understand the best way to contact people via the telephone. When speaking with professionals it is best to call on their work phone, with people in the trades in can be best to contact them on their landline when they return from the field and more importantly, the mobile phone is always within arm’s reach wherever you go! With it being so accessible and portable, you can talk anywhere, doing anything. So if like Gordon Gekko you’ve been out of touch with your customers for quite some time, then maybe you should contact B2B International and we can get in touch for you. A Recessionary Review of Market Research in the USAWednesday, May 12th, 2010  Hot on the heels of the successful opening of its Beijing office in 2006, B2B International took the decision to expand its operations into a further new continent – North America – and its New York office opened in early summer 2008. Not three months later and we had the meltdown on Wall Street, triggering one of the deepest and harshest global recessions in living memory. One question it might be appropriate to ask in these circumstances is whether we would have done things differently, had we known what was just around the corner? While I’m sure we would have thought long and hard before making the decision, in truth we probably would have gone ahead as planned. Why is that? It’s because, as many of you will already know, the market research industry has consistently proven itself to be fairly resilient in times of adversity. Perhaps saying market research is “recession-proof” would be going a bit far, but the industry is certainly able to withstand a degree of external pressure. Conducting market research is, of course, a means of reducing risk in business decision making, and when do companies most need to play it safe? When times are tough. When things are going swimmingly, you can perhaps afford to take the odd chance and risk making the occasional mistake. When the economy is in freefall, there can be no margin for error. We have to acknowledge that 2009 was a challenging year for many. Budgets in most industries were cut and – while we can argue all day about the logic behind it – market research spend, like expenditure in many other business areas, was reined in for some. Similarly, a number of our clients were forced to delay projects due to the economic uncertainty. Yet, overall, levels of enquiries and commissions have not altered significantly over the past 18 months. What we did, however, notice during the height of the recession was a change in the type of research we were being asked to conduct. The more ‘aggressive’ market entry and market assessment studies commissioned by companies looking to expand into new markets and find new customers were replaced by more ‘defensive’ projects such as customer satisfaction. It has clearly been more important than ever to protect what business you do have and look after your existing customers to ensure they don’t defect. In recent weeks and months, as increasingly we see optimism re-emerge in North America – as indeed globally – clients are gradually feeling emboldened. As their business strategies become more ‘adventurous’, so too are the types of research they require. Perhaps a little surprising to us in America has been the high number of clients commissioning product development studies during the recession. However, most of these have not been of the all-out ambitious new product development variety; rather, they have tended to focus more around improvements to existing products or extensions to an existing product range. While we cannot determine precisely the reason for this trend, we believe it has been a measured response to a real or perceived increased threat by competitors’ products and/or decreased market share. Product improvements are a means of establishing differentiation at the same time as demonstrating innovativeness and reinforcing a commitment to better serving clients’ needs. At a time when the economic environment is forcing many competitors to lie low, product development has the added advantage of giving you something to shout about. The intensifying of the recession also appeared to curb the movement we had been witnessing towards environmentally-friendly products and services. Many of the first market research projects we conducted upon arriving in the United States in 2008 assessed the potential for introducing ‘green’ extensions to existing product lines or launching an already-successful North American energy-saving product in other global markets. This type of project request became noticeably less common throughout 2009 but early indications in 2010 – across all our offices, not just in the U.S., it must be noted – lead us to believe that environmental issues will once again rise to the fore. A more general observation that can be made about the U.S.A. has been the optimism throughout the hard times. Perhaps being a pessimist Brit and used to constant negative media coverage about the doom and gloom we’re all facing, being in America has, at times, been like a breath of fresh air. In spite of rocketing rates of unemployment (up from 6% in September 2008 to 9.7% at the time of writing), record mortgage foreclosures, horrendous stock-market declines and trillion-dollar Government bailout packages, what has been noticeable has been the positive messages portrayed in the media. People haven’t denied the economic problems but have been very much of the opinion that “things will get better”, “together we’ll pull through” and “America will rule the world once more.” And there I was thinking the British were supposed to be full of Dunkirk spirit! In part, I think the presidential election of November 2008, which coincided with the start of tough times, generated a lot of positivity. President Barack Obama’s “Change we can believe in” slogan was a beacon for many. His election was seen as a chance for America to change for the better. Eighteen months on and the general public may not be quite so enamoured with what’s being achieved on the political agenda, but negativity has not taken over. Indeed, as we begin to see signs of improvements here on this side of the Atlantic, we are thankful that things have not been worse. I will conclude by referring to an observation made to me earlier this week by a British colleague, also based here in New York: “Americans are more confident, more willing to take a risk and therefore more likely to succeed”. That, in a nutshell, sums things up nicely. Don’t give your customers a product or service, give them an experience they will never forgetSunday, August 30th, 2009
