Avoiding the CX Rat Trap

Avoiding the CX Rat Trap

Goodhart's Law


A story of rats, cobras and economists

This is a story about rats, cobras and economists (and no, they’re not the same thing!) but it’s primarily a blog about a British economist called Charles Goodhart and his take on target setting, key performance indicators (KPIs) and the law of unintended consequences.

Goodhart is a man whose musings are worth reading if you’re struggling to make your customer experience (CX) programme work. All CX programmes involve the measurement of customer satisfaction (CSat), Net Promoter Score (NPS) or similar KPI. Companies will sometimes incentivise their employees to achieve a particular CX objective: “If we hit our NPS target of +50 this year, all sales staff get an additional bonus of £1,000.” This is not an uncommon practice. It’s also not a good one, as we are going to find out shortly.

Charles Goodhart is best known for Goodhart’s Law, which is neatly summarised in the Sketchplanations cartoon above. Setting targets can result in unintended consequences, particularly where incentives are involved.

Before we delve into Goodhart and his famous law, let’s start with a couple of stories about rats and cobras.

The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt

In 1902, the French ruled Indochina, a region in South East Asia comprised of modern-day Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The capital and administrative centre was Hanoi.

That year, the French administrators introduced a bounty on rats after it was discovered that rats played a significant role in transmitting the plague. The Third Plague Pandemic was a pretty serious issue in Asia at the time. It had spread from China in the late nineteenth century and by the time it was finally eradicated in the 1960s, more than 10 million people had died from the plague.

A bounty seemed to make sense. To claim it, the locals simply had to bring in a bag of rat tails. There was no need for piles of dead rats clogging up the corridors of power in Hanoi – tails would suffice. Within weeks, the bounty was working. Hundreds of rat tails poured in. Then thousands. It seemed too good to be true, and so it turned out to be.

It didn’t take long for French officials to figure out what was happening. The bounty had created an entirely new industry in Hanoi where rodent tails were brought into the capital from the countryside. Worse still, entrepreneurs in Hanoi started to breed rats in order to increase their bounty revenues. The number of rats in Hanoi was increasing, rather than decreasing.

Eventually, the bounty was discontinued. This story of administrative failure and unintended consequences is told in Michael Vann’s book The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt.


The Cobra Effect

It’s not just the French who were outwitted by their colonial subjects. A similar case happened under British rule in India, and documented in Horst Siebert’s book Der Kobra-Effekt.

At the same time that the French were grappling with a rat epidemic in Hanoi, the British were dealing with a cobra explosion in India. Cobras were viewed by the British administrators as deadly pests and a bounty was introduced in Delhi for every dead cobra handed in to the authorities. Many cobras were killed and handed in but, to the bemusement of the British rulers, the cobra population seemed to be on the rise.

It’s the same story of simple economics: the cost of breeding a cobra was significantly lower than the bounty, so entrepreneurs started to breed cobras. When the bounty was stopped, the breeders released the remaining cobras into the wild, further exacerbating the situation.


Goodhart's Law

Charles Goodhart is a British economist. He was born in 1936 and spent nearly 20 years of his career at the Bank of England, working on and writing about public and financial policy. In 1975, he wrote a paper containing the line: “whenever a government seeks to rely on a previously observed statistical regularity for control purposes, that regularity will collapse.”

The comment was specifically about monetary policy but would later be generalised as a law about targets, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). In 1997, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern expressed Goodhart’s Law as follows when she was investigating grade inflation in university examinations:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The more a 2.1 examination performance becomes an expectation, the poorer it becomes as a discriminator of individual performances. Targets that seem measurable become enticing tools for improvement.

Marilyn Strathern’s interpretation that has become the most widely used today.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

The basic message from Goodhart’s Law is a simple one: beware the law of unintended consequences when you set targets for people to achieve.

