Congratulations to Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods who have won Best Newcomer to CRQ!
Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods has been awarded Best Newcomer to CRQ in the Deep-Insight 2022 Excellence in CX awards and we are thrilled for them. This is a truly deserved award as it’s hard to believe that this organisation only ran its first Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment in 2022.
When we started working with Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods they were quite vocal about being relatively new to anything related to Customer Experience Feedback. They then impressed us by embracing the process like they had been at this for years. They got stuck in from the word ‘go’ (and even before) and kept their momentum up all through the live survey and throughout the reporting stages. They dived deep into their results to ensure they had specific actions for each area of the business that they could follow up on.
Rose Murphy, COO at Deep-Insight has said: “Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods are expert communicators. They are open to feedback, and they listen with care. They develop strategies that are in line with what their customers are telling them and have created a very sophisticated response to customers to keep them informed at every level. This is what it means to be customer centric”.
Gerben van Schaik, Commercial Director at Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods has said:
“In Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods, customers are at the forefront and are top of mind in everything we do. It is important to Vreugdenhil that we understand how our customers value the relationship they have with us. The research done together with Deep-Insight has given us a clear picture on how to develop even stronger relationships with our customers, with the hopes of an even better outcome in 2024.”
Congratulations to everyone in Vreugdenhill Dairy Foods, and a special shout-out to Leonie, Erik, Jeroen, Gerben and Harry!
About Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods
Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods is a leading provider of milk powder products as ingredients for nutrition across the food industry. Vreugdenhil Diary Foods has many years of experience in their field and works together with their chain partners to make a difference for their consumers across the globe. Their vision is: milk nutrition in everyone’s daily diet.
Deep-Insight is a leading European B2B Customer Experience (CX) company founded in 2000 by a small team of ‘magicians’ with one goal: researching a way to read customers’ minds.
Today, Deep-Insight supports customers all over the world with the skills, tools and methodologies to help you operate world-class CX and EX programmes and transform your organisation.
For more information, go to deep-insight.com or email awards@deep-insight.com.
Should Customer Experience and NPS Surveys be Anonymous? The simple answer is NO – anonymity is not required for a B2B CX or NPS programme.
But the answer is not that simple. Let’s start by defining what Confidential and Anonymousmean in the context of surveys. This may sound obvious, but I have been amazed at the number of times I have needed to discuss this:
ANONYMOUS: No person or application can associate the answers you give with any identifiable information about you CONFIDENTIAL: Any identifiable information about you will be held confidentially, and stored in an appropriately secure manner OPTIONAL CONFIDENTIALITY: Any identifiable information about you will be held confidentially, and stored in an appropriately secure manner unless you specify that you would like to be identified (in other words, you decide to waive your right to confidentiality)
So for the rest of this blog, I am not longer going to dwell on anonymity. It’s simply not needed.
Confidentiality – now that’s a different matter
In any setting, when a third party asks for your opinion about someone, confidentiality is important to ensure a really open and honest response. In personal relationships this goes without saying but in the B2B world this is also true. It’s especially true if your staff are doing what you need them to be doing – building strong and personal relationships with clients.
Of course, many of your customers will indeed give you an honest response regardless of whether it is confidential or not. But many won’t. Cultural differences will mean this statement is truer in some parts of the world than others. However, regardless of where your customers live, there will always be those who will not respond, or who may not be as open as you would like them to be, unless their responses remain confidential.
Example 1
This example is an actual Deep-Insight client.
Company A ran a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment (Survey 1) and told respondents that they had the option for their responses to remain confidential. Six months later Company A ran the survey again, but this time told respondents the option to remain confidential was removed.
The impact on their average Net Promoter Scores (remember NPS is a measure of advocacy on a 0 to 10 scale) was as follows:
Individuals’ responses in Survey 1
Completion Rate (Survey 2)
Average NPS (Survey 1)
Average NPS (Survey 2)
Chose confidentiality (did not share details)
55%
6.3
7.5
Waived confidentiality (shared details)
70%
7.1
7.2
For respondents who had shared their names with their responses in Survey 1, there was no significant impact. When asked to complete Survey 2, 70% did complete and only a small uptick in scores was noted (7.1 to 7.2).
