“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

Excerpt from the article:

Nick Wassenberg, Research Analyst for E.G. Insight, Inc., suggests several factors that could present ideal times to measure what your customers are thinking.

For internal factors, such as making the decision to expand into new markets, you would need to perform customer research to understand what those new customers want. And then there are external factors, such as the recession, which might inspire you to find out how it’s affecting your customers’ buying decisions and needs.

As Eric Engwall, a managing partner for E.G. Insight, puts it, “Reality never works out like your business plan.” So it’s crucial to get out there, find out what your customers are thinking, and adjust.

You’ll make the biggest impact if you focus your customer research on these topics:

• More effective product development
• Better customer service and satisfaction
• More targeted marketing efforts
• Increased knowledge about your competitors’ products and how customers are using them

The series is sponsored by Toyota and will be released in two parts: the first is a summary of what can be learned from listening to customers and the second reviews various tools companies can use to capture customer feedback.

The full report can be found here: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-you-can-learn-from-listening-to-your-customers-2010-5

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.

Are you missing a chance to make your customer relationships more emotionally intelligent?

I think there’s an opportunity that many organizations miss – especially businesses that sell complex products or services to other businesses – in the way they interact and communicate with their customers, including the way they collect customer feedback. There is a tendency to collect customer feedback in two ways: 1) doing operational or tactical performance surveys, and 2) having account management teams gather ad-hoc feedback while putting out fires or working on the next proposal. While both of these methods can be beneficial, there’s a chance to make an emotional connection as well.

My point of view – and one that our customers share – is that taking the time to conduct an in-depth interview process to gather customer feedback is critical. Not only can you probe deeper into key issues, but it gives your organization a chance to reinforce person-to-person bonds consistently across all accounts. If you’re selling consultative solutions to your customers’ problems, taking a “high-touch” rather than high-tech approach to listening to their feedback will help the relationship thrive over time.

In an era of shaken confidence and trust, isn’t now the perfect time to put emotional intelligence into the way you gather customer feedback?

Nick Wassenberg
E.G. Insight

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

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

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

Maybe that’s why your customers keep bringing up issues that you think are long resolved—the need for proactive support, responsive customer service reps, or trained technical staff. To you, it’s history. To your customer, it’s not even past. Your company’s “old” performance failure could still be bothering them—chipping away at their confidence and having them wonder if you can meet their company’s needs in the future.

So, how do you know if something is still bothering your customers? How do you help your customers move from “you didn’t fix this fast enough” to “I know I can rely on you”?

The answer: You have a different kind of conversation — one which allows you to dig deeper, to listen not just to the result, but the cause; to not just the words, but the emotions. Performance failures are painful — and memorable—because they cost customers something. When your company’s delivery is late or customer service is unavailable, it can result in worry, overtime, increased costs, and a spike in blood pressure for your customers.

Like in any relationship, people aren’t really ready to move on until you “get it.” Find out not only what went wrong, but why it went wrong. Learn how the error impacted them—personally. Find out how your solution was received. (What worked about it and what didn’t?) Is there work that you still need to do?

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Which brings to mind something else Scorsese once said:

“There’s no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.”

Rhonda Sunnarborg, Senior Consultant
E.G. Insight

“The Customer Review process transformed this organization into a listening company, helped us shift the focus to the customer, fostered open and honest discussion, and took down lots of silos within our company.”
- President, Global Construction Materials Manufacturer

That is certainly a nice testimonial – and we’re grateful for it – but I think there’s a lesson in it too.

What makes this statement compelling is the language. It’s powerful, genuine, and distinct. Honestly, it’s the exact type of thing we’d love to hear from all our clients. (And the kind of quote we’d like our prospects to hear.)

But we probably wouldn’t have described the Customer Review process quite that way. It took a client to give us a fresh way to look at both our services and ourselves.

The takeaway: When you ask for customer feedback, you can get more than just operational improvement suggestions; sometimes you get a new way to see yourself.

Nick Wassenberg
E.G. Insight

But they haven’t stopped there. In early 2009, Dominos tore a page out of the UPS playbook to let their customers track their orders in real time. That’s right, using Domino’s Web-based “Pizza Tracker,” you can follow your pizza from order to prep, bake, quality check, and finally delivery.

What does this mean if you don’t deliver pizzas, or don’t have customers demanding that kind of order visibility?

The takeaway is that your direct competitors aren’t the only benchmark for your customers’ expectations and preferences. Your customers’ requirements for things like responsiveness, quality, and support are influenced every day by many different companies.

The point is that customers - yes, even business-to-business customers - don’t experience your products or services on an island. After all, if customers can track a shipment online with UPS, why can’t they track their dinner too?

Asking the right questions when gathering feedback can uncover which products, services, or technologies shape your customers’ expectations. Having that knowledge can help you prioritize your investments based on real feedback, not just assumptions.

Nick Wassenberg, Research Analyst
E.G. Insight