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