How Well Do You Know Your Customers?

A question:

"What is really important to your customers and how do you perform against your competition"?
If you have substantive answers to both parts of that question, and are not resting on the fallacy of past glory, please accept our apologies, we can't help you – you must have more work than you know what to do with and we wish you every success.

If you have any doubts about either parts of the answer, we invite you to read on...

Importance/Performance Matrix – your bespoke solution

There will be products or services you provide, things that you do, that customers will view in one of three ways in the decision to brief you compared to your competitors.  The 'importance to clients' may be:
  1. of less importance, not considered necessary
  2. things they expect you to do to 'qualify' for inclusion in a shortlist of suppliers
  3. those things that you must do for you to 'win the business'

Equally, your 'performance against competitors' might be viewed in one of three ways in which you are:
  1. worse than competitors
  2. the same as competitors
  3. better than competitors
  From this understanding, you can build an importance/performance matrix of your products or services for your company; see figure 1 below:
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Figure 1. Importance-performance matrix showing where there is an 'excess' and less needs to be done, whereas urgent action is needed if performance is worse than competitors in an 'order winning', high importance area.
Once you know what your customers think, you can build a map to improve the management decision-making (and business planning) that drives business improvement initiatives, see Figure 2. 
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Figure 2. Importance-performance matrix showing one firm's situation across eight key areas.
In this example, the company’s products are viewed as 'technically' brilliant yet it is failing to win as much as it could.  Documentation is an 'excess' and appears wasteful, whereas urgent action is needed on ‘price’ and ‘communications’ performance of the company; these are ‘worse than’ competitors in two crucial 'order winning', high importance areas.  Also, the ‘delivery speed’ needs to improve - but only after the other two areas have been properly addressed.
  • The above example is from a pharmaceutical supplier of generic medicines
  • One major law firm used DAW to discover what they needed to do to win more debt recovery business from one of the major retail banks
  • We studied a Building Society's situation for a service supplier and found that their IT management systems were 'order-winning' , not purely yhr price: they went on to win a vital Tender.
You'll know what income you do make from which products or services.  But do you know what income you miss?  Where should you invest to give the best return?  We can build a matrix for your firm to help inform your management decision-making. (Contact us)


What about Customer Satisfaction? 
You will know that:
  • Most dissatisfied customers do not complain.  The average business does not hear from 96% of its unhappy customers.
  • Complaints are not made because people think it's not worth the time and effort, they don't know how or where to complain, or they believe the orgainsation would be indifferent to them.
  • Non-complainers are the least likely group to buy from the firm again.  A complainer who gets a response is more likely to come back.
  • Between 65% and 90% of non-complainers will never buy from you again and you will never know why.
But you need to do more than track complaints – finding out how satisfied people are with your products or services is fundamental to understanding business success. And just because no one has complained is no reason for complacency.

Talk to us about some ‘off-the-shelf’ research packages or a bespoke service to suit your needs. You can get assistance with:
  • Developing some clear key performance indicators (KPI) for customer service and then tracking customer service indexes (CSI) for the organisation.
  • Desk research where we have access to member-only resources.
  • Face-to-face interviews in many business sectors.
  • Focus groups from advertising testing to the working of hospital pharmacists.
  • Quantitative studies involving a few to many thousands of bespoke questionnaires.


 If you want to track how wide your customers smiles (or deep the frowns) are –  contact us.