Articles
ACR TODAY: What Customers Really Think
There is a growing recognition amongst major suppliers in many industrial markets including the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration sector, in the UK, that it is not simply the product that their customers are buying but the services that surround that product, ie. the benefits for a customer in dealing with a particular supplier relate ever more critically to the service that they receive, be it the customer contact, the technical support, the after sales service etc. The product quality itself is often taken as read when a customer differentiates between suppliers.
My own company can bear strong testimony to this recognition, as we have been increasingly involved in recent years in responding to our industrial clients need to measure how it´s customers perceive them in the market place, and the desire to measure their performance against the principal competitors. As a result we have considerable expertise in conducting independent customer perception surveys, where the client's name remains anonymous until the end of the interview. The projects work something like this; we agree the objectives for the project which typically would include - how the decision making process amongst it's customers work (who is involved), what are the issues that drive the customer to select the preferred supplier, to establish the level of awareness of our client against his major competitors and to benchmark the clients performance against the issues that his customer has already identified as important.
Having agreed the objectives we then prepare a questionnaire, most often these day for telephone research as this is the most cost effective means of conducting in depth research. At the same time our client provides us with a randomly selected list of customers in each of the market segments where he is active. This enables the client to compare his performance within each segment against the total. We then draw up the sample from this list and recommend to the client the number of interviews dependent upon a) size of his customer base, b) degree of similarity between these customers, c) level of accuracy required.
Having drawn up the sample to be interviewed and having agreed the questionnaire we then conduct the field work. The customers may be in the UK or they may be across Europe, even the Far East and the USA. All interviews are conducted in the native language.
Following the completion of the field work (usually around 2 weeks) a report is prepared and presented to the client summarising the findings and recommendations against the original agreed objectives. Our expertise revolves around preparing a questionnaire that does really identify what are the important issues to the customers of our client, and how our client rates against them. This is not easy and we would argue practically impossible for our clients, to devise the correct questionnaire themselves, let alone carry out the interviews anonymously. The issue of anonymity is very important when trying to achieve honest responses without bias
One or two examples of the question we ask would be;
When the selection of a dust control equipment supplier is being considered, what are the main factors that you take into account in selecting one supplier from another?
DO NOT PROMPT WRITE IN
If you were asked about this Company, say by a friend in another industry to yours, how likely or unlikely would you be to recommend this company´s product? Would you be :-
| VERY LIKELY | |
| FAIRLY LIKELY | |
| NOT VERY LIKELY | PROBE WHY AND WRITE IN |
| VERY UNLIKELY | PROBE WHY AND WRITE IN |
| D/K - DO NOT READ OUT THIS OPTION |
That is the mechanics but the question remains what does the client receive for all this work. The answer I think simply is a far better understanding of what drives his customers in their decision making, who those decision makers are and how he is performing against the issues that matter.
This then can form the basis of much of my clients strategic planning and enables him to focus his companies resources on providing the service quality in areas that really matter. There is little point in investing large amounts of money, in let us say, reducing delivery times by a day, when technical and after sales support are of far greater value to the customer.
In summary understanding what your customers really think about you is vital to future survival (let alone prosperity) in a competitive world. Nothing else in commercial life matters more than your customers perception of you.
