Keeping momentum, gaining insights
9 Novemer 2011
It’s hardly a revelation to hear an organisation state that focusing on customers is important to them. Understanding customers will, of course, help drive improvements and efficiencies. Taking it a step further, though, requires real efforts to be made.
Years gone by
In the current public sector environment organisations continue to face multiple challenges. They are struggling to deliver efficient services in the face of budget cuts, escalating customer expectations and the development of alternative communications channels and social media. As such, the need to provide efficient and cost-effective public services has never been more important.
In response to these issues, government agencies must work hard to understand customer needs and behaviour by adopting more pragmatic and sophisticated approaches to customer research.
One-off research activities often fail to have any major positive impact on the customer experience. To ensure success, customer experience programmes need to combine traditional market research approaches with innovative thinking.
New platforms like social media have opened up the playing field, giving forward-thinking research teams and their clients access to a range of tools and resources that enable a more holistic understanding of the customer experience.
At ORC International, we utilise social media and online methodologies, and integrate a whole host of wider organisational data with survey outputs. By taking a more comprehensive outlook, organisations can build a far more detailed picture of their business and customers, allowing them to assess where strengths and issues lie.
Three steps to success
ORC International’s customer research model includes a wide range of research approaches, specifically designed to gain customer insight across the customer experience continuum. These help organisations to understand the specifics of an individual event or interaction with a frontline service. Beyond this, the model focuses on exploring a customer’s pre-event mindset and post-experience behaviour to take account of the whole process and the factors that might influence them.
It’s a customer experience model that enables organisations to understand where service delivery is working or falling short. The information we source means organisations’ resources can be targeted effectively and in the most important areas. Ultimately, the goal is to improve the level of insight, and also provide organisations with a return on investment.
We also help organisations to understand how specific communications messages and service delivery can impact on customer attitudes and behaviour in the longer term. While the model encourages organisations to think about the wide scope of the customer service experience, it still focuses on elements of the service delivery and engagement against our Deliver, Delight, Develop scale.
This proposes that, to be successful, organisations should work to:
- Deliver: The core functional requirements of a service are delivered effectively and efficiently
- Delight: Engage customers emotionally through exceptional service. Staff have the right processes and support to enable them to focus on client service
- Develop: The service connects with customers. This is evident in their satisfaction, advocacy and loyalty scores.
For public sector organisations, service delivery is of key importance. We are a recognised leader in the field of public services customer insight research, and actively work with government departments and agencies to deliver a holistic view of the customer experience. By applying our Deliver, Delight, Develop model to customer experience research, alongside statistical techniques such as key driver and segmentation analysis, we help clients develop public services that fully understand and engage with their users.
