We want to extend our deepest gratitude to all our clients who took the time to complete our CRQ assessment this year. Your participation provided us with invaluable feedback.
We are truly humbled and thrilled by the positive scores and detailed responses you’ve given us. Thank you once again for your continued trust and partnership!
In summary: we received feedback from 85% of our customers, who gave us a CRQ score of 6.0 and a Net Promoter Score of +55.
We are incredibly proud of these scores and all the positive messages we received about our team.
Our greatest strengths are our exceptional team members
and their remarkable skills in forging enduring relationships
as CX consultants with our clients. Their dedication and expertise
truly set us apart. Big thanks to Fabienne Falvay, Kate Casey,
Fiona Lynch and Jade Flynn!
Our Commitment to Continuous Improvement
While we received a lot of positive feedback on our Products/Services, we are currently on a journey to explore how we can enhance our services and offerings. Navigating this change journey is a complex but rewarding endeavour.
We’re dedicated to discovering new opportunities for improvement and are eager to learn how we can better serve our customers.
How are we planning to do so?
‘Closing the Loop’ with our own clients.
The feedback process is not finished yet. We need to ‘close the loop’ with all clients and discuss their specific feedback. We will be in touch shortly with each one of our clients. We will be asking for time to discuss each client’s specific results and feedback.
Increase CRQ impact
Our customers appreciate the work we do, but they also see opportunities for CRQ to make an even greater impact across their organizations. We share this vision and are committed to enhancing our contributions. Over the past few months, our leadership team has spent significant time reviewing and refining our strategy, vision, and values. More details to follow on this, but in essence, our focus remains clear:
Deep-Insight – Providing innovative CX consultancy to global B2B organisations underpinned by a strong and competitive technical and data foundation.
We’re eager to explore how we can ensure this strategy delivers the maximum impact for your organization. Expect us to dive deeper into this topic during our “Close the Loop” sessions with you.
Before I conclude, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Jade Flynn for planning, organizing, and running this year’s client assessment. Jade joined us earlier this year and has quickly become an invaluable asset to our small but highly dedicated team. We’re grateful for her hard work and excited to see the continued impact she’ll make!
Alexandra Calugarici
Operations Manager, Deep-Insight
Last month, we asked our clients what they thought of us. We do this every year and take our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) feedback seriously. We try to follow the advice we give to our own clients: give your customers the opportunity to tell you what they think. Listen to what they say. Then act on their feedback.
As we did last year, we cast the net for our 2022 CRQ assessment quite wide. We didn’t just limit the survey to a handful of key decision makers in current clients. We included many operational and administrative contacts. Their views are equally important. We also asked dormant customers what they thought of us.
Last year, you said…
The main message that you gave us last year – actually for the last two years – was that you needed more than just a survey provider. In practice, that meant providing more assistance AFTER your customers gave their feedback. You needed a partner that could help you deliver meaningful change across your whole organisation. You also wanted us to be more flexible and supportive.
We listened, and here are three of the things we did in response to your feedback.
1. Deliver more than just a survey
We have always strived to be more than just a survey company. Our mission is to help companies become truly customer-centric. Getting customer and employee feedback is part of that process, but there’s much more to it than launching a survey. That’s why we completely redesigned the way we work with clients, based on what you said to us.
Today we spend a lot more time with leadership teams and sales or account teams both BEFORE we think about asking our customer’s clients for their views as well as AFTER they give their feedback. The BEFORE piece is critical and must be done properly. If you don’t invest the time up-front, your CX (or EX) programme will not deliver the results that Management and the Board expect from it. More than likely, it will end in failure. It’s as simple as that.
