The before snapshot
Peter Giudes, CEO of Artis Group, needed advice. Although his systems integrator business was growing rapidly, it wasn't fast enough. After hearing Bruce Rasmussen talk at a Microsoft partner conference in 2008, Giudes decided to enlist the principal of Carpe Diem Consulting to benchmark the company against peers and competitors, and to measure his customers' satisfaction with his company's performance.
"You can only grow so quickly if you just do the same things," says Giudes. "If you add an extra client executive or an extra pre-sales guy you can only grow in those same increments. But if you can find a way of doing something better with the people that you've got, you get a magnifying growth by doing everything better."
Giudes is also on the prowl for acquisitions, and the process of benchmarking Artis Group would also make it easier to benchmark target companies. If Artis Group could nail down corporate processes now it would assist in orientation for newly acquired employees.
"It's far better to [improve processes] early on because otherwise you've got more people to change and introduce systems to," says Giudes. "I wanted something that was documented and repeatable so our sales and delivery methodologies could be implemented across those acquisistions."
The story
Many companies don't conduct market perception surveys because they assume their customers are satisfied.
"They say, ‘We're in touch with our customers,' but they just fool themselves," says Bruce Rasmussen, principal of Carpe Diem.
Proactive resellers do quiz their customer base on levels of satisfaction, but for a fuller picture it is better to spread the net wider.
Rasmussen recommends surveying existing clients, lost clients, clients approached but not gained, and prospective clients. Major stakeholders, such as key vendors and distributors, should also make the list.
Employing a third party to do customer satisfaction research sends a message to the marketplace that the company cares about feedback enough to pay someone to give an independent report.
"It's a very qualitative thing," says Rasmussen. It is better to have quality conversations with 20 or 30 organisations rather than a standard response form filled out by 200 companies, he adds.
"What I don't think is necessary is battery-hen research where you rate questions from one to five. We don't do that stuff," says Rasmussen.
He believes it is better to have in-depth interviews with 15 to 30 people and ask longer questions rather than numeric ratings to get a qualitative response.
"Have they ever heard of you? Do they think you are just an IBM partner? If you were running the company what are the top three things you would do? A lot of surveys don't ask those questions," says Rasmussen.
Asking the right questions of the right people can unearth sales opportunities. Carpe Diem passed on three sales leads to Artis during the market perception survey. Rasmussen says inexperienced telemarketers wouldn't have been able to do the same.
Finding an angry customer should be seen as a useful opportunity rather than a negative experience.
"If you find out that someone is p---ed off with you, that's great," says Rasmussen. "It's when they're p---ed off and they don't tell you, that's when you lose the customer. A lot of people are conflict-averse and they won't tell you what they really think."
This silence can be deadly to a business, which can continue along the same trajectory without consulting its customers or adjusting its plans accordingly.
"If people don't have a solid base of how they are perceived, then all their plans are built on sand, not on bedrock," says Rasmussen.
Customer satisfaction plays a key role in how a company is perceived in the market. In turn, market perception underwrites the success of a brand - the distilled essence of a company's image.
A lot of people think brand is about slogans and logos, says Rasmussen, but this is just one way to represent an organisation. The brand can be defined better as the promise a company makes to its customers, and it's success is determined on how well that promise is delivered.
A company that is identified as an IBM reseller conveys one type of promise; one that is seen as a customer's trusted business adviser has made a totally different promise, says Rasmussen.
"Here's an easy exercise. Lock everyone in your organisation in a room and get them to write what the company promises customers and they will all write different things. And that's a problem," says Rasmussen.
Artis group was in the fortunate position of receiving all positive feedback. Instead of repairing problems, Carpe Diem set about working how to take customer satisfaction to the next level, which meant working out how customers could identify good service as Artis Group's hallmark.
Most customer satisfaction consultancies will just hand a customer the reports but fail to answer the key question of how to improve on their current methods.
"The gap is that people don't know how to act on it. In the area of customer satisfaction there is a whole industry on measuring it but there's bugger-all people on how to use it," says Rasmussen. "If your service level is down it tells you what the problem is but it doesn't tell you what to do about it. It's not just about revving up the staff."
The only way to improve customer satisfaction is to analyse every person's job in the company and find out how he or she can do their job in a way that improves the customer's experience with the company. Instead of writing a list of 20 scenarios, each person should just have three or four.
One example of proactive behaviour would be having the on-site technician agree not to leave the customer's premises after finishing a job without going to the on-site adviser and asking whether there were any other problems that needed attention.
"People write books on how to improve customer service but if you don't bring it down to what individuals can do, nothing happens," says Rasmussen.
Poor attention to customers is the number one reason companies switch suppliers, according to Breakthrough customer service, a book on the topic. Only 9 percent of companies leave their suppliers for competitive reasons, 14 percent because they are dissatisfied with the product or service, and 68 percent because of indifference by the provider.
"People don't like to be ignored," says Rasmussen. Getting started in evaluating customer satisfaction may be very straightforward. Microsoft offers a service to its partners where they upload a database of customers to the vendor's website and a third party will survey the customers on the reseller's behalf.
The afterwards look
Overall, the excercise has been extremely positive, says Peter Giudes. Artis Group is doing a lot more marketing than before; even during last year's financial crisis the company spent more on marketing than in previous years.
The investment is paying off with stronger pipelines for the sales team, says Giudes.
Bruce Rasmussen says that sales effectiveness audits invariably find that sales people are doing too much work that isn't related to the sale. Companies are generally averse to spending money on a full-time marketing position, but the extra head regularly pays for itself.
"People generally think of it as a cost [to add a marketing person] but any slice of a sales person's time not following a sale through is a huge saving," says Rasmussen.
Marketing was primarily focused on new customers, says Giudes. "The new clients we gain we always keep because we provide that great service and good people. Having that foundation means that we are confident at making that investment in other parts of the business."
Another key outcome was clearly defining the company's go-to-market message.
This has in turn helped crystallise acquisition strategy by making it easier to identify target companies.
Giudes expects Artis Group to double organically in the next three years and double again through acquisition in the same time frame. "We're confident that we have the right benchmarks and in using those blueprints for how we introduce acquisitions to the Artis Group," he says.
Artis Group's HR manager is responsible for implementing the findings of the customer satisfaction project.
Giudes says he underestimated the amount of work required. Assessing staff behaviours took four to six months as Giudes wanted to ensure they had the right processes. It has taken another year to work on the implementation, which will be ongoing as people join the organisation.
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