The Assignment
Our client was a major international supplier of raw materials to the brewing industry. Although they had regular day to day contact with their key customers, they wanted to better understand the factors that drove overall customer satisfaction, and specifically how they as a company compared with other suppliers.
It was thought that a better understanding of key customer concerns and priorities could be used to develop stronger working relationships for the future.
Approach & Delivery
This was a business to business project but we decided to develop a market research approach based on a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods more usually associated with consumer research.
Telephone interviews were conducted with a representative sample of customers. Customers were asked to rate various elements of customer satisfaction in terms of importance and then rate individual suppliers in terms of their performance against each element. This enabled us to create a key driver analysis, identifying which elements of customer satisfaction were of greatest importance to customers as a whole, and show how well individual suppliers performed against the most important factors.
To understand the viewpoint from within the client company we also conducted the survey with personnel from within the company. This would enable us to judge to what extent customer and supplier views were aligned.
We also conducted several in-depth qualitative interviews. Whereas the survey gave us a snapshot of current attitudes, these interviews enabled us to probe deeper and get a view of trends in customer/supplier relationships from the customer perspective.
Impact & Benefits
The key driver analysis highlighted areas of strength and weakness in the company’s current relationships with customers, indicating areas that needed attention. The qualitative interviews provided a view of how customers felt the customer/supplier relationship would evolve over time.
As well as indicating strengths and areas for development we built a customer satisfaction simulator. This was a dashboard which enabled the company to assess the impact on overall customer satisfaction that could be achieved by improving performance in any of the key elements.