2. Assist with Customer Relationship Quality ‘Healthchecks’
Last year we conducted CRQ ‘Healthchecks’ for clients in the UK and Ireland. The objective of a ‘Healthcheck’ is to benchmark how good a company’s Customer Experience or Customer Satisfaction programme is. That doesn’t just mean assessing if the right questions are being asked of the right people. It’s a more fundamental look at whether all the right components are in place to deliver genuine and meaningful benefits. We do this under four headings:
1. LEADERSHIP. The most important quadrant. Good Customer Excellence (CX) programmes are ALWAYS led from the top
2. STRATEGY. Good CX programmes link customer, product, operational and organisational strategy explicitly to customer needs
3. EXECUTION. Success requires properly resourced teams that are brilliant at executing the Strategy
4. CULTURE. Finally, Customer Excellence must become integral to the DNA of the organisation: “it’s how we do things around here”
All four quadrants are necessary for a successful CX programme. The ‘Hard Side’ quadrants of Strategy and Execution are all about metrics and processes. ‘Hard Side’ activities lend themselves to key performance indicators (KPIs) and while the activities in these two quadrants are important and easily measurable, the quadrants of Leadership and Culture are actually more critical.
In our experience, Leadership is the most important quadrant while Culture is the most challenging. And yet, here’s the strange thing: in most CX programmes the ‘Soft Side’ is often overlooked and almost always under-resourced.
3. Run Customer Centricity ‘Masterclasses’ for managers and leadership teams
One of the key ‘Soft Side’ challenges is making sure your entire organisation is on board with your CX (or CSat or NPS or Customer Relationship Quality) programme. Over the past 12 months, we have partnered with the world-leading HEC Business School in Paris.
That collaboration has helped us develop and deliver a ‘Masterclass’ to educate leadership teams, managers and partners about the importance and benefits of putting the customer at the heart of everything they do. The ‘Masterclass’ also helps employees understand the crucial role they play in making their companies customer-centric.
Already, these ‘Masterclasses’ have been delivered both virtually (for COVID reasons) and face-to-face to clients in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
How did we score this year?
Having made the investments over the past two years, we were very curious to get your reaction. In short, you were very generous in your responses this year.
This is the highest NPS result we have ever achieved to date and the third time we have scored over +50. Our CRQ score is also the highest we have ever achieved and we are honoured to be thought of so highly by you, our valued clients.
Result: new client wins
I honestly believe that it’s because of the trust that our clients place in Deep-Insight that we have been able to announce some great new wins in recent months.
We have a 10+ year relationship with Atos but primarily in the UK & Ireland. Earlier this year, we extended that relationship to Germany and over the next three years we will be partnering with Atos on one of their most important and strategic global accounts.
One of our largest accounts in Australia was the logistics company Toll Group. Last year our key contact at Toll moved to Scotts Refrigerated Logistics and we recently signed a new 3-year contract to help ScottsRL become one of the most customer-centric companies in Australia.
Vreugdenhil Dairy Foods is a Dutch milk powder manufacturer that operates in Barneveld, Scharsterbrug, Gorinchem and Madrid. Its 500 staff process 1.4 billion kilograms of milk each year. Over the next three years, we will be working with the Vreugdenhil leadership team to turn a company that creates great food products into a truly customer-centric organisation.
Agenda for 2022
While we’re really proud of these Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) and NPS scores, there is more to do.
For starters, we got feedback from 48% of the people we asked to participate. While that’s not bad, we do see some room for improvement. Last year our response rate was 55%. We know that some of our clients achieve rates of 70% or more. We will be working hard to improve on this figure next year.
Second, the main feedback we received this year is that our new consulting services are great BUT not enough. Our clients are looking for Deep-Insight to provide even more support. The two customer quotes below confirm to me that we need to support clients on a year-round basis.
“Would like to see greater insight on how we can really make a difference for our customers. How do we truly address those recurring themes that come up each year? It would be great to get insight on how we can do this better – beyond the data”
“I would question to what degree on a continual basis Deep-Insight provides interaction and insight as a partner to the business. Also, to what extent there are follow-up meetings post results as you as experts help inform our response and strategy.”
Third, the feedback process is not finished yet. We need to ‘close the loop’ with all clients and discuss their specific feedback. We will be in touch shortly and will be looking specifically for more insights into any additional support needs they may have.
I need to finish off by thanking Fiona Lynch for planning, organising and running this year’s client assessment. Fiona joined us earlier this year from Atos where she was part of a global service delivery team. It’s great to have her on board.
So, well done Fiona, and thank you to all of our clients. We really do value your feedback.