However, where respondents chose to keep their feedback confidential in Survey 1, there was a much bigger impact. For starters, only 55% of these individuals chose to complete Survey 2. For those who completed Survey 2, there was also a significant increase in scores (from 6.3 to 7.5). In fact, ‘Confidential’ respondents went from scoring more poorly than average to scoring more positively than average when forced to share their details with the response.
Example 2
Here’s another client of ours. Having received very high scores for several consecutive surveys, Company B decided to introduce the option of confidentiality to ensure the integrity of what it was measuring. The findings were interesting, especially for newly-included respondents:
26% of respondents opted to remain confidential overall but for newly-included respondents the figure was 38%
‘Confidential’ respondents scored more poorly than those who agreed to share their responses – but not significantly so
Newly-included respondents who opted for confidentiality scored significantly more poorly than other respondents
“…but my teams are frustrated by these unactionable ‘Confidential’ responses”
In both examples above, the organisations had good business reasons when they chose not to include confidentiality in their CX process:
Improved usefulness as an account management tool as ALL feedback is provided to account management teams
All raw data can be fully integrated with internal systems, allowing ongoing re-segmentation of responses (this is limited when responses are confidential)
But the argument that your CX or NPS programme should include ‘Optional Confidentiality’ is far stronger. If you don’t include optional confidentiality, your most unhappy customers will either not respond or will not give you a completely honest response.
This puts your entire CX or NPS programme at risk. You will end up making decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete data.
So should NPS Surveys be Anonymous? No. Should they include ‘Optional Confidentiality’? Absolutely!
“Is there any way to convince ‘Confidential’ respondents to share their details but still give an honest response?”
Maybe, but this will take time; people are people after all.
If a customer is at a point in their journey with you that they do not want to share their details, but they are willing to give feedback, that’s OK. Of course, you can explain the benefits of what you can do if they agree to share their details with you (you can address their issues more easily) but don’t push too hard. There is a trust issue here. Pushing won’t help.
You have a much better chance of convincing this customer by including them in your ‘Close the Loop’ process even though you don’t have a response from them. Over time you will gain their trust, both in the CX or NPS programme as well as in your organisation. You’ll eventually win that shared response.
Last Saturday, our CEO John O’Connor was interviewed on Newstalk’s Down To Business weekend radio programme about his new book Customer At The Heart. If you missed the show, here’s that conversation between Bobby and John again.
Quite a few topics were covered in the short interview with Bobby Kerr. The one that I enjoyed most was the concept of “sacking the customer” – being honest about when you can’t service particular clients and choosing instead to concentrate on customers where you know you can excel.
Feel free to get in touch with us if you want to hear more about Deep-Insight’s work in helping CEOs create customer-centric organisations. And if you want to find out more about dealing with clients that are Opponents and Stalkers, just click here for another blog on the topic.
Craig Johnson
Customer Relationship Advisor, Deep-Insight
Customer At The Heart
Bobby Kerr: A lot of words have been said and written about putting the customer first but many businesses and business leaders struggle to move away from product and technology-based models to ones that are truly customer-centric. So how hard can it actually be? John O’Connor is the CEO of Cork-based company Deep-Insight and he is the co-author of Customer At The Heart: how B2B leaders build successful customer-centric organisations. John, you’re very welcome to the programme. Tell me a little about your background and what inspired you to write this customer-centric book.
John O’Connor: First of all, you need to be a big mad to write a business book. I was saying earlier that we’re not going to knock Margaret Atwood off the top of the Amazon charts even though the book is available on Amazon. So why did we write the book? One question has been rattling around in my mind for the last 15 years that I’ve been running Deep-Insight. At Deep-Insight, we gather feedback for Business-to-Business (B2B) customers with the objective of getting our clients to use that feedback to build deeper client relationships. Sometimes we tell our clients “You’ve got a fantastic set of customers who love you to death.” Other times it’s a case of: “They hate your service and want to move away from you”. In that second case, it seems phenomenally difficult for our clients to move the dial and really improve their customer scores. Or if they can improve, it takes them a long, long time. So the question we had in our minds was: “Why does it take so long, and what is it that you have to do to transform an organisation to be truly customer-centric?”