In recounting a recent – and somewhat memorable – taxi journey, Matthew Harrison is reminded of how a product or service can really differentiate itself from the rest of the pack by becoming an ‘experience’. I must confess to being one of B2B International’s less tolerant air travelers. The 6 hours I spent imprisoned in a 747 on a Shanghai runway…the 7 course ‘meal’ served up by the good staff of Aeroflot (6 of the courses were salmon)…my interrogation by a wild-eyed immigration goon at Newark Airport…the dimwit who confiscated my cases at Rochester because I allowed said cases to complete two laps of the carousel without collecting….these and other events have been crow-barred into company folklore by my incessant moaning. As a result, it is a relief both to me and to anyone unfortunate enough to be my travel companion when my flight touches down, and all that remains is to catch a cab to my final destination. A couple of weeks back, my colleague and I returned from Pittsburgh to New York in good spirits. The journey had gone ahead without a hitch, our meeting had concluded successfully, and both of us looked forward to the weekend. We drank a couple of beers and took the opportunity to examine the front page of the Wall Street Journal, which was reporting on Bill Clinton’s liberation of two journalists from the clutches of Kim Jong Il. Oddly, the official photograph to mark the event (see below) featured a rather kitsch 1980s wall frieze, which had been dropped onto a Tellytubbies set and gate-crashed by the cast of Madame Tussauds.
To return to the matter in hand, my colleague and I had forgotten that the efforts of the airline industry to make the general public’s life a misery extend far beyond aircraft cabins and indeed airport walls. Whatever medicine the world’s aviators take to ensure unrivalled levels of inhospitality and indolence, it would appear that the New York taxi industry has been raiding the cabinet. The warning signs that B2B International was to experience a nadir in land travel were there from the beginning. The passenger window of the cab was jammed open and the back seat about as comfortable on the posterior as a broken Rubik’s Cube. My colleague and I had naively taken the driver’s rather blank grin upon being asked to drive to White Plains as proof of his willingness to take us there, rather than his inability to find his own backside in the bath with both hands and a personal assistant. Within 2 minutes of leaving the taxi rank, and well inside the airport perimeter, we drew despondently to a stop underneath a graffiti-speckled flyover. - “Where you go?” Our driver lurched into gear, trying but failing to convince us that he had the slightest idea of where he was going. Three laps of the airport’s inner perimeter and 25 minutes later, we finally find our way onto the open road and were heading north. Disconcertingly, the driver had been steering with one finger, most of his other 9 digits clasping a telephone, through which he received nonsensical directions from someone who also had no idea where we were or where White Plains was. Over the ensuing 2 hours we stopped and asked, we shouted at passers-by, we waved, weaved and guessed our way through the streets and back yards of Southern New York, before finally, mercifully, we arrived in White Plains city center. I dragged my weary body out of the cab and headed for home. And as I trooped through the streets I was hit, not by a Friday night drinker but by a kind of Eureka moment. I was happy! In fact I was exhilarated. I HAD ENJOYED THAT TAXI RIDE. The speed. The bumps. The danger. The nausea. The sense of the unknown. The laughs. The memories. I had experienced an adventure that evening – an adventure I am recounting to you now. An adventure I will recount to my children, and my children’s children. That useless man, that anti-navigator with whom I had shared two hours of my life had (unwittingly) met a need that few suppliers can meet. Rather than sell me a tangible product or service, this disorientated scatterbrain had given me a holistic experience that will live with me until my dying day. The savvy marketer recognizes that providing a simple product or service puts the organization on a route towards low prices and commoditization. In order to add value, and therefore raise prices and profit, it is critical to look beyond the tangible. In other words, sell a concept and provide an experience. Our taxi driver, of course, made two mistakes: firstly the basics of product and service were so intolerable that most customers would be uninterested in any ‘experience’ related to these. Secondly, he sold us a basic service (to drive us home) meaning that the thrill-packed tourism experience we endured was unexpected and therefore not paid for. So, I will not pretend that our driver’s marketing strategy was flawless. However, I thank you, Mr Clueless of LaGuardia Airport Taxis, for the memories. Your product is substandard, your service despicable, and your attentiveness to my needs non-existent. But, for a mere $90 (plus tip and tolls), you gave me an experience that was both thrilling and addictive. You, Sir, in one (and only one) respect, are an inspiration to all marketers. Understanding Cultural Differences Across B2B MarketsFriday, June 19th, 2009
