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.
We are delighted to announce two new clients at Deep-Insight. Both have a strong maritime feel.
Survitec
Survitec is a global leader in survival and safety solutions to the marine, defence, aviation and offshore markets. It has over 3,000 employees worldwide, covering 8 manufacturing facilities, 15 offshore support centres and over 70 owned service stations. Survitec also has a network of over 500 third party service stations and distributors.
Across its 160-year history, Survitec Group has remained at the forefront of innovation, design and application engineering. It is the trusted name when it comes to critical safety and survival solutions. The new management team has made a commitment to focus the company around its customers.
In a recent interview for SAFETY4SEA, Survitec’s newly-appointed Managing Director for its Marine Division, Baba Devani explains how the world’s leading safety and survival partner is restructuring to become more customer-centric.
Port of Newcastle
Port of Newcastle is the largest port on the East Coast of Australia. As a global trade gateway for more than 220 years, the Port of Newcastle delivers safe, sustainable and efficient logistics solutions for its customers. It is also the largest coal exporting port in the world.
Port of Newcastle’s customers include coal producers in the Hunter Valley, non-coal traders including fuels, alumina, wheat, mineral concentrates and fertiliser manufacturers, as well as some of the world’s largest shipping lines.
The Port of Newcastle is at an early stage of development of a customer-centricity programme. Deep-Insight is delighted to be helping CEO Craig Carmody and his management team on that journey.
We’re used to handling questions on how to make CX programmes more effective. One of the most common questions we get from first-time clients is: “What completion rates can I expect from my CX programme?” Another common question from longer-term clients is “How do I improve my completion rates?”
Let’s deal with each question in turn.
“What Completion Rates can I expect from my CX programme?”
Let me preface this by saying that we are talking about business-to-business (B2B) relationships so there is an inherent assumption in the question that our clients have some existing – and hopefully strong – relationships with their customers and that these contacts will be receptive to a request to give feedback as part of that ongoing relationship.
This is usually the case but clients – particularly senior clients – are busy people so it may not come as a surprise to hear that the average participation rate in a B2B customer assessment is around 35%.
But that 35% figure is an aggregate score and there’s a little more to it than that, if you have a look at the graph below.
The spread is wide.
The most common completion rate is in the 26-30% range. We have a smaller number of clients – typically those who have been running our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessments for many years – who regularly achieve completion rates of 50% and higher.
If this is your first time running a customer assessment – either a simple Net Promoter Score survey of something a little more complex like our CRQ relationship assessments – you can expect completion rates of less than 1 in 3.
This may sound OK if you regularly run consumer surveys where a 5% completion rate can be a good result, but for an existing long-standing B2B client relationship, it’s paltry. And yet we have been running customer assessments of all sorts for nearly 20 years and these are the actual numbers.
So now let’s get to the second question:
“How do I improve my completion rates?”
The starting point is to understand why some B2B companies sometimes get really low completion rates and others consistently exceed 50%.
Our lowest-ever completion rate (4%) came from a first-time UK software client. The quality of contact data was simply terrible. We should have spotted that it was little more than a ‘data dump’ from the company’s CRM system. The list included people who had left their companies three years earlier. It included people who had never even heard of our client. It probably included the names of people who were dead. That’s because there was no governance in place for the programme. The Sales Director was not involved. Account Managers did not personally sign off the client contact names. You get the picture.
Our highest-ever completion rate came from a company that has been a client of Deep-Insight’s for 10 years and whose customers view the annual CRQ assessment as a critical part of their ongoing strategic partnership.
But there are other reasons for low and high participation rates. Here’s a quick summary of the profiles of our clients that fit into both categories:
6 Steps to Improve your Completion Rates
Here are the steps you need to take to get your completion rates up:
Make It Strategic. If the CX programme is CEO-led and driven from the top, it will not be seen as another box-ticking exercise. Make sure this is a key item on the Executive agenda.