Bobby: I once worked with a guy who used to tell me that a customer was somebody that allows you to make a profit. That was his definition of a customer. If you have a customer that doesn’t allow you to make a profit – because they are high-maintenance, they take up time, you have to manage them and you find that you can’t make a profit – how do you deal with that situation?
How to ‘Sack A Customer’
John: So here’s a little trick. You’ll find that in any portfolio of customers, probably a third are ‘Ambassadors’ for you and another 40 or 50 percent are good ‘Rational’ customers. Then a small percentage are what we call ‘Ambivalents’, ‘Stalkers’ or ‘Opponents’. What you should do is take your Opponents by the hand and walk them down to your competitor’s office and say “There you go…”
Bobby: “…here’s the guy you’ve been looking for…”
John: Yes. Basically you should not be afraid of sacking customers that you can’t service properly.
Bobby: So it’s almost like putting your hands up and saying “You know what, you’d be better off going elsewhere” and hoping that they will go elsewhere and cost your competitor money?
John: It is. But if you have those hard conversations… honest conversations… with the customer, either you will turn that relationship around or they’ll move off and allow you to spend time with the clients that you can really do some good for.
Getting your clients to design your products
Bobby: It’s interesting what you say, John. You know, we look at customers almost on a product basis. In other words: I make this product, I sell it to the customer, I’m finished with him now I want to find the next customer. Once the sale is made, that’s the end of the journey. But it’s only really the beginning. Is that right?
John: Yes, but but it’s also the wrong starting point for the journey. If you have a product-centric mindset, you are basically building something that you hope somebody is going to buy. A much better way is working with your customers to try to craft the next generation of products or the next set of widgets that you’re going to manufacture. Because once they are manufactured, the client has already bought them. After all, they’ve actually help you to design them in the first place. And very few companies have figured out how to do that properly.
Customer-Centred Leaders
Bobby: And when you talk about leadership, what are the customer-centred leadership traits that you would see in an organisation.
John: First of all I would say but if you haven’t got good leadership in an organisation, you’re never going to transform the company to being customer centric. The companies that have done very well are ones where you have a really, really passionate leader who does put the customer at the heart of everything. The second thing is that they intuitively understand that by doing the right thing for the customer, the profits will follow. The third thing is they are also very good at executing a plan or a strategy to put the customer at the heart of everything. Now they can be ‘Big Picture’ people but they know how to put together a team that will get things done, and will be relentless about making sure that it happens.
Bobby: When you look at the challenges of big organisations like utility companies, banks… you know: those organisations that everybody loves to hate where they provide a service based automated telephone answering machines… How can those organisations become customer-centric in a real way?
John: Well the focus of our book was business-to-business organisations. We were very lucky and got to talk to people like Gavin Patterson, the CEO of BT but it was very much on the B2B side of things. We talked to David Thodey in Australia who was CEO of Telstra, their biggest telecommunications company. We talked to people in eBay, HP and Atos but the focus was really more on B2B. Regardless of the industry, you can be either very customer-centric or not at all. And if you’re not at all customer-centric, that’s a pretty difficult place to be.
Culture change
Bobby: When you talk about culture in a company, the culture can sometimes turn sour. How can you use the customer to enact change in the company’s culture?
John: Well, one of the other traits of being a good customer-centric leader is that you never let a good crisis go to waste. A lot of good leaders will use the customer as a platform to try to change the culture of the organisation. They’re constantly talk about the last customer visit that they had, the last product that they developed in conjunction with that customer. By continually doing that and by getting the customer into every discussion, people in organisations will start to follow the direction of their leaders.
Bobby: And finally, John, is it true that if you can get the customer to be your ambassador – in other words, the customer is talking about your business being the best business known to man – that’s the most powerful advocate that you can have? It trumps any advertising or any marketing that any company could do?