This is equally true when companies set targets in the field of customer experience (CX). If senior leadership teams incentivise their sales people and account managers to hit Net Promoter Score (NPS) targets, they will be achieved come hell or high water. In a previous blog, I outlined how CX programmes are often ‘gamed’ to achieve ridiculously high NPS targets which bear no relationship to the company’s actual performance. Common actions taken to game the CX system include:

  • Selecting only those clients who are Ambassadors for you and your product or service, when you are looking for customer feedback
  • Within those clients, selecting only those individuals who you know will score you 9/10 or 10/10 (these are ‘Promoters’ in NPS terminology)
  • Making sure to deselect any client that is likely to give you a poor score, using excuses like: “Now is not the right time to ask their views” or “We’ll only antagonise them if we approach them now”
  • Refusing to send a survey to anybody who doesn’t know you really well, even if it’s a senior decision maker that you’d love to have a conversation with. Why? The chances of them scoring you 9 or 10 are slim
  • Not outsourcing the NPS survey process to a third party that can give the option of confidentiality to survey participants – confidential surveys are likely to elicit lower scores even if they provide a much more realistic and honest view of your product or service

In many cases, employees and leadership teams are unaware that they are gaming the system. They simply believe that they are doing the right thing for the company.


Avoiding the CX Rat Trap - 5 Rules

Rule No. 1: Do not incentivise employees to achieve CX targets. It’s that simple. If you do, you’ll end up with more rats and cobras than you can handle.

Rule No. 2: If your Senior Leadership Team or Board is bonused on achieving NPS results, stop this practice immediately! You would be amazed at the number of companies that engage in such bonus schemes.

Rule No. 3: Resist the temptation to publish your Net Promoter Score in your annual report. All you are doing is setting yourself up for inflated NPS results as nobody in the organisation will want to be associated with a ‘down year’. It’s human nature. By accident or design, employees and leaders will game the system to achieve higher scores next year.

Rule No. 4: Put a robust CX governance structure in place. Make sure ALL clients are surveyed. Sign off the contact lists. Resist the urge to exclude people whose views might be unfavourable – you want to know what they are thinking.

Rule No. 5: Finally, don’t approach CX with the mindset of a colonial administrator! Senior leadership teams have to view customer feedback as a gift. They have to encourage their colleagues to be open about getting feedback, whether good, bad or indifferent. Without honest feedback, change will never happen. Poor practices will continue and eventually clients will leave.

Finally, if you want to find out more about how to set up and run a customer experience (CX) programme effectively, contact us for a chat. We’d love to hear from you.

The B2B Blindspot: Why NPS Isn’t Enough

The B2B Blindspot: Why NPS Isn’t Enough


Why do so many B2B CX programmes fail?

Later this year, Bert Paesbrugghe will be hosting a LinkedIn webinar called The B2B Customer Success Blindspot: Why NPS Isn’t Enough. It sounds like it will be a good session and I have cheekily borrowed his title for this blog as it got me thinking about some of the reasons why B2B companies set up customer experience (CX) or Net Promoter Score (NPS) programmes in the first place.

More important, it’s worth reflecting on why these CX and NPS endeavours often fail to deliver on their initial promise. And that’s the sad truth – many of these programmes fail to improve the service delivered to customers. They don’t succeed for a variety of reasons. One of these is the belief that Net Promoter Score is a silver bullet for solving all manner of customer woes.

It’s not. That’s the blindspot. NPS is not enough for B2B companies.

B2B is different

The first thing to mention is that the Business-to-Business (B2B) world is VERY different to its Business-to-Consumer (B2C) counterpart.

The consumer world is all about the 4Ps: ProductPricePlace and PromotionMarketing guru Philip Kotler popularised the 4Ps back in the 1960s. They were a core part of his Marketing Management book that many of us still have on our shelves today.

My only real problem with the 4Ps model is that it’s essentially a B2C concept. It doesn’t cover the subtleties of the B2B world where very often a service provider is delivering a very complex service across multiple locations – often in different countries. This is a world away from selling and marketing consumer products such as Mars Bars or Mercedes cars.

The 4Ps also don’t take into account the need for key/ global account management or the associated challenges of building and maintaining relationships with multiple decision makers and influencers across large global organisations.