Put in Governance Structures. By this we mean things like: a) Account Directors should supervise and sign all contact names, not just pull them from the CRM system; b) the Sales Director should personally sign off all Strategic Client contact names.
Don’t call it a Survey! At Deep-Insight, we ban the use of the term “survey” . For us, a CRQ assessment is a strategic ongoing conversation with the clients and their views will be taken seriously.
“Warm Up” the Contacts. An invitation to complete a survey should not come out of the blue. Ideally, it should be introduced by letter or by email by the CEO or Country Manager, and while an assessment is “live”, the account manager will know to stay in touch with the client and urge them to complete the assessment.
Close the Loop. This is critical. If you ask for feedback, you need to share that feedback with the client, agree the actions that BOTH PARTIES will take to improve the relationship.
Repeat. Get into a rhythm where your clients and your sales/account teams know that every February or October (or whenever), the annual strategic assessment will take place. You may want to run frequent assessments. Some companies have quarterly Net Promoter or Pulse assessments – but don’t overdo the frequency. Your organisation needs time to put remedial actions into effect.
Completion Rates of 90% or more?
Follow the above steps and you’ll get your completion rates to 50% or higher.
But remember that these completion rates are at an individual level. You should be getting feedback from multiple people at different levels within each client. Include Influencers and Operational Contacts as well as Key Decision Makers. That way you’ll get a wealth of information about what your key accounts REALLY think of you.
You’ll also get completion rates of 90% at an account level if you take this approach.
If you are interested in reading more about running a CX programme effectively take a look at our process for running a B2B CX assessment or just get in touch with us today for a chat.
Some years ago, the focus of NPS discussions changed. At least, in the USA they did. It used to be: “How do I measure NPS?” and now it’s: “How do I improve my Net Promoter Score?”
Remember that Net Promoter Score is an American metric for customer advocacy. Europe is still a few years behind the USA. The topic of how to improve NPS results will dominate executive leadership discussions in Europe for the next few years. If you’re a leader in a European B2B company that is already measuring NPS, this blog is for you. It’s about the 5 actions to improve your Net Promoter Score.
Insight from a Decade’s Worth of B2B NPS Data
Deep-Insight has been gathering NPS data since 2006. We gathered this data from B2B firms operating across a variety of different industries in over 80 countries. A few years ago, we integrated NPS into our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) methodology. We now have tens of thousands of data points – exclusively from B2B companies – showing which items are strongly correlated with NPS and which are not.
A quick word on our terminology:
We call accounts where you have the strongest and deepest relationships Ambassadors. An Ambassador typically has many ‘Promoters’ and few ‘Detractors’. We call companies at the other end of the relationship spectrum Stalkers and Opponents. These accounts typically have few ‘Promoters’ and large numbers of ‘Detractors’.
The pie chart on the right shows a client portfolio for a typical European B2B organisation. Most accounts have good relationships, and a third have excellent relationships.
As the graphic on the left shows, the key elements of any business relationship are Trust, Commitment and Satisfaction. Each of these elements is highly correlated with a customer’s willingness to recommend. In other words, their willingness to give you a good Net Promoter Score.
Trust, Commitment and Satisfaction are only the outcomes of other elements of performance so we need to delve deeper. By doing so, we’ll find out which areas to concentrate on in order to improve a company’s Net Promoter Score.
5 Actions to Improve your Net Promoter Score
Based on more than a decade’s worth of data, we know the five key actions to improve your Net Promoter Score.
First things first. Any large account is likely to have a combination of Promoters, Passives and Detractors. Different strategies are required for dealing with each category. The actions required to turn Detractors into Passives are not the same as the actions required to turn Passives into Promoters.
Here’s a quick summary of those 5 actions.