John: Absolutely. We called those ‘Ambassadors’ and as I said, about a third of your customers should be ‘Ambassadors.’ Even if another 40% are ‘Rationals’ who don’t believe you are truly “unique” but they are good customers all the same, those Ambassadors and Rationals are the clients that will deliver your sales for the rest of this year and into the following years.
Bobby: Well it’s a fascinating subject. John O’Connor is the CEO of Cork-based company Deep-Insight and the co-author of that new book on customer centric organisations. Thanks very much for joining us, John.
As a Customer Relationship Advisor at Deep-Insight, a lot of clients ask me about innovation. How do I make it happen? What prevents it from happening? How do you create an innovation culture? Very often people ask me: “What exactly is innovation?”
I hope you enjoy the interview, and if it sparks any questions, please do get in touch with us.
Craig Johnson
Customer Relationship Advisor, Deep-Insight
“Innovation is about looking for a cracking problem and then trying to solve it”
John O’Connor: Rob, your biography says that you are the MD of Clustre, the Innovation Brokers and that you’re celebrating your 50th year as an innovator this year. Can you tell me more about your 50 years of innovating?
Rob Baldock: Sure. It all started in 1969 when I watched the most extraordinary thing on TV. Two men set foot on the moon. That was something that struck me as being incredibly significant at the time. That was real innovation, particularly when you consider that they were sent to the moon using a computer that wasn’t remotely as powerful as a modern smartphone. Another influence at that time was my maths teacher at school who got us involved with programming at the local polytechnic. While some of my friends were very interested in using this opportunity to play computer games, my mind was moved towards using their computer to solve problems. Even at the early age of 14, I was starting to zone in on one of the essential principles of innovation – look for a cracking problem and then try to solve it.
Innovation = Sales
Rob: I remember at the time, our school was compiling statistics for the local council. The person doing this work was moaning about how tedious and time consuming this task was. I thought this is a cracking problem waiting to be solved. So back in 1969, at the age of 14, I convinced the local council that I could write a computer program that could do this and even persuaded them to pay me to do this for them! So I quickly learnt another principle of innovation – you need to be a good salesperson too.
Rob: By the way, the other interesting thing about the moon landing is that John F Kennedy didn’t know if it was even possible in 1961 when he challenged NASA in to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade. It may have been ‘Mission Impossible’ but there’s nothing like a seemingly impossible task to concentrate the mind.
Time Pressure as Enabler
Rob: Another situation which influenced me was the problem encountered on board Apollo 13 which should have been the third moon landing but turned out to be literally a life and death problem for three astronauts. With no more than some slide rulers, a basic simulator, some pens and paper, a lot of brainpower and some real time pressure, a small team of people innovated a solution to save the three astronauts. Innovation starts with a cracking problem and is actually helped by applying time pressure to it.
Rob: One of the firms we represent sets itself the challenge of coming up with a solution to a problem within a month or so. Problem to prototyping in a 4 week time-frame. That may or may not always be possible but the time pressure imposed by that 4-week timeframe is important. I have found that creative minds work based when placed under time pressure!
John: That’s a nice segue into the definition of what invention is. You talk about ‘Invention versus Innovation.’ What do you mean by that?
Rob: Innovation is about finding ways to do something differently or better. That’s the essence of innovation. Innovation is not always synonymous with the with game-changing ideas. In fact, new inventions are few and far between. For example, look at Uber. Uber is an example of Innovation rather than Invention. All of the components were there already: cars, drivers, sat nav, smartphones… but Uber has managed to pull it all together into an app and deliver a truly disruptive service via a smartphone.
“Innovation is as much about speed as it is about creativity”
John: It’s a great example but Uber is a modern tech company. What about traditional companies? How should they approach innovation?
Rob: Innovation is a hot topic in traditional companies too and it’s about asking the question “what does it require us to do differently?” Remember we are in the era of mass disruption. What is different today is the speed with which you can create something from nothing. You can disrupt or be disrupted in a very short timeframe which means you need to do things at speed. In fact, it’s as much about speed as it is about creativity.
John: But traditional companies are not usually known for speed…
Rob: If it’s too hard to do internally, then companies need to recreate themselves outside the confines of the current organisation. Look at the banks in the UK. Many have come to the conclusion that it’s easier to create a new standalone business bank than trying to re-engineer their existing operations.