NPS is one-dimensional

Net Promoter Score has proven to be one of the most durable metrics in management, ever since its invention by academic and business consultant Fred Reichheld more that two decades ago. Reichheld’s basic premise was that you only need to ask one question in order to understand if a customer is going to stay loyal to you or not. The question is: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”

Fred, an excellent marketeer, promoted the benefits of his Net Promoter Score (NPS) concept in publications like the Harvard Business Review. He then proclaimed its merits in his 2006 book The Ultimate Question. Since then, NPS has became a hugely popular metric for customer loyalty and customer experience.

I’ve written about NPS before and, in general, I’m a fan of the metric for both its simplicity and its popularity. Sure, it’s not perfect, as Professor Nick Lee points out. But then again, is there a perfect KPI for anything? Let’s agree that Net Promoter Score has its place and is worth measuring even if it is a little one-dimensional. 

So NPS is good, but much more is required, particularly in the B2B world with all of its complexities, peculiarities and challenges.


Why NPS is not enough (in B2B)

Let’s go back to basics here. B2B IS different. So let’s recap on what some of those differences are:

  • Customer Base. Consumer brands like Mars Bars and Mercedes cars are sold to millions of individuals. Three million sold every single day, in the case of Mars Bars. In contrast, we work with B2B clients that generate annual revenues of more than €1bn from fewer than 100 clients.
  • Value. A Mars Bar costs around €1.60 at the time of writing (let me know if you can source them cheaper!) while an outsourced IT contract can be worth €100m. Admittedly, a Mars Bar can be consumed in less than five minutes while a €100m contract might take five years to consume. But you get the picture: value and Value For Money are very different in the B2B and B2C worlds.
  • Marketing Strategy. We talked earlier about Kotler’s 4Ps. While the consumer world is all about Product, the B2B world is more around Service and Relationships. Even in today’s AI-enabled world, those services are still delivered by people. Relationship-building is a critical component of the marketing mix the B2B world.
  • Sales Focus. In the consumer world, merchandising and point-of-sale advertising are key. In the B2B world, far more emphasis is placed on educating the customer about features, benefits, return on investment, and so on. This is still mainly done through personal contact and relationships.
  • What to Maximise? The consumer world is about the transaction – promoting those Mars Bar at the point of sale, for example. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is rarely if ever mentioned in the consumer world. CLV is arguably the most important thing to maximise in the B2B world as it typically takes 2-5 years to recover the initial sales cost of a major multi-year contract win.
  • Buying Process. In a supermarket, buying a Mars Bar is a split-second decision. Even for a Mercedes, the decision can be quick. Clinching that 5-year outsourcing deal can and does take years from beginning to end. It also involves multiple decision-makers and influencers.
  • Buying Decision. In the consumer world, decisions are often made on emotion – hence the importance of brand and image. In the B2B world, we like to think decisions are made on rational grounds, based on cleary-defined evaluation criteria.


What else is needed?

Let’s assume we have just sold a 5-year outsourcing deal to a client and we are now in the onboarding or delivery stage of that contract. Yes, it’s useful to know if our client would recommend us to a friend or colleague. That’s the Net Promoter question, but is it enough?

Not really. Ideally, we need to know much more. For example, do our clients trust us now that we have started working for them? Are they committed to us for the long term? Are they happy with the service that they are now receiving? 

These are just some of the questions that we need to ask our B2B clients in a systematic way. We need answers at an aggregate level but we also need feedback at an account level. Contract A may be going swimmingly. Contract B may already be on the rocks (to continue the theme) but we might not know that if we are only getting aggregated client feedback.


Eliminating the blindspot: Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ)

An alternative to asking the one-dimensional NPS question is to view the customer relationship more holistically. That’s where Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) fits in.

CRQ can be visualised as a pyramid comprised of three different levels.

  1. The first and most fundamental is the Relationship level. Do your clients trust you, are they committed to a long-term relationship with you, and are they satisfied with that relationship?
  2. The second is the Uniqueness level. Do your clients view the experience of working with you, and the solutions you offer, as truly differentiated and unique? Do they see us as good value for money?
  3. At the top of the pyramid is the Service level. Are you seen as reliable, responsive and caring? Get this wrong and you will never be seen as Unique and you will struggle to build a long-term relationship with that client.

Interestingly, CRQ and NPS scores are highly correlated. If you score well on all six elements of this Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) model, your clients will act as Ambassadors, generating a high NPS result for you. However, CRQ gives you so much more information to act upon, and that’s far more important.