Nick Hague this week takes us on a world tour, explaining why you should never be surprised to get such varied responses to your global customer satisfaction questions. We tend to have a human instinct that ‘deep inside’ all people are the same – but they are not. Therefore, if we go into another country and make decisions based on how we operate in our own home country – the chances are we’ll make some very bad decisions – Geert Hofstede After spending what seems like the last few months living out of a suitcase delivering research findings to a myriad of companies in countries ranging from Germany, Belgium, Spain and Ireland to the USA and China, it has hit home to me even more so, how important it is to understand individual country differences. These differences might be cultural, behavioural or attitudinal, but a researcher needs to know what lies behind a given score before making informed recommendations for action. Carrying out international research is all in a day’s work at B2B International! Enquiries for customer satisfaction and loyalty research have risen in recent months as the global recession bites harder and companies are turning their attention towards retaining their existing customer base. We are often tasked with carrying out customer satisfaction studies that cover multiple geographies. Implementing and evaluating such research requires an understanding of the different cultures and infrastructures within a particular geography; for example will a Chinese respondent answer an unsolicited telephone call or will an e-survey alienate half your target market in Spain? Another complexity that comes up in multi-country studies is making sure a translated questionnaire has the same meaning across multiple geographies. However, one of the most important aspects of carrying out international research is having the insight to why individuals from different countries around the world convey such different ratings; especially customer satisfaction ratings, when receiving a similar if not identical service from the same global organisation. So my Thursday Night Insight rant this week is about response styles and I pose the question: Why do customer satisfaction response styles differ between countries? Typically, in any customer satisfaction survey the norm is to use a 10 point scale where 1 means totally unsatisfied and 10 means totally satisfied. When asking this question to customers across different countries I can definitely make the following general observations:
However, one point that should be made clear is that these observations are generalizations and what we do see is that respondents from North America typically give higher satisfaction scores than their UK or Western European counterparts. One reason, I personally believe, is down to cultural differences. For example, I have an American colleague who works within our European HQ and on his first day at B2B International he greeted me with the question ‘how are you today?’ to which I replied ‘OK’. He looked aghast and said ‘why, what’s the matter?’ There was no problem or issue but my typical English response led my colleague to think that something was wrong based on our different cultural backgrounds. Therefore, based on these differences, Americans would typically rate a product or service as a 9 or 10 (totally satisfied or excellent) while Europeans would rate a similar issue as a 7 or 8 (an okay, acceptable, satisfactory score). Another reason for higher satisfaction scores in the US could be that Americans are more likely to respond to a survey even when service levels are good and expectations are being met whilst Europeans only respond if the service is poor or they have a gripe to bear – however, this is a personal point of view and so like any good researcher I wanted to know if any external research has been carried out looking at geographical scoring differences. Supporting the internal B2B viewpoint is a piece of research I came across carried out with 116,000 employees of IBM Corporation operating in more than 40 countries. Using these findings, Geert Hofstede from Maastricht University developed a framework that identified four different typologies based on national culture that impacted on response styles. These typologies were: Power distance: The degree to which people in a country accept a hierarchical or unequal distribution of power in organizations. Therefore respondents would typically score mid-response ratings and countries showing this type of response style include Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Philippines, China, Brazil, Chile and Mexico Uncertainty avoidance: The degree to which people prefer structured vs. unstructured situations. Cultures high in uncertainty avoidance prefer unambiguous situations and are therefore more likely to use the endpoints of the scale as opposed to the middle, thus exhibiting an extreme response style. Countries showing this type of response include Belgium, Poland, France, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Korea and Japan Individualism: The degree to which people in a country focus on working as individuals vs. working together. Cultures high in individualism are less likely to exhibit a middle satisfaction score because they would emphasize their individual opinion as opposed to their perception of the group opinion. Among all the response styles, individualistic cultures may exhibit extreme response styles and include countries such as US, Canada, Australia, UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Italy, Hungary and France. Assertiveness: The degree to which people in a country emphasize traits such as assertiveness and insensitivity to feelings. One could hypothesize that individuals in these cultures would favour more extreme response styles and that “softer,” more “sensitive” cultures exhibit more modesty or middle response styles. Countries that have been categorized as assertive are the UK, Germany, Italy, Hungary and Japan. However, it should be pointed out that Geert’s research is inconclusive with regards to the impact of this dimension on response scores. In conclusion, the key takeaways are thus. Every business needs a feedback loop to assess their performance and provide an ongoing measurement and benchmark for future progress. Customer satisfaction surveys are excellent at delivering this feedback, but different country cultures do impact on responses and response rates and so, when analyzing international research findings, a researcher needs to use their knowledge and judgement to whether a response is based on different levels of performance, or simply because of a result of cultural difference. In the future, when comparing international customer satisfaction research findings, it might be useful to take the following three steps:
