Research Services

Customer Experience

The last ten years have introduced the term, "Customer Experience" into our marketing lexicon, making a strong statement about the importance of seeing the world from the perspective of customers and the challenges of mining vast stores of data to deliver a meaningful pay-off that marketers can act on productively. This renewed focus on customer experience heralds an era in which marketers are attaching more weight to nuggets of insight than mountains of information.

The challenge of extracting those nuggets from large quantitative databases is met in several ways:

  • A deep understanding of the category and an appreciation of historic market levers, drawing on richly informed cultural and psychological perspectives.
  • An analytic strategy that marries complementary techniques, using sensitive qualitative techniques to drive quantitative hypothesis-testing
  • Intelligent survey design that asks truly relevant and sensitive questions – not just traditional questions – in order to make what we measure as meaningful as the trend line
  • A statistical tool kit that is versatile and broad, and an approach to statistical interpretation that insists on the "so-what?"

One of the areas in which a "customer experience" orientation can deliver great dividends is Customer Satisfaction research, where detecting disappointment and modeling customer priorities is only part of the process. Our approach to Customer Satisfaction is designed to help clients make productive resource allocation decisions by determining what levels of performance are required to drive specified levels of satisfaction.

Other arenas are Brand Strategy and Market Surveillance, where effective strategy is driven by an understanding of the customer-brand relationship – its anatomy and its evolution.

Customer Satisfaction Monitoring

A recognized industry leader in Customer Satisfaction Modeling, National Analysts Worldwide has developed a portfolio of approaches to customer satisfaction research that are designed to address the shortcomings of traditional customer satisfaction measurement (CSM) and customer value analysis (CVA). Our customer satisfaction research services include:

  • Customer behavior-based relative importance measures for prioritizing process improvements.
  • Special techniques to measure customer requirements and supplier performance in a manner that is sufficiently granular to support process improvement initiatives at the line management level.
  • Modeling tools for assessing and optimizing the financial impact of process improvement.
  • Summary measures of competitive performance condensed into "one-page" dashboards that are suitable for upper management presentation.
  • Designs for tracking change over time and implementing a continuous improvement program.

National Analysts Worldwide has devoted more than two decades to the development of our customer satisfaction research techniques, and has implemented these approaches with many of the leading Fortune 500 firms, including the first company ever to win the coveted Deming Prize for Customer Satisfaction.

Satisfaction Drivers

Most marketers measure both overall satisfaction of their customers as well as satisfaction with specific product attributes and service elements. Effective allocation of marketing and service resources requires some method for prioritizing the product attributes and service elements that create greatest leverage.

National Analysts Worldwide often employs customer satisfaction research approaches that are more actionable than traditional CSM and CVA by focusing on customer requirements and supplier performance against those requirements.

National Analysts Worldwide uses several different approaches to help marketers prioritize among these product and service elements. Empirical modeling techniques are used to generate an understanding of the considerations that most strongly affect loyalty and repeat purchase tendencies. In addition, more advanced techniques (conjoint, etc.) can be used to help assess the relative importance of key product and service elements on overall satisfaction and purchase propensity.

By comparing actual performance to specific performance requirements, we can direct clients to the areas where improvements are necessary and the magnitude of improvements that are needed to satisfy customers can be obtained.  In addition, our analysis assigns value to the "debits" associated with under-performance vs. the "credit" associated with over-performance to help clients fine tune service delivery goals and investments.

For more information on National Analysts Worldwide, feel free to e-mail us or call (215) 496-6800.