The most important part: Action

The CRQ model above was specifically designed for the B2B world. That said, it really doesn’t matter what questions you ask your clients if you fail to do anything with their feedback.

The most important part of any NPS, CRQ, CX or client listening programme is the ‘Action’ piece. The reason that many  customer programmes fail to deliver is that they are run by the Marketing department (sorry guys and gals!) while the members of the company’s Senior Management Team have collectively washed their hands of any responsibility for acting on that client feedback.

In most B2B organisations, key client relationships are owned by Sales. In some cases where delivery is an ongoing function, it’s the Service or Operations functions that have most of the day-to-day client contact. It’s rarely, if ever, somebody from Marketing. The Sales Director (or Service/ Operations Director) needs to own the ‘Close The Loop’ element of the programme. It’s unfair to expect Marketing to take responsibility for it.

Put it another way: it’s madness to think that Marketing can effect change on its own. That’s a Leadership function. I’ve never seen a successful NPS ar CX programme that has not been driven from the top. So regardless of what you think of NPS as a B2B metric, don’t assume that NPS or any other set of survey questions is going to improve your top line or your profitability. It won’t, unless there’s follow-up action. That action needs to be managed systematically, and it needs to be driven by the  SMT or Executive Team.

Finally, do remember that it’s not about the score. It’s about using that valuable client feedback to take action and become more customer-centric. That’s how you generate more revenues and boost profits.

New Year’s Resolution: Measure Net Revenue Retention

New Year’s Resolution: Measure Net Revenue Retention

Broker Revenues

Do New Year's resolutions work?

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post ran an article entitled Here’s a better way to make New Year’s resolutions.

In the article, points out that the conventional wisdom is that New Year’s resolutions typically fail. However, a closer look at the data shows that many people do benefit from making resolutions. Lindsey also summarises the tips for improving your odds of success if you do make a New Year’s resolution.

Lindsey’s tips in that Washington Post article are fairly straightforward:

  • Set your New Year’s resolutions at the right time
  • Make an explicit plan for achieving your goal
  • Choose a goal you’ll enjoy
  • Subtract things from your life
  • Forgive failures

We’ll come back to those tips shorty. But first, let’s try to apply that Washington Post’s article to the B2B world.

The New Year’s resolution that I would like ALL B2B leadership teams to make this year: Measure Net Revenue Retention (NRR) in 2024.

Revenues at Kainos, excluding acquired companies (£m, 2015-2022)

What is Net Revenue Retention (NRR)?

The easiest way to explain NRR is to use a real-life example. Take a B2B company call Kainos – I wrote a blog about them a year ago – which has been operating at an average Net Revenue Retention (NRR) rate of 110-120% ever since it went public in 2015. 

(See the box below for a more detailed explanation of Kainos’ NRR figures.)

Kainos may not be a household name but since it floated on the London Stock Exchange way back in 2015, the company has been growing revenues organically by 20-30% a year. That’s 20-30% a year every single yearWithout fail. Kainos floated at a share price of £1.39. On 1 January 2024, its share price was over £10.

If you’re a member of a B2B leadership team that would like to emulate Kainos’ success, read on!

Kainos is a high growth, high profit company precisely because its NRR figures are so strong. In its nine years as a publicly-quoted company, its NRR has only once dropped below 100%. In 2019, it hit 139%. Kainos is certainly ‘Best in Class’ and is a role model for any company trying to achieve above-average revenue and profit growth.

NRR is not a difficult concept to grasp but few senior executives truly understand the power of monitoring their company’s NRR performance. The reason for this is that most B2B leadership teams don’t understand how much it costs to land a ‘Net New’ client (brand new logo). If they did, they would become obsessed with retention in general, and NRR in particular as a key metric to monitor.

That’s why the adoption of NRR should become your main corporate New Year’s resolution in 2024.

NRR Explained

Net Revenue Retention is not yet a commonly-used financial term in business even though it is a well-known term in Software as a Service (SaaS) companies.

Let’s look at Kainos’ revenues from a NRR perspective. Let’s group revenues by the year in which they were acquired.

