In January, we asked you what you thought of your relationship with Deep-Insight so let me start by saying THANK YOU to everybody who completed our own Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment.
Two years ago we had a CRQ score of 5.7 and a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +37%. Our clients across Europe and in Australia told us that they saw us as “Unique” and that our solution was essential to their business.
I was delighted by these customer scores and more than a little humbled by the positive comments our clients shared with us. Since then, we have all been asking ourselves: Could we replicate those results? Could we remain Unique? Let’s get straight to the results and find out.
OUR 2018 RESULTS
Bottom line: this year our scores are good but not as good as in our previous assessment.
We had a 45% completion rate, a CRQ of 5.4 and a NPS result of +23%.
These are good scores but to our disappointment, our Uniqueness “prize” has been taken away from us. When we first saw the headline results, we felt like a hard-working team in a top restaurant that has just lost its Michelin star. The great Irish chef and restauranteur Kevin Thornton described that experience as akin to “a stab in the heart”. I don’t think we took the news as badly as Kevin did but we certainly felt a little deflated.
On the plus side, we were only just outside the Unique zone, and the encouraging message for me was that the overall feedback was still very positive:
-Top quartile performance (even if it wasn’t top decile)
-Half of our customers are Ambassadors – same as in our previous assessment
-No Ambivalents, Stalkers or Opponents in our customer portfolio – better than last time around
-Very positive reaction to the introduction of our Deep-Dive online platform
THE CHALLENGES OF REMAINING “UNIQUE”
Being Unique was great. It was a validation of everything we had been striving to achieve. It meant we were on a par with the the Top 10% of all companies globally. But it’s a challenge to maintain that Unique status so it was important for us to understand what messages lay behind the headline results and address any common issues across our client base.
When we went through the results in more detail, we discovered that the number of clients who had given us higher scores this year was the same as the number who had given us lower scores. Our new clients also gave us very good scores so it wasn’t an on-boarding issue which is an issue we see in some of our clients’ assessments. We did notice that one of our larger clients had scored us badly for not being flexible enough in our dealings with them, and this became very clear when we went through the verbatim comments. There was no shortage of suggestions from people on how we could improve our offering and regain our Unique status.
We want our Unique status back! What are we going to do about it? Based on your feedback, we are planning three sets of activities in 2018:
#1. Implement a benchmarking programme
While reading your comments we realised that one word that kept getting mentioned: ‘benchmarking’. In previous years, we would tell our clients that the two best benchmarks you can have are against your previous performance (have you made significant improvements since last year?) and against a Best In Class standard (are you seen as “Unique”?). Most of our clients buy into those messages but there is still a strong desire among senior executives to understand how their organisations fare against their peers in their industry. Deep-Insight has over 15 years worth of historic CRQ and NPS data across a variety of B2B industry sectors and this year we will start implementing benchmarking comparisons in our reporting.
#2. Bring more innovation to the table
In late-2016 we started to roll out a new online reporting and analysis tool called Deep-Dive. It has turned out to be a very popular addition as it allows additional analysis and insights to be gleaned from the underlying data. This year, we will be making minor improvements on reporting and more intuitive navigation. In 2019 our aim is to give Deep-Dive a complete makeover with a new interface and features. We have also taken on board a number of comments regarding our product offering. For example: questionnaire length (“Can we make it shorter!”), anonymity (“Do customer assessments always have to be anonymous?”) and frequency (“Can you run monthly/ quarterly NPS surveys for us?”) and we will have announcements on these items later in 2018.
#3. Review our processes and be more flexible
We are perceived as rigid and inflexible by some clients. Now there are times when we need to be rigid. For example, our clients trust us to keep their details secure and their customers trust us to keep their feedback anonymous. On the other hand, we are aware that there is still work to do on our processes and in particular on the automation of tasks and activities. We have already started reviewing them to see how we can upgrade and automate some of these activities. We are also looking at how we can better integrate the Deep-Insight offering with other CX technologies in the marketplace, as well as examining how to make the core CRQ question set shorter..
In the coming weeks, we will be discussing these results with you in order to figure out how we can better serve your needs in 2018. On a personal level, I’m looking forward to those discussions and welcome the opportunity to allow you shape Deep-Insight’s future.
John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight