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Archive for the ‘Customer Satisfaction’ Category« Previous Entries Next Entries »Childbirth and How We Delight CustomersFriday, March 25th, 2011
This week Matthew Harrison thinks back to the nerve-racking day his wife gave birth, and reflects on what this tells us about the different ways in which we measure customer needs We headed down a tree-lined avenue and arrived at the hospital, an imposing building in an aspirational Connecticut suburb. A team of uniformed, white-gloved octogenarians ushered us into valet parking, transferred our belongings into a silver trolley and delicately placed my wife into a wheelchair. Our vehicle was whisked away by a Dickensian character in a towering hat. I handed $5 to his fawning colleague and scurried inside the building, behind my wife-on-wheels. The lobby of this hospital was a thing of beauty. Cherry wood-paneled walls met lush carpets; impressionist paintings vied for wall-space with portraits of benevolent local millionaires. One dry-cleaned footman after another escorted us through elevators and corridors and – finally and breathlessly – into a spacious labour room, our personal home for the next 15 hours. I reclined on a chaise longue, like many a husband before me. The flat-screen TV piped cheerful music into the immaculate room. I tuned my laptop into the wi-fi system and emailed my family the latest news. This room had everything a man could want. My wife seemed a bit angry about something. Must be the hormones – I’d read about that. The next days were the most miraculous of our lives, as our baby was born and our every need attended to by this most sumptuous of hospitals. The pièce de resistance arrived the night before we returned home, as the nurses served us a complimentary meal of filet mignon and champagne, before giving our new baby a trendy T-shirt and arranging for us to meet the ‘hospital photographer’. One sleepless night a few days later, I reflected on how lucky we were to be in America at this crucial moment in our lives. Where else would we have received such 5-star service? The hospital had not only met our expectations, it had exceeded them. The hospital had delighted us. Speaking to a friend back in England my view was confirmed. Jon’s wife had given birth in a West Midlands hospital, behind a flimsy curtain in a room full of caterwauling mothers and hyperactive visitors. No flat-screen TV, no chaise longue for anxious husbands. Nothing more than a clock radio chained to a concrete wall and a husband that was sent home to bed when visiting hours ended. I told Jon that his treatment had been a disgrace. The once-great nation I was proud to call home was falling into disrepair. What kind of animal gives birth without champagne, filet mignon and an unusually lush carpet? Jon was quick to correct me, pointing out that his wife was perfectly satisfied with the medical treatment she received, and that he placed more importance on that than on some pretentious undercooked steak. For good measure, he informed me that the UK health service provides a superior service to its US counterpart when it comes to childbirth, with infant mortality 30% higher and maternal mortality 15% higher in America (CIA World Factbook, UN World Population Prospects Report) . Treatment in the UK was less likely to delight but more likely to satisfy. Our discussion illustrated a frequent dilemma for market researchers and service providers. How do we measure customer needs? If we simply ask customers what their requirements are, they typically reply with top-of-the-mind requirements that any serious player must satisfy in order to survive in the market – in other words, hygiene issues or table stakes. A hospital, for example, must deliver babies and perform operations safely in order to remain ‘in business’. The alternative way of measuring customers’ needs is to calculate derived importance by correlating respondents’ satisfaction scores on a range of issues against their overall satisfaction with the supplier. This provides us with the drivers of satisfaction. Requirements which correlate strongly with satisfaction are differentiating factors, the non-essential requirements that – so long as basic needs are satisfied – allow companies to pick up market share by distinguishing themselves from the competition. In order to establish customer loyalty, companies must perform effectively against both stated and derived importance. The company that performs poorly against needs with strong stated importance will not be in business for long, because its offering is simply unacceptable. The company that performs poorly against needs with strong derived importance may survive for a while, but in a competitive market will become commoditized and see its margins erode over time. Engaging With Your StaffWednesday, March 2nd, 2011
 The Sunday Times best small companies to work for list has this week been published and yet again, even in these trying times, small companies show that even with recent job losses and pay cuts/freezes, employee engagement is key to a profitable future. The survey findings also show many similarities to what we see in all the employee satisfaction surveys we carry out at B2B International – your staff are not solely motivated by salary! Looking at those companies in the top positions, most invested in training while others organised charity work or benefits other than salary to keep employees motivated. Communication was also key and was increased in an effort to encourage people to come up with cost-saving ideas. As a result, many of the firms that are staff focused are now in a better state of health and with a more engaged workforce comes confidence that they can deal with the future, no matter what it throws at them. For more information on how B2B International can help your company’s employee engagement programme visit http://www.b2binternational.com/research-and-intelligence/employee-engagement A Moment To Be Social With Your CustomersThursday, January 6th, 2011  Most large US companies* are not currently using social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to gather customer feedback, according to the findings of a recent study conducted by research technology firm MarketTools. This aligns with recent findings from our business confidence tracker for Business Link in London whereby we survey 3,000 SME business owners in London and found that only 37% are using social media for business purposes. The MarketTools study also revealed a disparity in the way companies think and the