The graph on the right shows that in 2015, Kainos generated revenues of £61m.

Now suppose Kainos signed up no new clients in 2016. Its revenues would still have grown as the clients that were on its books in 2015 generated revenues of £68m in 2016.

Here’s the NRR calculation:

Kainos’ Net Revenue Retention for 2016 is:

NRR = £68m ÷ £61m = 111%

Kainos NRR net revenue retention


Is it worth the effort?

Yes! But it does require effort – not just in measuring NRR, but making the changes that are required to drive that NRR figure up.

Here’s why it’s worth it. Let’s say you and your fellow directors are running a B2B company with an annual turnover of €100m. You have an Enterprise sales team that’s delivering €10m in new sales each year and you feel you’re doing a good job for you’re shareholders.

But you’re not growing and your shareholders aren’t ecstatic.

That’s because you’re operating at a NRR of about 90%. In other words, the clients that accounted for €100m in revenues in 2023 will only generate €90m for you in 2024. So you need €10m of ‘New Logo’ sales to make up the gap. In other words, your Enterprise sales team are working their socks off but all they’re achieving is to help you stand still.

NRR - 3 years

Impact of Improving NRR – taking a 3-year view

So let’s see what happens if you manage to retain your existing customers for a little longer or if you expand your footprint across those accounts a little better.

If you do the right thing for, and by, your clients, your NRR should increase to 100%.

That would turn your €100m company into a €130m company in three years – see graphic on the left. Now you’re growing again.

If you could get your NRR to 120% which is where truly market-leading companies operate, you would more than double the size of the company over the next three years.

Of course, the reverse is also true. If your NRR is only 80%, then your Enterprise sales team (who currently do €10m a year in New Logo sales) have no chance of plugging that €20m revenue gap each year. So the company goes into long-term decline.

NRR - 10 years

Impact of Improving NRR – taking a 10-year view

The real benefit comes when you replicate these NRR achievements over the longer term.

Suppose you can maintain a NRR rate of 120% for 10 years. Yes, that’s a tall order. But it can be done. Well-run companies like Kainos have achieved this. The most successful software companies often exceed this rate.

The graph shows the impact very clearly. You will increase revenues almost ninefold over ten years with a NRR of 120%

Even at 110%, you will still double the size of the company in a decade purely through organic growth.

Of course, if you’re operating at a NRR of 80%, your company will lose almost half its revenues over a 10-year period, and probably more than 90% of its share value. And you’ll be out of a job well before those ten years are up.

Tips for Success

Let’s go back to those tips from at the Washington Post at the start of this blog:

  • Set your New Year’s resolutions at the right time. Honestly, there’s no better time than now. It may not be the start of your financial year – most UK companies have a financial year beginning in April – but that gives you a few months to try it out so that you can get your company’s financial systems tracking NRR formally from 1 April 2024.
  • Make an explicit plan for achieving your goal. Table this topic at your January leadership team meeting. Challenge yourselves to be bold, and put the customer at the heart of everything you do. (This is the key to improving your NRR figures.) 
  • Choose a goal you’ll enjoy. If you can achieve a NRR greater than 100%, you’re definitely going to enjoy this New Year’s resolution. If you get anywhere near 120%, your board and shareholders are going to enjoy it even more!
  • Subtract things from your life. If you’re going to add NRR to your leadership team’s KPI list, drop a couple of your existing KPIs. Do a spring clean of your management dashboard. Are all those metrics really necessary? Which ones can you drop?
  • Forgive failures. Change is not easy and the road to success is challenging. You won’t get everything right first time. But the journey will be worth it. Read through that Kainos blog and interview with former CEO Brendan Mooney again for a little inspiration.

Happy New Year!

“Excellence in CX” Awards 2023 – That’s a Wrap!

“Excellence in CX” Awards 2023 – That’s a Wrap!

Congratulations to our 2023 Winners

2023 That's a Wrap

This is the second year of Deep-Insight “Excellence in CX” Awards.

These awards focus on companies that we have worked with in 2023 that have embraced our Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) framework and methodology to make meaningful change for both their customers and their employees. 

That makes us very proud!