Most people understand implicitly that good Business to Business (B2B) relationships are built on a strong foundation of trust. But if Trust is so important, why do so few companies measure it? It’s a question that has always intrigued me. I must admit that I’m still struggling to find the answer.
The fact is that CEOs keep tabs on all sorts of KPIs. For operational performance, there are lots of service level agreements (SLAs) and other three letter acronyms (TLAs). Logistics companies even have five letter acronyms like DIFOT – Delivery In Full On Time. For financial performance, the CFO has an eye-watering array of metrics. For customer performance, there is customer satisfaction (CSat) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
But rarely, if ever, is there a metric for Trust that is discussed by the leadership team or reported to shareholders.
How Important is Trust?
A couple of weeks ago, I ran a short poll on LinkedIn, asking people what they thought was the most important element of a strong B2B relationship. It wasn’t a trick question as we believe at Deep-Insight (based on pretty good academic research) that the three key pillars of a great B2B relationship are Trust, Commitment and Satisfaction.
I wasn’t surprised by the winner but I was intrigued by the margin. It appears that Trust really is seen as the cornerstone of a strong B2B relationship.
Trust, Commitment and Satisfaction
How are they all related? Here’s how we explain it.
If you take a purely commercial view of any business relationship – and you shouldn’t – it’s all about the revenues you can generate from that relationship over the long term. I know that’s a bit mercenary but that’s how some people view things. The greatest predictor of a long-term relationship is Commitment and it’s important that you measure your clients’ commitment to you. We ask that question quite bluntly to our clients’ customers: “Are you committed to a long-term relationship with [Name of Client]?”
It turns out that the answer to this question has the highest correlation with the likelihood of the company buying from our client again in the future. The opposite is also true. A poor score is the best predictor that the customer will defect to the competition.
But remember: commitment to a long-term relationship is only the outcome of other factors. Two of the most important factors are Trust and Satisfaction. Trust is all about fairness, honesty and acting with integrity. It’s a reflection on what clients think of your brand but, more important, it’s their perception of how trustworthy your people are as well.
Satisfaction, on the other hand, is a measure of how well you meet (or exceed) a client’s expectations. It’s more transactional than Trust, and also more volatile. For example, you can be satisfied with your IT service provider today, but deeply unhappy tomorrow when the network crashes and your factories or stores can’t operate. When the IT service provider pulls out all the stops and fixes the problem in double-quick time, you’re both relieved and satisfied again. Satisfaction scores can fluctuate wildly. Trust scores? Not so much.
Trust at Serco
One of our clients that takes Trust seriously is Serco. It’s one of Serco’s four stated values: Trust, Care, Innovation and Pride.
Serco is quite clear about both what Trust is, and what it is not. Here are the behaviours it expects from its people:
Do what they say they will, try their best and see things through
Consistently provide the highest standards of customer service
Have a can-do, will-do attitude
Are open and honest
Communicate truthfully, clearly and concisely
Aim to always do the right thing and never compromise our values
Think through the consequences of their decisions
Speak out when they see something wrong
Understand who our customers are, listen to them and act upon their feedback
Challenge assumptions in an appropriate way
Acknowledge when they make mistakes and take responsibility for correcting them
Similarly, Serco believes Trust is not demonstrated if employees or the leadership:
Make promises that we cannot keep
Rush to provide solutions before listening to others’ needs and opinions
Fail to keep customers and colleagues informed
Are not straightforward and transparent
Allow disrespectful or discriminatory behaviour
Knowingly use Serco’s resources for personal gain
Break our Code of Conduct or the law
Falsify or misrepresent information
Ignore and don’t speak up when we see something wrong
Choose to ignore adverse criticism
Blame others for mistakes we have made or things we have missed
Shift our responsibilities to others
Why do so few companies measure Trust?
How many companies measure have identified Trust as a core company value and measure it in a systematic way? The short answer is that very few B2B companies measure Trust at all. Serco is one of the few that even identifies it publicly as a core value. Isn’t that strange? Business magazines and articles are full of ideas and tips for becoming trusted advisors. A lot of CEOs and company boards talk about “trusted relationships” with clients in their annual reports to shareholders.