way they act with regard to customer satisfaction. Although 92% of respondents believe that satisfied customers are very important or extremely important to their company’s bottom line, fewer than half (42%) solicit customer feedback on a continuous basis, and more than one-fifth (22%) invite feedback only once a year or not at all. If there is one New Year’s Resolution we should all be making as marketers is making sure we keep on top of customer feedback to make sure our customers stay loyal and remain satisfied. For more information on how B2B International can help your company improve customer loyalty please visit our white paper on Customer Satisfaction *Sample of 810 executives at companies with annual revenue greater than $100m Creating Customer LoyaltyTuesday, May 18th, 2010  Although there is clearly a link between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, a satisfied customer may not actually always be a loyal one. Still, there is no doubting that every business wants to achieve as many loyal customers as possible. You could be forgiven for thinking that loyalty card schemes – such as those operated by many supermarket chains – are all about creating loyal customers (the more cynical among you might say they are purely for collecting data on said customers…). However, new YouGov SixthSense research in fact indicates that loyalty card programmes are not creating customer loyalty for retailers. More than 90% of shoppers surveyed for this study would not stop shopping at a retailer if they scrapped their loyalty card scheme, and only 17% choose where to shop based on such schemes. What’s more, in spite of the widespread use of loyalty card programmes, half of shoppers don’t think it’s worthwhile to collect points and would prefer to convert points into a money-off discount at the till. A quarter would rather retailers offer more promotional deals and one in ten rarely redeems points even if they have collected them. To discover better ways of ensuring customer loyalty, read our white paper: Loyalty – How to Win Devotion from your Customers The Real PictureThursday, May 13th, 2010  By giving us an insight into the creative and sometimes surreal world of advertising, Simi Dhawan rightly reminds us that it’s better to risk knowing about a failed plan than to risk implementing a plan which will fail… As is routine within our so-called “modern world”, no week would follow the norm if a plurality of “forwarded emails” did not make their merry way into my personal inbox. Whilst I can appreciate the heartfelt sentiments that might go into a friendship chain mail, I’ve seldom the patience to pass these on and, frankly, I find them more than mildly irritating. (Having to manually delete each one wastes at least a few seconds of my life – possibly several hours spread over a lifetime!) However, one which didn’t follow this same ill-fate by instantly grabbing my attention included the artwork of a Mr. Julian Beever – a British artist now famous for his ability to create 3-D illusions using just chalk (and an eye for detail) on pavements all over the globe. By some, he has been bestowed the respectable title “Pavement Picasso”. I include one such example of his ingenious work below:    An array of marketing mediums ensure that we meet the goals we set ourselves in getting our message across and reaching our target audience – ranging from branded products, literature and POS materials, through to posters, banners, newspapers, trade magazines, television adverts and internet websites (to further examine some creative design ideas, you can view images of multitudinous campaigns at www.toxel.com). This week alone has seen my involvement in several projects centred on this ever-present theme of advertising and, whilst I’d like to conclude that research outcomes have offered me a foolproof insight into surefire campaign approaches, I’m afraid I can’t quite claim that to be the case. In practice, every company needs to assess their (often inter-related) unique target markets and end-goals thoroughly, to create a powerful and effective bespoke solution to the continual challenge of raising both brand awareness and perception. Unfortunately, ad-hoc choices based around a “gut feeling” of what might work, in short, might work – and that’s the point. It’s a time-consuming and expensive process to invest in any such campaign and, to avoid unnecessary risk-taking, we shouldn’t launch into these blindly – careful planning is imperative. Led from research experiences thus far, as a starting point, my advice is to seek thorough answers to the following 3 questions (although possibly not at the same time):
Most interestingly, it is the first question which is most understated in practice and actually, it is the pre-cursor to the others. Only too often, we see that it is sometimes a pre-agreed business plan or budget allocation which sets our creative minds spinning – and very like the 3-D drawings we saw earlier, our own preconceptions offer a sometimes misleading perspective. As a result, possibly in our understandable eagerness to reach our customers, our focus naturally tends to shift to the latter two questions which effectively cover off questions we want to know to set the ball in motion. Questions such as “What do they want?” “Which are their preferred advertising mediums?” “How can we improve these or better our competition?” Whilst these are crucial questions, a fundamental backdrop to bettering our understanding is “Who is our audience?” “Do their needs differ based on different parts of this market or are they similar?” “Do we need to consider multiple avenues of communication to suitably engage with different parts of our market?”…and so forth. Collectively, all questions we ask should strike the correct balance between what we would like to ask in relation to our preconceptions and what we need to know to make suitably informed decisions – even if the outcome directs us to completely review our current strategies and plans (better to risk knowing about a failed plan than to risk implementing a plan which will fail!). In short, as our “Pavement Picasso” might commend – our chalk is any problem drawn-out or created by a business; the pavement is our canvas or research design to lay out the problem; the passers-by are our audience feeding us their thoughts and opinions……whilst we, the researchers, seek to ensure that our perspectives are not skewed by any illusions…so that we can help reveal the real picture. « Previous Entries Next Entries » |
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