Before we talk about the winners, let’s answer the following question:

What do we mean by ‘Excellence in CX’?

Deep-Insight is a small team of Customer Experience (CX) consultants who work extremely closely with our customers. The single question which drives us in each engagement is “will this programme inspire transformation in our client organisations?”.

Transformation does not need to be, and usually isn’t, a huge significant event in itself. When done well, transformation is a series of small, well thought through changes and improvements. Transformation is only worth it if it leads to growth, and it always does when it is inspired by the customer.

Also, we are not interested in vanity projects! We are focused on our core mission of Inspiring Transformation i.e. effective, growth-oriented use of Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX).

This is what excellence in customer experience looks like and it is the foundation on which our customers build their CX and EX programmes.

AND THE 2023 WINNERS ARE…

 
open eir wins Best CRQ Newcomer 2023 award

open eir has been awarded Best CRQ Newcomer in the Deep-Insight Excellence in CX Awards for 2023. We are thrilled for them.

If you live in Ireland, you’ll know open eir. It’s the wholesale arm of Ireland’s largest telecommunications company. At some point you will have seen their vans on the streets, and their technicians out and about, installing fibre lines and connections into business premises and homes across Ireland. 

This is a truly deserved award as it’s hard to believe that open eir’s very first Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment was launched to its customers as recently as October 2023.

Maeve O’Malley recently took on the role as Managing Director at open eir Wholesale and in recent weeks has been leading the charge with open eir’s response to its clients and partners.

Maeve has over 24 years of experience in the telecommunications industry and joined eir in 2013. According to Maeve:

open eir is delighted to be working with Deep-Insight and are already finding huge value in the insights and input from the team as we continue our journey of transforming our customers’ and partners’ experience with us.”

Best CRQ Engagement

When we run a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment at Deep-Insight, the average completion rate for our surveys is around 35%. If it is a first-time assessment, the average participation rate is lower – typically 30%. So that’s the figure we were expecting to achieve at Insight.

However, the senior leadership team at Insight had different plans. Jill MurrayVice President Marketing EMEA at Insight led the programme. Adrian GregoryPresident of EMEA, sponsored it. Together, they felt that 30% was a pretty low hurdle to achieve so they mobilised their regional and country managers, plus all of their account managers, to start a conversation with key clients across Europe. The message was simple: We want to be better partners for you, so we need your help to tell us what we’re good at, and where we need to improve.

Insight contacted 203 key individuals – key decision makers, influencers and operational contacts – from a selection of their strategic clients across Europe. 100 of the 203 responded – a whopping 49% engagement rate

Jill Murray has this to say about receiving the award:

Our unwavering commitment to our clients drives us to constantly improve our solutions and expertise in order to provide exceptional service. It is with great pride that we accept this award from Deep-Insight, a testament to the hard work and dedication of our teams in building strong client relationships and driving meaningful business outcomes.

As a leading Solutions Integrator, we are thrilled to continue supporting our clients on their digital journeys and enhancing the experience we deliver.

Best CRQ Score

DWF, a long-standing customer of ours, has been awarded Best CRQ Score in Deep-Insight’s “Excellence in CX” Awards this year.

We will always be the first to say that great Customer Experience should NOT be about scores only. It’s about much more than that. However, this year we want to recognise DWF for their amazing Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) scores regardless as they have been consistently rewarded with glowing reviews from their clients as part of the CRQ programme.

With a CRQ score of 6.0 (as well as a Net Promoter Score of +62) we can call this a truly phenomenal set of scores. On top of this, DWF is notorious within Deep-Insight for struggling to get their clients to give any negative feedback at all – a true testament to how much their clients value their relationships with DWF!

 

Sir Nigel Knowles is CEO of DWF, having previously served as Chairman of the Group from September 2017 to May 2020. Sir Nigel Knowles shared:

“We are very proud of this award from Deep-Insight which reflects the exceptional client relationships we have been able to develop thanks to the hard work, dedication and excellence of our colleagues.

The valuable insights provided by Deep Insight are helping us to go even further, continuing to enhance the way we support our clients.”

Focus on Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ)

Doing the right thing for customers means doing the right thing for your employees.

