Strategic Intent:
To report on the highly competitive marketplace regarding brand equity and quality of service.

Client Profile/Situation:

• A distributor of architectural and industrial raw material
• Marketplace is highly competitive, customers buy from an array of distributors similar to client
• Needed to develop a better understanding of the customers’ perception of business offerings
• Needed a better understanding of the customers’ needs
• Wanted to benchmark the company relative to its competitors

Key Issues and Barriers:

• Client wanted to break into a relatively new market
• Anecdotal evidence indicated client was priced above competitors
• Client needed data on competitive marketplace to inform strategic planning
• Key Implementation Components:
• Hybrid approach—telephone and self-administered online data collection methodology

Primary Results:

• Customer satisfaction was low for the client relative to competition, there was room for improvement
• Client scored highest among competitors for brand equity: awareness, current usage, preference, most engaged and revenue share
• Client scored lower on a number of key performance indicators relative to competitors

Key strategic results:

• Marketplace needs raw materials quickly so stock availability is crucial to customer satisfaction
• There is significant room for improvement with a significant percentage of customer vulnerable to customer drift.
• Despite the high level of brand equity, customers are very sensitive to price changes, therefore client would need to tread lightly with pricing.
• Client owned the largest share of revenue in the total marketplace, largely because of strong performance and satisfaction in the Western region.
• Client was in danger of losing more share of revenue in Southwestern region if performance measures were not improved.

Conclusions:

• Changes were made to areas of performance to improve satisfaction in the Southwestern region resulting in increased business in main markets.
• Client now has a VoC program to monitor changes

What the client said:

Feedback Systems provided me a clear perspective to take action to grow our business.
– CEO