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• Recent Posts

  • What Did Mark Twain Know About Business-to-Business Customers?
  • E.G. Insight’s Eric Engwall and Nick Wassenberg Featured in Business Insider’s Voice of the Customer Series
  • E.G. Insight’s Gary Gerds Shares Best Practices in Gathering Actionable Business-to-Business Customer Feedback
  • Are Your Customer Relationships “Emotionally Intelligent”?
  • Three Reasons to Add Face-to-Face Reviews to Your Customer Feedback Efforts
  • Going Beyond Responsiveness to Meet Customer Needs
  • The Customer Confidence Crisis – Why Now is the Time to Rebuild Your Customers’ Trust
  • Martin Scorsese and Confident Customers
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As we’ve mentioned before, data about customers is multiplying. But information about customers – the kind that informs confident business decisions – can be harder to come by. So when I came across this quote on the blog www.gilliganondata.com, it stuck with me:

“A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.”
– Mark Twain

I think there is a lot of truth to that, and we see the effect in the work we do with our clients. When it comes time to make those big business decisions – like entering a new market, developing a new or improved product, or changing how customer service works – what leaders don’t need is more data. They need better information.

So, a big part of our point of view is that getting in-depth information from the most important business-to-business customers yields better information – and better decisions – than getting a pile of “shallow” data from a scattered sample. Selling to businesses is complex enough without mixing in data that comes from customer contacts who may not have much say in the actual buying decision. Less truly can be more.

So, when you’re looking into your next voice of the customer or other research project, it’s a good idea to think about what you’re really trying to get: one watch or two?

Nick Wassenberg
E.G. Insight

May 17, 2010 – Düsseldorf, Germany – In ongoing Voice of the Customer work with a global chemical company, Gary Gerds of E.G. Insight will conduct training for a group of key account managers. The training will amplify the effectiveness of the Customer Review Process (CRp^®), a structured method of gathering face-to-face customer feedback from an organization’s most important accounts.

Gerds, co-founder and managing partner of E.G. Insight, said:

I’m excited to bring our updated training session to a European audience. We’ve seen our clients leverage the Customer Review process worldwide in the past, and this training will continue to magnify their gains in customer loyalty, innovation, and confidence.

One consistent finding is that cultural differences never overshadow the need for suppliers to inspire confidence in their business-to-business customers.

The training will feature interactive exercises to improve how sales and account managers ask questions, probe for details, and incorporate actionable customer feedback into their strategic planning. Participants will also get an in-depth look at the Customer Relationship Hierarchy, the Customer Confidence Index^®, as well as learn best practices such as the “Nine Commandments of Effective Listening.”

E.G. Insight’s Germany-based client has conducted the Customer Review Process in Asia, Europe, South America, and North America since 2007. For more information about how the process has helped transform the way the organization listens to key customers, see the success story here: http://bit.ly/eginsightSuccessStory0510

About E.G. Insight - E.G. Insight helps companies worldwide develop and implement feedback processes that yield a better understanding of the current health of critical business relationships, and further assists clients to use that data to make better business decisions and guide organizational improvement.

For more information please contact Nick Wassenberg at 1.651.288.1469 or nick.wassenberg@eginsight.com.

As technology advances, the methods available to collect customer feedback multiply. With social media sites (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter), web-based surveys, and post-transaction reviews on sites like amazon.com, customers have the opportunity to provide feedback for every purchase they make.

And there is value in that feedback loop. Real-time transaction data can identify tactical issues, widely-shared customer opinions can be used to shape product strategy, and the social web can give businesses new channels to interact with some customer segments.

But if you don’t have a structured process to capture face-to-face feedback from your most important customers, what are you missing?

For large-scale, long-cycle business-to-business accounts, there is an opportunity cost in not making consistent face-to-face customer reviews part of the voice of the customer process. If your account managers aren’t having strategic and consistent customer feedback conversations with your most important accounts, your organization can’t do three things:

1. Go Deeper

   Online surveys and other web-based feedback systems have their place in providing insights into what customers think is or isn’t working with your systems for orders, transactions, or services. But to get past the what? and into the real details about why?, face-to-face conversations are much more effective.

   Getting an understanding of the issues your product or service is solving for customers is critical. (Some of our clients call it “the need behind the need,” or how you make your customer’s job easier.) Knowing what really drives your customers’ buying behavior comes from asking the right questions, and then probing and clarifying for details when necessary.

2. Build Relationships
   Having a conversation with your customers sends a much different message than sending them a link to a web-based survey. For some contacts – especially high-level ones – taking the time to discuss their needs and concerns can be critical to building a better long-term partnership.

   Having a face-to-face customer review process in place can also help expand the network of contacts between supplier and customer organizations. A consistent approach strengthens the overall relationship and guards against turbulence caused by things like personnel transitions, rapid growth, or mergers and acquisitions.

3. Increase Customer Confidence
   Between product recalls, government bailouts, and economic turmoil, customers’ trust in companies meeting their needs has declined. The impact of this lack of trust on organizations –especially business-to-business sales organizations – has been dramatic. When customers don’t have confidence in their suppliers to meet their needs, they place more scrutiny on purchases and can be more open to competitors.

