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Archive for the ‘Customer Satisfaction’ Category« Previous Entries Next Entries »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. Product Localisation Taken to the ExtremeTuesday, March 23rd, 2010  Let’s take an extreme example. Many Westerners are partial to a Kit Kat. In the UK, Kit Kat is the number one brand both as a confectionery item and as a biscuit (or cookie). In Canada and the US, Kit Kats also feature in the top ten chocolate bar brands. But how would you British, Canadians or Americans fancy a soy sauce-flavoured Kit Kat? Perhaps not licking your lips quite so much now, are you? In Japan, however, Nestlé has created a whole host of unusual flavours for its Kit Kat bars – among them soy sauce (the most popular nationwide), miso, green tea, wasabi, yubari melon, baked corn, sweet potato, cucumber, pickled plum, bubblegum and mango varieties. And it seems to have worked: Kit Kat is the No. 1 confectionery brand in Japan too. Many of the flavours are considered regional, and therefore only sold in the Japanese region for which they were created – and often for a limited time only. This has built the brand into something of a phenomenon, with domestic travellers snapping up the unusual varieties as souvenirs or gifts. A clever marketing strategy, right? Not only have they adapted their product to suit local tastes, they have chosen an unusual distribution strategy and created some real excitement around the brand. It’s certainly an interesting approach and gives us all, ahem, food for thought….! « Previous Entries Next Entries » |
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