Interestingly, the same CEOs and boards talk about trusted relationships but then quote the company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). Now don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with NPS but it’s not a measure of Trust. It’s a measure of Advocacy. Yes, the two are related but it you’re going to talk to shareholders and clients about “Trusted Relationships” or “Acting as Trusted Advisors” then you really should go and measure your performance directly.
Sometimes NPS isn’t enough. It’s a good metric – simple and easy to understand. But it’s one-dimensional. If you really want to understand how trusted a relationship you have with your clients, you need to measure Trust as well as NPS of CSat (Customer Satisfaction). As a CEO or Sales Director, you need to understand if your key clients are Ambassadors who trust you implicitly, or Stalkers and Opponents who want to get out of the relationship because levels of Trust (and Commitment and Satisfaction) are so low.
If you want to know more about measuring Trust, have a read of this blog.
The following words are from two American academics Rob Morgan and Shelby Hunt. We’ll come to these guys shortly.
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“Commitment and trust, rather than (or at least in addition to) power and dependence, are now central to discussions of business relationships.
Researchers and practitioners have come to view most interactions between business parties as events that occur over the course of a relationship between two or more partners.”
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Here’s a funny thing about business-to-business (B2B). It’s less about business and more about relationships. In fact, B2B is really P2P: person-to-person. People buy from people. In large organisations, the decision to go with one particular service provider over another is often down to the answer to one simple question: “Do I really want to work with this person?”
The answer to that question is usually based on the perception of whether the individual can be trusted or not. Without trust, there can be no commitment.
I thought companies bought mainly on price?
Companies generally put large business contracts out to tender. They will produce a clear set of evaluation criteria to help guide their choice of service provider. Price is always one of the evaluation metrics. Even so, the final decision is often made on softer and unwritten criteria. Price is rarely the deciding factor. Often, they are made on a combination of price and solution/ functionality. But when it comes to making the final choice to award any contract, subtle psychological elements come into play.
“OK, I know these guys seem to have the [INSERT: ‘best product’, ‘lowest price’, ‘most innovative solution’]. But what if it all goes wrong? Will they sort out the issues or will they leave me in the lurch? Will I lose my job?”
Fundamentally, we like to buy from people we think are honest, who treat us fairly and who act with integrity. In other words, we buy from people we trust. Price is generally a secondary consideration. It can’t be ignored but rarely is it the most important factor in the decision-making.
Morgan and Hunt
Two American academics figured this out a long time ago. In 1994, Rob Morgan and Shelby Hunt wrote a seminal paper on what really drives a long-term relationship between two business partners.
The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing quickly became a hit, not just in academic circles, but among senior business executives who were trying to identify why people were likely to do business with you.
Morgan and Hunt realised that long-term business relationships are built on a mutual and cooperative working relationship between two partner firms. Focus on Trust and Commitment if you want to foster and nurture such relationships. That’s why we built these key metrics into the heart of our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) methodology.
Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ)
Deep-Insight’s CRQ model works on three levels. Let’s take a quick look at each level. From the bottom up:
The Relationship Level
Trust and Commitment are the most important building blocks for a good relationship but don’t ignore Satisfaction. This is simply a measure of whether the customer’s expectations have been met or exceeded. Satisfaction is quite transactional. Customers can be happy one day and deeply unhappy the next, if they experience a problem. If the problem is solved, satisfaction levels increase quickly.
The Uniqueness Level
Experience is a measure of how easy you are to do business with and if you are seen as a trusted partner. You can have the best products or services in the world but if your clients can’t work with you and don’t see your people as trusted partners, you will not be seen as ‘Unique’. Deep-Insight defines Solution as a combination of Innovation, Leading Edge and Value-For-Money. These are three related but slightly different concepts but if you score well on all three, you have an offering that can help your clients compete in the marketplace in a way that none of your competitors can do. When we talk about ‘Solution’ we’re not just talking ‘Product’. It’s as much about how the account managers, sales and delivery teams position your company’s product or service, as it is about the product or service itself.
