You Said, We Listened

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 year we achieved a Net Promoter Score of +66 and a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) score of 6.1 out of 7.

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.

John O’Connor
CEO, Deep-Insight

Deep-Insight seen as ‘Unique’ in 2019 CRQ assessment

Our 2019 Customer Relationship Quality Results

A big Thank You to all of our clients and channel partners who completed our CRQ assessment this year! It provided us with a wealth of feedback. We are humbled that you have given us such positive scores and we are thrilled with both the overall results and the detailed responses that we received.

In summary: we had an overall completion rate of 49%, a CRQ score of 6.0 and a Net Promoter score of +53%. This is the strongest set of scores that we have ever received.
CRQ and NPS CRQ assessment

Regaining our Unique Status

Our scores this year mean that we are now back into ‘Unique’ territory, which we just missed out on last year. Uniqueness requires a combination of a winning ‘Solution’ and a great ‘Experience’. Last year, our ‘Solution’ scores had slipped and over the past 12 months we have been working hard to regain this ‘Unique’ status. It’s very gratifying to see all of our hard work paying off.

Unique Solution and Unique Experience CRQ assessment

Deep-Dive: New and Improved

We have reflected a bit on last year’s journey for Deep-Insight and why we regained our Unique status. As a result of your feedback last year, we took your comments on board and put together a plan to upgrade our Deep-Dive platform. As a result, we have recently rolled out Deep-Dive v1.1 which is faster, has more features and allows our clients to access individual account reports at a click of a button. The work that the development team put into Deep-Dive has paid off as we have seen our ‘Solution’ scores increase from 4.9 to 5.7 this year and we have already received some very positive feedback regarding our upgraded Deep-Dive platform.

Our Plans for 2019?

Even though we received an amazing set of scores this year and we are thrilled with the results, that does not mean we will take a break. We have put our heads together and came up with the following action points for the upcoming months.

No. 1 – Share Results with All Clients – and Create Joint Action PLans

We tell our clients to share their results with their customers as this is a very effective way of building strong relationships. In the past we have sometimes been guilty of not taking our own advice but this year we plan on doing exactly that with all of our clients. Expect us to reach out to you in the very near future so that we can review your feedback together and see how Deep-Insight can be more effective this year at helping you achieve your 2019 objectives.

No. 2 – More Support with Account Management 

This year we asked you to what you use our services for. The answer? You use Deep-Insight and primarily as an Account Management/ Customer Retention tool, followed closely by Customer Experience feedback.

Customer Portfolio CRQ assessment
The message for us at Deep-Insight is that we need to spend more time with our clients at the start of any assessment to understand how you segment your client base, how you allocate account managers and service teams to those accounts, and how we can help you get more account-based insights from using the Deep-Dive platform. We also need to be more supportive in helping you use the results to manage those accounts more effectively. This is one area we would specifically like to explore with each of you in the coming weeks.

No. 3 – Aim for a Higher Response Rate in 2020

This is more of an internal action for us at Deep-Insight. A 49% response rate is not bad but we know that some of you set targets of 60% or higher, and you achieve them. We will be aiming for a 60% completion rate in 2020. We always advise our clients to work with their account teams to achieve the highest response rate possible, so for next year we will definitely put a stronger focus on this for ourselves as well.
Thank you again for your time and input into this year’s customer assessment. We will be in touch shortly.

John O’Connor

Product Management: First Month, First Insights

Rose Murphy
Product Manager, Deep-Insight

I’m delighted to start my new role as Product Manager. It’s an exciting challenge for me and for Deep-Insight. But where do I start? What do I do first?

Having spent ten years working my way up to Operations Director in Deep-Insight, I know our products and services like the back of my hand. I’d like to think I have a good grasp of the enhancements required to improve the reports and results we provide to our customers. But how can I be sure?

Here’s the single biggest thing I learned in the last few weeks since starting this role.

What I knew within operations, I really knew. What I know now, I only think I know.

I need to gather a lot of information and knowledge in the next few months. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by this.

Here’s the plan; I am going to deal with the ‘known unknowns’ one day at a time.

There are a lot of unknowns at the start of this process, but I have decided that there are only two that really matter.

1. What do our customers really want need?
2. What is the correct product roadmap for the next couple of years based on this?

I thought I knew the answer to number 1 above. I did with the word ‘want’. I have been listening for years to client feedback on our products.

But do I really know what happens within our client’s organisations once we deliver the results? Do I know what they really need?

We spend a lot of time with the management teams responsible, as a result of our findings, for creating action plans and driving change throughout their organisation.

But what about the team on the ground responsible for working with the reports on a daily basis?
– Do we really know everything that happens with our reports and results once our clients receive them?
– Have we ever truly observed how the account management teams use our reports and findings to help them manage their accounts?
– Have we ever assessed if our clients are making full use of every piece of information in every document we send to them?