Rob: Another example is Rightmove which was created in 2000 by the top four corporate estate agencies in the UK. It was a standalone entity that competed against its founders. Now Rightmove has a valuation which is greater than the combined value of the estate agents that got together to build it. Another example is the mobile operator Giffgaff which was set up by O2’s owners Telefonica in 2009 and is ranked as one of the most innovative companies in the industry.
John: Are there other ways of being innovative which don’t require you to recreate yourself or implement such radical solutions?
Rob: Yes, of course. You need to establish a culture of customer-led experimentation.
John: Can you explain…
“Just by involving the customer, the success rate increased to 9 out of 10”
Rob: Let me give you an example. Another firm in our network worked with a major international publishing company to look at the way they created new products. At the time, this company had a 3 in 10 success rate with new product launches. That wasn’t sustainable. They needed to improve their hit rate. We showed them a different way of approaching the problem by working with their target customer groups from the beginning. Just by involving the customer, the success rate increased to 9 out of 10. We know that the very act of involving customers in the innovation process will dramatically increase the likely success rate.
John: What are the main roadblocks to Innovation, and do you need to throw money at the problem?
Rob: Roadblocks? It’s lots of things – bureaucracy, structural barriers, culture, and so on. But remember that Innovation must also be thought of as a process, and one of the key things in innovation is to have a hypothesis and to be able to test it. That’s a key technique. And it doesn’t need to involve huge cost.
“Poverty is the mother of invention”
Rob: Let me give you an example. We were talking to an operator of some leisure centres where they faced a problem of members sharing their membership cards with friends and allowing them to use the leisure centre’s services without paying. One of the potential solutions with the use of facial recognition to identify if the card holder was actually the real owner of the membership card. The hypothesis was that the introduction of facial recognition software would deter this behaviour so they went ahead and bought some of this tech to try out . But they didn’t need to actually buy the tech to test this hypothesis out. They could have simply put up a sign saying “We are trialling facial recognition in this leisure centre.” That alone would have been enough to test the hypothesis! Remember: poverty is the mother of invention.
John: Thank you Rob, that was fascinating. Where can we find out more about Clustre’s work on innovation?
Rob: Easy. Just go to our website or drop me an email at robert.baldock@clustre.net.
We have some new faces in Deep-Insight. They bring an exciting mix of talents and interests and are already adding value to the company and what we can do for our customers.
Here in Deep-Insight, we take our time with recruitment. We understand that getting the right fit for our company and for the roles is so much more important than filling a position quickly. This approach has paid off more than we hoped for and we are delighted and privileged to have these individuals join our team.
Fabienne Falvay – Project Coordinator
Fabienne is originally from the Netherlands but has been studying and working abroad for the past number of years. After spending time in New Zealand and Denmark she moved to Ireland in 2016. She has been working at Deep-Insight since March 2019 as one of our Project Coordinators.
Fabienne comes from an analytical background and has a passion for working with people and large sets of data. In her spare time, she likes to cook and work on design projects with her sewing machine.
Meghan Clune – Project Coordinator
Meghan Clune originates from Cork, enjoys travelling and exploring new and different cultures. Meghan has completed a BA in Business Studies in Cork Institute of Technology and has worked for companies in varying different industries with a background in fraud analytics, crisis management and onboarding.
Meghan gets excited about innovative thinking and creative problem solving, she has previously managed strategic projects that focus on improving employee engagement within organisations.
Shane O’Regan – Project Coordinator
Shane O’Regan is a project management professional who is driven to understand, enable and enhance the human aspect of organisational transformation. Shane hails from Cork, Ireland and has lived in Chicago and Seattle while working in radio and completing a BA in Communication and an MA in Digital Anthropology.
Shane is interested in design, urbanism, psychology, digital ethics and the relationship between people and technology.
Craig Johnson – CRQ Advisor
Craig Johnson was born in New Zealand and has been living in Ireland for the last five years with his Irish wife and two children.
Craig’s professional background is in key client relationship management, having worked in the financial and outsourcing sectors internationally for the last fifteen years.
