Archive for the ‘Customer Satisfaction’ Category
Friday, May 23rd, 2008
In his first Thursday Night Insight article, B2B International China general manager, Alaric Fairbanks, assesses the impact that differing expectation levels have on how satisfied customers will be with any product or service they receive.
When was the last time you were delighted by your experience as a customer? Will you get the same experience next time? If so, will you be merely satisfied rather than delighted?
In a post a few weeks ago my colleague, Matthew Harrison, talked about customer service in China, in particular in the restaurant trade. I have to agree that in Beijing this sector is outstanding, but when it comes to expressing my levels of satisfaction, myself, along with almost everyone I know, would expect this to be the norm, so outstanding food, good service and reasonable price, would, say on a scale of 1-5, get a 3. Prior to moving back to Beijing, a scale of 1-5 would barely have been enough to contain my levels of delight with what I now consider normal.
When looking at a single market, be it food in Beijing or Liquid Chromatography in Chinese research laboratories, the weight of experience and expectations is not a major issue, and indeed is useful benchmarking. If, however, as frequently occurs, we are asked to “find out how satisfied our customers are in Hong Kong, Mainland China, across Asia Pacific, etc” the differing levels of background noise from customers’ past experience and hence expectations can make such comparisons problematic.
On multi-country studies, it is quite common to find satisfaction levels in emerging markets for some products to appear higher than in mature markets. Does this mean that customers are easier to please than their “sophisticated” counterparts? Definitely not. Let’s go back to the restaurant industry in Beijing: these same customers, myself included, can be demanding, or stingy even, in their assessments; however, take me to a bank in Beijing, and if I have a wait of less than half an hour and am able to complete my transaction in one visit, I would leave feeling extremely satisfied. We certainly need to be aware of experience and the expectations or weighting that it brings to expressing satisfaction, and make sure that we are able to account for these in our findings.
Finally, even though we have to bear in mind what customers may have experienced previously in different markets, and this may help us gauge what will satisfy them, we cannot overlook local requirements. Recently we had a client producing some very expensive and technical equipment for the health care sector – probably the leader in terms of quality in their particular product range. Despite ranking very highly on all factors they considered important, they scored surprisingly low on overall satisfaction, simply because the technical manuals were only in English.
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Friday, May 2nd, 2008
In this, his first Thursday Night Insight blog post, Jason Zhang, Deputy General Manager of B2B International’s Beijing office, takes a look at stereotypes and preconceptions, and reiterates the importance local knowledge plays in understanding people’s opinions and perceptions. Presently working out of the B2B International UK head office, Jason knows first-hand that, in spite of some common ground, there is still plenty to talk about when the East meets the West…
Before coming to Manchester for a two month placement in our Stockport office, I went to see my uncle in my home town near Beijing to say goodbye. My uncle, who is nearly 70 years old, has worked his whole life as welder for a local pharmaceuticals manufacturer, and has never travelled outside of China. In spite of this, he does know the name of Prime Minister Gordon Brown and he knows Manchester to be the hub of England’s textile industry. However, he also asked me “Are there still a lot of people in London who suffer because of the heavy smog?” It surprised me that my uncle still thought London to be a heavily polluted city as I know that this has not been a real problem for some years now.
To be honest, I myself also have some preconceptions about the UK. Two Saturdays ago, I went to watch Stockport County play MK Dons at football. I was expecting to experience some sort of hooliganism but there were none there! I am not a football fan, but just thinking about English football makes the concept of hooligans spring to mind.
Let me tell you another funny story about myself. Some years ago, when studying for my Masters degree at the University of Hull, I did some shopping in the supermarket ASDA. At the cash point, the staff asked me “Cash back?” I was so excited to hear that, as in our country the supermarkets have some kind of lucky draw to reward their customers by giving them cash or vouchers. So I answered, “Oh great, how much can I have?” When I saw everybody in the queue laughing at me, I finally came to realise that there was something wrong with my understanding of the expression “Cash back”.
It is fair to say that everybody has got his or her own perceptions and opinions about the outside world. However, the most successful companies out there are those which are very good at continually listening to their customers and understanding their perceptions. In turn, these companies then inform their target audience with certain information via specific vehicles.
Let us look at the example of Carrefour, one of the most successful foreign supermarkets in China. The French operator opened 19 stores alone in 2007 across mainland China, with the total number of stores now standing at 109.
Some years ago, I supervised some customer satisfaction face-to-face study projects for Carrefour in Beijing. There I leaned that this French operator was the first supermarket in China to introduce live seafood displays of fish, crabs, prawns, etc in their stores. They understood through listening to local customers that Chinese people like live fish as they are fresh. Previously, the only place to buy live fish was in the open market. Now you can see, in all the Carrefour supermarkets in China, big glass tanks full of water where live fish and other water creatures are swimming around.
So, perhaps you should ask yourself - How good is your company at listening to customers and translating this into marketing campaign actions?
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Thursday Night Insight, Jason Zhang, Market Research China, International Market Research, Customer Satisfaction, Market Research |
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Monday, April 28th, 2008
To some degree or another, loyalty schemes have been around for generations, but loyalty cards as we know them really took off in the 1990s. Company after company introduced them as a way of encouraging us consumers to keep coming back to buy more – often, in fact, persuading us to try or buy things we didn’t really want.