The Service Level
Service covers three separate elements: Reliability, Responsiveness and Customer Care. Reliability measures whether or not you do what you say you do. Do you walk the talk? Do you do what you promise? Essentially, can your clients rely on you (and the ‘you’ refers to both the brand and the individuals working with the client). Responsiveness measures whether or not you react quickly to issues that arise. Better, still, are you proactive in anticipating customers’ needs or issues. Customer Care is all about making the customer feel valued.
Are you interested in building Trust and Commitment with your key clients? Would you like to find out more about our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) model? If the answer to either question is yes, contact us today.
Mark Hollyoake is a co-founder and director of Customer Attuned – a UK partner of Deep-Insight – and is the author of this guest blog. Mark is currently studying for his Doctorate at Southampton University, focused on Trust as a dynamic within business-to-business customer relationships. He is an expert in B2B Customer Experience (CX) and Customer Management (CM). This includes CM strategy development; execution of improvement plans including organisational modelling for customer management); programme design; and partnership & alliance development.
Like our personal world, business to business can also be surrounded by fake news, false claims, unethical behaviours and self interest. Never has there been a time when trust has been so important. It has been proven to have a positive impact on relationship development and performance. It is a fundamental element to the development of a long lasting B2B relationship. With the need for trust being at an all time high, how can I ensure my B2B relationship is trustworthy and how can I use trust to build and develop it?
During my Doctoral research, I have investigated many models and frameworks devoted to systematically growing trust within B2B. The majority of these focus on the interface between customer management and customer experience with varying degrees of competence and rigour. No doubt, your existing customer plans will be built on some of these findings.
What none of them have done to date is to analyse the available data on trust and synthesize the research to develop a cohesive framework that systematically enables B2B organisations to develop and apply Trust to a real life business to business relationship – or ‘in short’ create a whole organisation systematic approach. Doing this, gives organisations the advantage of being able to quickly identify areas where you have strong applications of Trust (interdependence) or less bonded relationships (transactional).
We have been working with B2B customer relationships for over 30 years and studying trust as an integral element of B2B relationship development for the last 20 years. Building on our practical, pragmatic and applied academic research / thinking we developed a B2B model for trust. The Trust DNA™ model has emerged from my doctoral research and a recent re-defining of trust within a B2B context (Hollyoake, Ashleigh & Higgs 2017) that develops the elements of the definition into the Truscould apply to a real live business to business relationship.
We unpack the model and explore each element, allowing you to see how it applies to one of your customer relationships
-Intentions (I), the expectations you hold for the relationship, how much you plan to get involved and strategic focus? In, essence, what’s your appetite for risk with this customer?
-Ability (A) How good are you at what you do? This relates to your competence and capability in your sector, category and/or market? This covers not only your products, solutions, services, but the people that interface within the relationship.
-Credibility (C) This is often glossed over as reputation. In this context it’s a lot more encompassing, how commitments are met – do you do what you say? How does the organization act within the relationship and the level of integrity?
Within B2B relationships, it can be the partner’s credibility within a sector and/or category, market to realise value from the relationship, for example Airbus approaching an engineering company to make plane parts, exploring development of a plane and their part in the process would come with a lot of credibility.
Mutual Value (Mv) Within the relationship, does the level of mutual commercial benefit appear fair? Do you see a level of benevolence in the relationship and the dealings between both sides.
Interdependence (In) What level of interdependence do you see within the relationship. The level of joint working, co-creation, co-location and joint business planning.
Time/Repeatability (T) How long has the relationship been in existence? How often do both sides transact or formally review the relationship?
With the Trust DNA™ established, it is possible to evaluate your relationship and the level of trust that exists. This then leads to the possibility of predicting the mutual value potential you could achieve from a customer relationship by developing different elements of this.
The output from your TRUST DNA™ assessment allows you to identify what you could do to develop and build the relationship and how you could pro-actively use trust building. i.e. you could find the scoring is down around interdependence, this may be as simple as working in their office once a week. It might come out at a more advanced level, which may require the development of a co-created joint business plan. This is just one of numerous example of how the TRUST DNA™ can be pro-actively applied to develop your business.
How do I know this works?
It’s been proven through academic research.
It’s been proven through practical application.