Finally, to wrap up this week’s ramblings I should point out that when it comes to customer service and customer satisfaction, one issue that transcends all geographies is that it is imperative that the customer is listened to, and feels valued and cared for. Relationships are key in any business to business market throughout the world, and so invest in your people as they are the face of your business and typically are the driving force behind excellent satisfaction scores whether you are based in Torquay, Tokyo or Timbuktu. What Can Marketers Learn From Extravagant MPs?Friday, May 29th, 2009
In his latest Thursday Night Insight, Matthew Harrison reflects on what lessons we can take from the latest scandal that’s plastered across all the British newspapers. Despite working in the US, I do like to keep in touch with events in England – my home country – on at least a weekly basis. Most weekends I will spend an hour or two on the Internet looking through the newspapers and marvelling at the content. I read a couple of weeks ago how sun-soaked Britain – at a balmy 62 degrees Fahrenheit – would be ‘warmer than Tel Aviv’ later that week. I was informed a week later that Neanderthal men – rather than being wiped out by disease or developing over time into human beings – were in fact eaten by the French. And only yesterday I learned that a 73-year-old pensioner who performed a daring break-dance routine on Britain’s Got Talent has been claiming for disability benefit. Whilst the ludicrous content of these stories provided the reader with plenty of entertainment, their impact pales into insignificance against what is regarded to be the ‘biggest political scandal in decades’, namely the Daily Telegraph’s exposure of British politicians’ expense claims. The details of these expense claims have caused widespread offence and outrage at a time of economic hardship for the country. Some of the claims, it has to be said, were jaw-dropping, including an ornamental floating duck house (£2,000), moat-cleaning at a politician’s sumptuous country mansion (another £2,000), 2 pornographic films (£12), multiple toilet seat replacements and a £1,800 limousine ride to a football match. Other politicians have used public money to furnish their family homes or indulge in tax-free property speculation. As I laugh and wince at the tales of extravagance and anger currently filling the UK newspapers, it seems to me that marketers can learn a number of things: The importance of (authentic) story-tellingSuccessful marketers depend on telling an appealing story that can be defended as authentic. When a story is exposed as unauthentic, trust in the supplier evaporates, and the costs in terms of damage to reputation and lack of repeat sales usually far outweigh any sales made through ‘mis-selling’. The double-glazing salesman who sells the promise of a warm, dry home will not stay in business long if his windows let in the wind, rain and next door’s dog. The same goes for the restaurant that promises Michelin Star standard food that turns out to taste like a Dunlop tennis shoe. MPs, who ‘sell’ amongst other things financial responsibility and moral leadership when they are elected, kill their hopes of ever ‘selling’ their candidacy to the public again when they are exposed as frauds. The importance of transparent pricingAt B2B International, we are frequently faced with questions such as the following:
The answers to these questions vary hugely according to the market we are studying, the client we are working for, and a host of other factors. However, there is one factor that is universal to all of the pricing work that we do: Above all, customers want to know how much they are paying, and what they are paying for. In other words, they want transparency. A key reason for the negative public reaction to the politicians is not the total price taxpayers are paying for the politicians; rather it is that they are paying 20% or so more than they were told. People feel betrayed by this unexpected price supplement, just as they would with a product or service that did not meet their expectations. In business, also, a breach of trust can be fatal. I was recently furious when my bank charged me $15 for a new check-book. Not because $15 is a lot of money, not even because I don’t think my bank should charge me for allowing me to spend my own money. I was furious because the bank had consistently told me that my account was free and never mentioned that there would be a charge for new check-books. I felt cheated, and my trust in the bank evaporated to such an extent that I have now opened an account with a different bank. Problem-solving can turn a negative into a positiveA constant feature of the customer satisfaction studies carried out by B2B International is that satisfaction tends to be driven not by the product per se, but by the extended offer – the services that surround the product. This often means that a company can gain market share not by increasing product quality (so long as quality meets a certain minimum standard) but rather by responding efficiently and effectively when quality problems do occur. Whilst a number of MPs have sealed their own fates by blaming their extravagances on the rules they were working to or denying that they have done anything wrong, others have defended or even improved their reputations by apologising profusely and promising to reform the flawed expenses system. Indeed, just as many of our clients in industries as diverse as telecoms, education and industrial equipment have provoked significant increases in client satisfaction not through product innovation, but rather through improved aftersales and problem resolution, perhaps there can be a happy ending to the long-running expenses story. « Previous Entries Next Entries » |
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