Invensys fine-tuned its customer research to unlock its competitive edge

Customer relationships have always been at the heart of Invensys Controls’ (IC) B2B marketing strategy. Having invested six years in a series of B2B customer relationship research studies with global research agency, Harris Interactive, there wasn’t much the company didn’t know about where it sat in the global marketplace, how customers rated its performance, and what that meant in terms of customer loyalty.

However, IC’s commitment to advancing its competitive edge through the measurement of customers’ relationship health took a turn for the unexpected when it introduced new survey metrics to its most recent study. This led to some fascinating insights, and a shake-up of internal and external initiatives to support the achievement of driving profitable growth throughout the organisation.

Researching the metrics
As a leading provider of components, systems and services used in appliance, heating, air conditioning, commercial cooking/refrigeration and residential thermostat products, IC has a global reach with around 7000 employees worldwide.

The business identified a need for a custom research approach to customer loyalty. Metrics were adapted over time to reflect the increasing complexity of customer needs and expectations, stay in tune with the highly competitive market landscape, align more tightly with strategic needs, and include more business segments across a larger geographical scope. The first major change was to add emotional connection measures, focusing on valuing customers and relationship trust to already existing rational metrics. More recently, this was supplemented by forward-looking behavioural metrics, including competitive advantage to recognise business success is highly correlated with differentiation.

Many B2B service industry players have shifted from a purely rational go-to-market strategy (based around product and price) to one focused on delivering a more holistic customer experience, including relationship building. The inclusion of these newer metrics has added more value and given a more relevant interpretation of customer loyalty today.  

With a fresh approach centred around the growing importance of emotion in client relationships, and metrics designed to reflect intentional or forward-looking behaviours, Harris conducted research for IC in 2011 across customers in 29 countries in eight languages.

Finding the focus
Analytical modelling by Harris uncovered two customer priorities for IC where performance needed to be further fine-tuned: customer partnerships and innovation.

As a way to enhance partnerships with customers, IC launched an on-going training development initiative, ‘Hearing the gap’, based on the concept of truly listening to, and understanding, customers’ needs. A sizeable proportion of the global IC sales, marketing and engineering staff has started to benefit from this programme and all new sales recruits will receive similar training.  While company-wide implementation will take time to bed in, IC intends to follow up initial training to ensure the philosophy and practical application is fully adopted across the business. 

In terms of innovation, IC uncovered a gap in customer understanding about the products and services it provides, and the value it delivers. In an attempt to change perceptions, a major internal and external communications programme is planned to roll out. Internal communications will centre around helping staff to be more effective at explaining innovations and their business value to customers, sharing best practice across different teams, while putting in place a more regular channel of updates and news. A series of external webinars and seminars and a revamp of website content are also underway.

In addition to having a strategic focus, the research highlighted tactical actions to be implemented at an individual customer level. Customer scorecards are being produced summarising the key loyalty and performance results, and the customer’s priorities. These should lead to action plan development by account managers to enable more relevant engagement with customers in the future.

At Chillventa 2012 – one of a series of major international trade fairs IC attends every year – the ‘Hearing the gap’ initiative was seen in action. Sales personnel were trained in advance on the new products and their applications, meaning they were then able to converse with stand visitors much more effectively, demonstrate the products and make intelligent recommendations. These kinds of face-to-face events prove the real test for the organisation’s training programmes.

Competitive advantage
While the research highlighted specific action points for IC, much has already been put in place to close the gap and forthcoming studies will continue to play a key role in measuring improvements. When it comes to fine-tuning IC’s market leading position, the research has proved successful to make sure the business has a competitive advantage going forwards.

Llinos Jonathan, marketing communications director EMEA & APAC at Invensys, commented, “Over time, we have fine-tuned the research approach to be more effectively aligned with the increasing complexities of customer relationships and the competitive environment, and enable the results to be more firmly linked with Invensys Controls’ strategy. This has led to greater actionability, resulting in a comprehensive series of internal and external initiatives and communications to drive change. We are all very pleased with the value the research has generated.”

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