We award the “Best Focus on ERQ” prize to the company that shows the greatest interest in Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ), the sister methodology to CRQ.

Pelican Self Storage has been a client of ours for years, and it has been a privilege watching the Pelican management team take the views of its employees so seriously over that time.

 

Burkhart Franz is CEO of Pelican and has always been a huge advocate for his management team and all of his employees across Denmark, Sweden and Finland.

“Our twice-a-year employee satisfaction surveys, alternating the eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) question and the more in-depth Employee Relationship Quality (ERQ) assessment are now in their 7th year.

They have clearly made Pelican a more employee-focused organization. Over the years we have addressed many issues that had previously wiped the smiles off the faces of our collaborators, from slow internet connections and faulty printer set-ups to significant changes in management style, workplace scheduling and internal communication. As a result, we have very low employee churn in what are otherwise red hot labor markets; a premium service proposition; and the happiest customers in our industry.”

Insight wins “Best CRQ Engagement 2023” Award

Insight wins “Best CRQ Engagement 2023” Award

Today we are delighted to announce the second winner in the 2023 Deep-Insight Excellence in CX Awards.

Today’s category is “Best CRQ Engagement“.

CRQ stands for Customer Relationship Quality but what exactly is Engagement, you might ask? Engagement is all about convincing your customers to give you feedback on your performance, and then working closely with them to improve the overall customer experience. The “Best CRQ Engagement” winner is the company that does the best job at eliciting the most feedback from its customers. Think of engagement as the completion rate you achieve when you send out a customer survey to all of your key accounts.

This year’s winner is Insight EMEA, the European arm of the Fortune 500 leading Solutions Integrator Insight Enterprises.

What exactly is a Solutions Integrator, I also hear you ask? Well, Solutions Integrators work as both a service provider and an advisor to ensure a project is successfully delivered from the initial concept all the way through to execution. That advisory work can also extend beyond implementation to ongoing support, management and optimisation. Also, Solutions Integrators are equipped to deliver meaningful change and a greater return on investment at a global scale.

What is a Good Engagement Score?

Some time ago our Operations Manager Alex Calugarici wrote a blog on the topic of engagement rates in a B2B environment

In that blog, Alex explains that when we run a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) assessment at Deep-Insight, the average completion rate for our surveys is around 35%. If it is a first-time assessment, the average participation rate is lower – typically 30%. So that’s the figure we were expecting to achieve at Insight.

However, the senior leadership team at Insight had different plans. Jill MurrayVice President Marketing EMEA at Insight led the programme. Adrian Gregory, President of EMEA, sponsored it. Together, they felt that 30% was a pretty low hurdle to achieve so they mobilised their regional and country managers, plus all of their account managers, to start a conversation with key clients across Europe. The message was simple: We want to be better partners for you, so we need your help to tell us what we’re good at, and where we need to improve.

Insight contacted 203 key individuals – key decision makers, influencers and operational contacts – from a selection of their strategic clients across Europe. 100 of the 203 responded – a whopping 49% engagement rate

Jill Murray has this to say about receiving the award:

Our unwavering commitment to our clients drives us to constantly improve our solutions and expertise in order to provide exceptional service. It is with great pride that we accept this award from Deep-Insight, a testament to the hard work and dedication of our teams in building strong client relationships and driving meaningful business outcomes.

As a leading Solutions Integrator, we are thrilled to continue supporting our clients on their digital journeys and enhancing the experience we deliver.

About Insight

Insight Enterprises, Inc. is a Fortune 500 Solutions Integrator with more than 13,000 teammates worldwide helping organisations accelerate their digital journey to modernise their business and maximise the value of technology. We enable secure, end-to-end transformation and meet the needs of our clients through a comprehensive portfolio of solutions, far-reaching partnerships and 35 years of broad IT expertise.

Rated as a Forbes World’s Top Female-Friendly Company and a Great Place to Work, we amplify our solutions and services with global scale, local expertise and a world-class e-commerce experience, realising the digital ambitions of our clients at every opportunity. Discover more at uk.insight.com.

About Deep-Insight

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 establish and operate world-class Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) programmes.

For more information, go to www.deep-insight.com or email us at sales@deep-insight.com.