Tesco Clubcard is one of the better known points-based loyalty card schemes. Supermarket competitor Asda, meanwhile, rejects loyalty cards as a "gimmick" and considers it more beneficial to concentrate its resources on offering lower prices and better value across the board to its consumers. So who is right?
Is it really loyalty when shoppers turn up week after week collecting points on their Tesco Clubcard? Is it sometimes maybe just that Tesco happens to be the closest supermarket, and that customers figure they might as well get as many "freebies" and discounts as possible whilst they’re there? Unless they feel that they are really benefiting from them, many customers will lose interest in their loyalty cards eventually.
Of course, loyalty cards don’t just give rewards to customers. They give valuable insight to the retailers on the buyer behaviour of their shoppers – who buys what, where, how often and in what quantities? But is a loyalty card the best way to understand what makes your customers tick and to get them coming back for more? Great price, great quality, great service…these are all valuable assets which a company can offer to encourage more customer loyalty. At the same time, ever more advanced CRM systems help to build customer relationships and promote loyalty. And, of course, market research offers, amongst other things, market segmentation techniques and customer satisfaction studies to better understand and meet the needs of your various clients.
More information on ways to improve customer loyalty can be found in our white papers:
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Segmentation, Customer Satisfaction |
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Friday, April 11th, 2008
In this week’s Thursday Night Insight, B2B International Managing Director Paul Hague returns with some thoughts on the state of customer service in the UK, and suggests why satisfying customers is the single most important thing a business must do to succeed.
I probably haven’t read a more important article in the Financial Times than this one from Luke Johnson from Tuesday of last week. Luke Johnson you may recall is the entrepreneur who set up PizzaExpress and who now runs a private equity company as well as penning articles for the FT.
I was reminded as I was reading the article of a meal I once had in PizzaExpress at the time he was in charge. I had chosen a Caesar salad, one of my favourite dishes, and indeed one that any restaurant should be able to prepare. The salad was not up to my expectations in that it was light on the chicken. I did not complain.
When I paid my bill the waitress asked if everything was okay (as they always do) and exceptionally for me I explained that I was disappointed in the food. Without demur she made me out a card on which it said “Please return and have any meal of your choice and you will not have to pay. There is no time limit. It was for two people. I never did take up the offer even though I returned often to PizzaExpress. Rather I carried the note around in my wallet for two or three years feeling good about PizzaExpress and telling the story often to as many people who would listen.
It wasn’t a difficult thing to do, was it? So why is it that we are so poor at customer service in general? Almost certainly it is connected with the level of people we employ who deliver the service and the training that we give them. In restaurants throughout the country we are served by students who are paid a pittance, instructed to ask if everything is all right, and have no clue what to do if someone says it is not.
There can be no excuse for this. If service is one of the most important things that we buy, it is criminal, if we are in charge of a company, if we do not provide sufficient resources to ensure that it is good. The same comments which apply to consumer markets apply equally in business to business situations. In an attempt to reduce costs staff at service centres have no knowledge of the product (or the company) and no capability of dealing with a difficult situation. Service is even outsourced to people who have no commitment to the company. As much as possible is done on the cheap by telephone or online rather than face-to-face.
There can be no better time to set up in business as there are opportunities all over for all companies who believe in service and are prepared to invest in it. It is the great differentiator and it is service that delivers the highest scores in customer satisfaction.
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Friday, March 28th, 2008
This week’s Thursday Night Insight comes from Senior Research Executive Matt Powell, who this week reflects upon how customer satisfaction research can go much further than just helping a company better meet its customers’ needs
Earlier this week I received a phone call from my mobile phone operator, which caused me to think for a moment about the importance and impact of listening to what customers have to say.
I have been with O2 since back in my student days when they were known as BT Cellnet – over the years I have been on what could be mildly described as a ‘rollercoaster ride’ in terms of my customer satisfaction. From the feel-good days of unlimited free texts at the start of the new millennium, to the dark days of endless (and extremely expensive) calls to customer services. For many years it seemed as though O2 was resting on its laurels – content with having its customers tied to contracts, yet not listening to what they had to say.
In 2005, after a few years of customer service levels that almost drove me (and most other people I knew with an O2 contract) to leave the network, O2 announced they were to invest £18million in developing the customer services. In short, they started on the road to performing quite an impressive u-turn.
You might be wondering where I am going with this quasi-nostalgia, but earlier this week I received a phone call from O2 which caused me to think about how much my perception of the company and my satisfaction levels had changed over the years. The phone call I received did not contain the up-selling or phone insurance deals that I had wrongly expected – instead the attendant briefly said that she could reduce my monthly rate and increase the number of free minutes I had. Of course, that is always a good thing, yet the attendant informed me that I would receive a short customer satisfaction survey on my mobile after the call, and expressed her gratitude in my filling it in.
As I was completing the survey, I thought a little more about my answers and my satisfaction levels and realised that despite the odds, O2 had managed to turn me from a very disgruntled customer into a very satisfied one. This, in turn, made me reflect further on the impact of the survey I was filling in. By asking me to think about how I feel about the company, and by spending time to dwell on my thoughts, O2 had effectively forced me to think about how good they had just been to me in reducing my bill. If they had not done this, this positive experience might have slipped past unnoticed.
For me it highlighted that listening to what customers have to say is not only essential to improving a business (ensuring that needs are being met), it also pays for the customer to feel that they are being listened to.
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Matt Powell, Thursday Night Insight, Customer Satisfaction |
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