Turn Detractors into Passives
1. MAKE YOUR CUSTOMERS FEEL VALUED. The one thing you should do, above everything else, to turn Detractors into Passives is to have empathy with them. Show a willingness to engage. Listen to them and make them feel valued. People give extremely low advocacy scores (0 – 3 out of 10) when they feel unloved and frustrated. Unloved because they are ignored. Frustrated because they believe you are not interested in solving their problems. Even if there is little you can do immediately to fix their problems, tell them that you understand how they feel. Let them know you will do your utmost to address their issues. But be honest. If it’s going to take six months, don’t say six weeks.
Convert Passives into Promoters
2. DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF FROM YOUR COMPETITORS. The more you differentiate yourself from the competition, the more you will be seen as ‘Leading Edge’. Our analysis tells us that if you are perceived as a leading-edge company, your NPS score will be higher. By the way, there’s no point in trying to discuss innovation with Detractors. They’re not in listening mode. What they want is for you to address their immediate problems. Do that and you will earn the right to chat about innovation. Not before.
3. PROVIDE VALUE FOR MONEY. This is linked to the previous point. The more differentiated you are and the more unique your offering is, the greater the value you deliver to your clients. Passives think you provide good value for money. Promoters think you provide excellent value for money. Price is rarely the issue. Focus of what you can do to increase the value of what you deliver rather than on the price at which you deliver it.
Actions – All Customers
4. MAKE IT EASY FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS TO DO BUSINESS WITH YOU. Regardless of whether you are a Promoter, Passive or Detractor, there is a high correlation between ‘Ease of Doing Business’ and NPS. Become less bureaucratic. Break down the silos between departments. Build cross-functional teams. Look at your processes and simplify them. Get your clients involved. Just ask them – they want to be included.
5. BE PROACTIVE. Customers want you to respond quickly and effectively to their needs. That means not just reacting to problems as they occur. It means anticipating problems BEFORE they occur. That’s what good account management is all about.
If you’re interested in turning NPS data into a full-fledged Customer Experience (CX) programme that improves retention rates and revenues, get in touch with us. We’d love to hear from you.
It’s Good to Talk. If you’re as old as I am, you’ll remember the British Telecom (as BT was then known) TV adverts with this tagline. It was an incredibly effective advertising campaign which helped change consumers’ perceptions of the organisation.
As it so happens, the same tagline is relevant to the sales and account management communities too. Let me explain by using an example from the corporate banking world.
Relationship Managers
Corporate banks don’t employ account managers to manage their major accounts. They employ Relationship Managers or RMs. Words are important. Banks tend to take business relationships more seriously than other industries. This is partly because an intimate knowledge of the customer is critical when making lending decisions.
One of our clients is a large European bank. The MD of the Corporate and Business Banking division prides himself on the level of service provided to his customers. For him, service begins with regular contact. The vast majority of corporate and business clients see their RM every three months or more frequently.
The MD asked us to test this, so we did. We asked his clients how frequently they saw their RM. A small percentage (4%) of the bank’s clients claim they never saw their RM and a similar number said they met the RM annually. 9% saw their RM every six months; 22% every 3 months and the majority (56%) said that their RM was in contact with them on a more frequent basis.
What we hadn’t predicted was that frequency of contact has a huge impact on the quality of the banking relationship. We call this Customer Relationship Quality. It also has a huge impact on the bank’s Net Promoter Score (NPS).
It really is good to talk
A quick analysis of Net Promoter Scores by frequency of contact is telling.
The bank’s overall Net Promoter Score is 28% which, for European B2B companies is good (see another blog here).
When RM visits are conducted only on an annual basis, or not at all, the Net Promoter Score is deeply negative – minus 70% for the 4% of clients who claim they never see their RM.
However, for the majority of clients who are in contact with their Relationship Manager every 1-2 months, the Net Promoter Score is a whopping +51%.
There is a very simple message here. If you want to have better relationships with your clients, go and talk to them more frequently than you currently do.
Get in touch with us today if you want to find out a little more about customer centricity.
Fabienne Falvay – Project Coordinator