To answer the question at the beginning of this blog, that is what I am doing first.

I will visit every client that will have me and meet as many people as possible within their organisation. I am going to ask many questions but I am also going to stop asking questions and simply watch.

I believe that it is this process of watching how our products are being used that will bring me much closer to understanding what our customers really need us to do. I will consider this information to be the single most important factor when deciding on our product roadmap at the start of next year.

That’s better. Now I have a plan. I’ll keep you updated.

A Christmas Message to Our Customers

We’re coming to the end of another year and all in all, it’s been a good one for us here at Deep-Insight.

We are an Irish company – and proud of it – but our client base is international. Over the past 12 months, we have carried out customer and employee assessments in the UK, Netherlands, Poland and Australia as well as in our home market. That said, one thing that I have noticed in 2015 is a marked increase in activity from local companies. The Irish recovery is definitely under way.

NEW FACES

 

Jamie Jaggernauth

We’ve had a particularly busy year at Deep-Insight and as a consequence, there are a few new faces in the Cork office these days.

We’re delighted to welcome Jamie Jaggernauth, who is our latest addition to the Deep-Insight team.

Jamie hails from Trinidad and has worked in a variety of research roles in the Caribbean, UK and Ireland before joining Deep-Insight.

NEW CLIENTS

We also added a few new names to our client list during 2015, ranging from large well-established firms like the health insurer VitalityHealth in the UK to newer digital organisations like DoneDeal, which is Ireland’s biggest classifieds site (and which is part of the Norwegian-headquartered Schibsted Media Group).

In fact, DoneDeal celebrated its 10th birthday this year so a big happy birthday to John, Cathal, Kristian, Simon and the rest of the DoneDeal crew!

DEEP-INSIGHT’S OWN CUSTOMER ASSESSMENT

Earlier this month, we asked you what you thought of your relationship with us.

Now, I must admit I awaited these result with some trepidation. We think we deliver an excellent service to our clients but it’s always slightly scary waiting to hear what people ACTUALLY say about us and the benefits of working with Deep-Insight. It’s scary because we do take your feedback personally and it’s always a little nerve-wracking waiting for the results ton come through.

Last year, we had a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) score of 5.2 and a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 17%. I was a little disappointed with those scores last year as they were down from the scores we received on our previous assessment and I felt that we could – and should – have done better.

A NPS of 17% is above average (more on average and good Net Promoter Scores here) but frankly it’s not that much above average. We had significantly higher scores in the past and we don’t see ourselves as a “slightly better than average” company. We used to be regarded by our clients as ‘Unique’ but in 2014 we dropped out of that zone. It’s a bit like a restaurant losing its Michelin Star – I was extremely keen to see if we could get back into the top bracket again this year.

So how did we do? How did you rate us?

2015 CLIENT FEEDBACK

 

This year, you gave us a Customer Relationship Quality (CRQ) score of 5.7 and a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of +37%.

I was a little stunned when the results came through as our NPS and CRQ scores had shot up dramatically. As many of you will be used to hearing me say at this stage, it’s quite a challenge to get your CRQ score to jump by more than 0.2 or your NPS to increase more than 10%. We had worked hard on a number of fronts over the past 12 months but the size of the improvement in scores still came as a surprise. So thank you for that vote of confidence in Deep-Insight – it really does mean a lot to us.

UniquenessThe other thing I’m particularly pleased with is the fact that we are back into the ‘Unique’ zone – that’s the light green box in the top right hand corner of the graphic. To be seen as unique, a company has to be able to provide a solution that truly solves its customers’ problems, as well as providing an excellent experience for that client. That’s something that only 10% of B2B companies achieve so it’s nice to be able to claim that accolade again.

There’s still plenty for us to work on. We’re currently analysing each and every verbatim to figure out exactly how to improve our service even further. We will be sharing these results with you as early as we can in the New Year.

LOOKING FORWARD TO 2016

So there it is. 2015 is nearly over but we have some exciting things planned for next year.

Over the past few months, Rose Murphy has been talking to most of you about what you like and dislike about our current product offering. The feedback you have given to Rose, as well as the various suggestions you have made in this recent client assessment, will help us improve what we do and how we do it.

But for the moment, allow me to say a big thank you to each and every one of you for supporting us throughout 2015.

On a personal note, I’d also like to say a big thanks to the following (in no particular order other than alphabetical): Brian, Frank, Grainne, Jamie, Mark, Mary, Peter, Pim, Rose, Yvonne as well as to the rest of the wider Deep-Insight team who have helped to deliver a fantastic service to you – our clients – over the past 12 months.

Have a very peaceful Christmas and I look forward to seeing you all in the New Year,

John