   Face-to-face candid discussions about the past, present, and future of the business relationship is a powerful way to rebuild customer confidence. Your customers know times have been tough – they’ve probably experienced it firsthand – so being open and honest about your plans to improve will put you ahead of the competition in a key area: confidence.

In-depth customer reviews can yield enormous gains for key accounts. To learn more about how to implement a face-to-face customer review process, contact us today; we’d be happy to have a conversation with you about it.

Nick Wassenberg
E.G. Insight

In our work with clients, we help them to understand the confidence that their key customers have in their current and future ability to meet their needs. Among other things, many clients are interested to know whether their responsiveness to customers is perceived as a core strength or an opportunity for greater focus and improvement. Using our Customer Review process, our clients often include responsiveness as one of the performance factors they ask their customers to evaluate. The goal is to assess customers’ perceptions of such things as accessibility (are you there when I call?), willingness to listen, desire to help, and speed of response.

But is being highly responsive enough?

After reading comments in thousands of our clients’ customer interviews over the past ten years, it has become apparent that responsiveness doesn’t quite capture what customers are looking for. Any significant customer – particularly those that are highly dependent upon their suppliers – has a minimum expectation that they’re going to be able to reach a live person who can help them when the need arises. Finding a friendly voice at the other end of the phone to help with a quality glitch or shipping delays might be enough to solve the short-term problems, but customers are looking for more from their key suppliers. Responsiveness is what customers expect, but resolution is what they really need.

When asked about the responsiveness of their suppliers, here’s a paraphrase of what many customers say:

“You do a fine job making sure I can reach someone. You are also good at acknowledging my initial request for help or for information. I truly believe that the customer service person or the technical support expert is interested in helping me solve my issue, and most of the time they do. The problem comes when the issue to be solved is beyond their level of authority or expertise – when others in your organization have to get involved. So yes, you generally meet my needs for the initial response, but getting to the point of resolution on a more complex issue – that’s another story.”

In order to go beyond that first level of responsiveness, companies need to make sure that the people on the front line have a defined process for getting the resources required to resolve a customer concern. Companies spend a great deal of time and money equipping their customer service personnel with knowledge, skills and tools to solve and track customer issues – but the job is not yet complete. Beyond that first call for help, customers want:

• A plan for resolving the issue
• A timeline for implementing the plan
• Regular status updates from a trusted contact
• Direct interaction with those actually working on the solution
• Clear and candid communication when the solution is not forthcoming

The takeaway: For business-to-business suppliers and service providers, emphasizing the responsiveness of your frontline employees isn’t sufficient. The goal must be resolution – a shared understanding with the customer on the outcome of a particular need or request.

Eric Engwall, Managing Partner
E.G. Insight

Over the past few weeks, the media has been buzzing about the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer study (details here). It measures and reports the level of trust the general public has in entities like corporations, government, even friends and family. Some of the results are unexpected, such as the rise globally in the credibility people see in messages directly from the CEO and the lack of trust people have in their “inner circle” social network.

Some have critiqued the study, others have praised it, but it’s hard to deny the fact that the last two years have shaken the public’s trust in business leaders, especially in the financial services, automotive, and aerospace industries.

Not surprisingly, this breakdown of trust has also happened in business-to-business relationships. Organizations worldwide are doing more with less. Fewer resources often leads to declines in quality and delivery performance as well as less interaction with key customers.

The end result? Less trust.

And, of course, in business-to-business relationships trust is critical to loyalty, growth, and profitability. When channel partners, distributors, or OEMs can’t trust their suppliers to provide the products and services they need to meet the needs of the end user, both the bottom line and the future relationship suffer.

If your customers have lost some of their trust, the business impact – in both the short and long term – is significant. So how do you build (or rebuild) customers’ trust?

In the work we do with our clients, it happens in four steps:

Address and resolve current issues
Address the issues that you know your customers are already facing. Building trust without meeting your customers’ core needs is impossible, so allocate time and resources to resolving the most pressing issues. For the issues you can’t solve in the short term, communicate your long-term issue resolution plans to your customers.

Proactively listen to your customers
Collecting feedback from customers does two things: first, it lets you solve problems that you may not have known about, secondly, it reinforces the fact that you’re working with your customers, not against them. This builds trust because you are making a concerted effort to listen proactively instead of merely reacting to issues. When possible, the most effective way to emphasize these messages is in a face-to-face setting.

Act on your customers’ feedback
Taking targeted action on what your customers tell you may seem like common sense, but it’s not always common practice. Make your follow-up steps – taking action and communicating – part of your comprehensive plan for collecting the feedback. Align the appropriate resources, instill accountability, and be diligent. Your customers’ trust depends on it.

Continue communicating
This is the step that builds trust. Listen, take action, and let your customers know what actions you’ve taken as a result of their feedback. And if you can’t solve all their problems, tell them that too. Demonstrate that you heard what they said and that you’re making efforts to help them. Just taking action isn’t always enough; you need to make it clear to your customers that they can trust you to improve.

These four proven steps can put you back into trusted advisor or partner status with your customers. In the years to come, your customers’ confidence will be a differentiator.

Now is the time when your customers’ trust can be rebuilt. What are you doing to rebuild it?

Nick Wassenberg, Research Analyst
E.G. Insight