Qualitative Research Highlights

The initiative’s qualitative research explores perspectives and insights from experts at leading business schools, published authors, customer affinity consultants, and solution provider companies, from both marketing and IT points of view. Our experts were asked a series of questions during recorded telephone interviews. The following highlights some of our customer affinity expert responses to date.

What do you think most impacts customer perceptions and predispositions about companies in the technology sector?

“I think the key point is the ability of the vendor to create and to communicate credibly the value proposition and secondly, do they do a good job of communicating the benefits of that offering.”

“Two things impact customer perceptions. First, how seamless and easy is it to install the product and to understand what you are getting and second, what it does to your system and the kind of support you get when you have a problem.”

“I think it’s the experience customers have with either individual companies or competitors. I think it is the experience that they, associates, friends, or colleagues have had with companies, which influences reputation in the market place.”

“Customer perceptions are primarily formed through the customers own experience with a firm. In essence, does the firm deliver on its promise?”

How do companies go about gaining better customer intelligence and analytics?

“Start with the end goal in mind, meaning companies should ask themselves the question: what exactly do we want to achieve? Then derive from that what pieces of data you need to diagnose.”

“The first step is to build a customer database. Where possible, the database should track actual customer behavior. The company should also engage with customers through a formal survey process.”

“Companies need to invest the intellectual capital to get better intelligence and analytics that are predictive and correlate highly to either customer behavior or integrity.”

What should BtoB technology companies be doing to better understand the needs and requirements of customers?

“There are two ways to do this. The first is to ask customers directly, which is an expensive option. You can only survey a sample of customers and there are difficulties in projecting to the entire population of customers. The second approach is database analytics, which many companies are now doing. They use it to better understand which products customers own and then determine the next best product they will buy and when.”

“First, talk to your customer not about your product, but about their needs. Second, do your homework with both quantitative and qualitative research. And, third, get senior executives back in touch with customers.”

“The number one issue is really communicating with customers and acting on that information to provide solutions to solve specific customer needs. It requires that individual-level feedback be made available to those charged with interacting with specific customers. It also demands higher-level analyses to uncover systemic issues that need to be addressed as a company.”

What is essential to retaining and growing the value of customers?

“The first is truly understanding the underlying customer need. Second, understanding where you create the biggest benefits. Third, communicating credibly via your sales force and documentation. And, finally, making sure that in terms of offering product service delivery your back office is in place and standardized to reduce cost and your front office is in place and highly customized to improve delivery.”

“Growing the value of customers demands an understanding of the products and services customers want and are willing to pay for. While that sounds obvious, the execution is anything but obvious. It requires an understanding of the specific customer characteristics that are most receptive to specific services. But increasing customer value also typically demands more efficient means of servicing customers. The key to doing this well is to combine efficiency with a better means of serving the customer.”

What types of marketing and communications investments are essential to advancing customer affinity and attachment?

“I think especially for B2B IT investment should focus heavily on the sales force…training and improving the quality of your sales message. Another type of communication investment is about brand building, making sure you have a strong clear brand on top of your strong product offer.”

“I would put investment into really understanding who my customer base is and the segments of that customer base, understanding the movement among the segments and the different value requirements among those segments. I would architect an experience that’s important, knowing what those ‘moments of truth’ are, and letting them drive and inform what’s done from an operational and communications standpoint.”

In what ways should technology companies embrace customers in the co-innovation process?

“Customers are actively willing and wanting to be part of the development process. This is where I use the “net promoter” concept pretty actively. If you know who your promoters are, those are the people you should reach out to. If you are not listening to the communities of your customers and haven’t actively created a place for them to talk to you then I think you are behind the curve. You bring them in at the beginning before you have built anything because you need to hear from them what’s important to them from a value standpoint.”

“Some technology leaders have technical excellence center where they invite not only customers, but channel partners and sometimes even competitors in sub-segments to come in and offer opinions…customers can come in and “kick the tires” early in development.”

“We work closely with customers to see the direction they want to take, but then we drive it through the standards. Once you get down more into the enterprise solutions we have customer forums where we let a select number of customers look at the evolution of the product and provide input.”

What systems and solutions do you recommend for better planning, managing, optimizing, and tracking customer relationships?

“The focus is not necessarily the system. Although you clearly need a system, the heart of it is building an internal process around managing customer relationships and tracking customer relationships, which starts with understanding what pieces of information you need to develop that relationship management process.”

“Timely distribution and easy accessibility of customer feedback is key to success. This requires a reporting platform that can accommodate all of this and more with real-time permission-based access for all internal stakeholders. Customer feedback, however, is not enough. It needs to be turned into action, which requires a formal action planning process. This process guides the day-to-day activities of an organization or project. It is the process of planning what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, by whom it needs to be done, and what resources or inputs are needed to do it.”

How would you recommend companies go about integrating, coordinating and harmonizing cross-functional and channel interactions with customers?

“In order to have coordination within cross-functional and channel interaction companies need to adopt and embrace an interaction orientation. This is a big shift in company thinking. It’s almost like shifting from a product-centric approach to a customer-centric approach. Many companies have created Customer Relationship Managers who manage all of the needs of customers…they are able to interact effectively and coordinate multiple channels across all functions.”

“One aspect is how much integration do you need to improve your operations? From a purely operational standpoint harmonization is important and I think it is the most immediate point to start. After that market intelligence, marketing campaigns and cross-selling are important, but unless we have the first piece – the operational piece - in place there is little purpose in doing the second piece. Start on the operational level and then move to sharing data, interpreting data across channels, across functions, cross-selling, campaigns, etc… It is more important to get the operations right in terms of cross-functional and channel interactions than it is to execute the second part.”

What criteria would you use to audit, assess and monitor customer affinity and intention to do business?

“I am a proponent of the customer lifetime value metric and intention to do business is one of the components that goes into the computation of CLV. It’s a great metric that you can use to realize higher dollars.”

“These criteria should be on a Customer Score Card, which has a set of line items that document the state of particular customer relationships. There should be transactional data and buying behavior, but also attitudinal information. With respect to customer affinity and intention I’d like to see more information on customer retention, contract renewal rates, satisfaction and perhaps customer attitudes.”

“Look at simple metrics like the flow of incoming customers to outgoing customers, the volume in value versus the volume out value, who is renewing or repurchasing and why, the rate of recommendation across customer segments and how is that shifting and moving, and then what is revenue and profitability by customer segment or group, and finally attach it to the trending and tracking of complaints and customer feedback…don’t make it more complicated then that.”

Where and how should BtoB technology companies control, manage and evaluate customer touch points and experiences?

“Depending upon which type of customer, for example, key customers then I want to have information on the presale, the funnel, the systematic information. I want to have sales over transactions in the various channels, markets, SBUs, and I want to have information on the ongoing relationship management, satisfaction data, post sales data, customer service data, and so forth. For infrequent customers, maybe the transaction data is sufficient. It’s about managing complexity and trading it off with feasibility.”

“I think it is about creating alignment across the organization. You first have to have a meeting of the minds on the stages of the experience and then a meeting of the minds on what the contact points are. From there, drive accountability down. If you can’t agree on the stages of the experience you can’t possibly manage the experience.”

“It has to driven by marketing. It depends upon the segment you are going after and the profile of the customer. You will change your mix between online and offline, the frequency you touch them, and since it involves long-tem relationships, part of it is keeping that communication going over time so that once they purchase a product you can maintain communication with them, not in a hard sell approach, but a thought leadership approach.”