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Porter Research

Businesses can Gain Market Edge by Understanding Their Most Important Asset - the Customer

Jennifer Dennard, E-Media Marketing Specialist
July 7, 2010

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Understanding the customer experience has exponentially grown in importance alongside the lightning-fast growth of social networking tools. As customers become more comfortable with these outlets, they in turn become more comfortable voicing their opinions about everything they purchase - be it a service like car maintenance or a product like diapers. The World Wide Web and its accessories have put megaphones up to the mouths of customers who were once content to share their opinions only with friends and family.

Companies have quickly realized that listening to their customers and, more importantly, understanding what they're saying, is absolutely necessary to remain competitive, much less successful. Events like the recent Forrester Customer Experience Forum and Gartner Customer 360 Summit have sprung up to help businesses develop and implement strategies and technologies that will help them understand, grow and engage their customer base.

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"Companies that deliver a superior experience have customers who are more likely to buy another product or service from them, less likely to buy a product or service from a competitor, and more likely to recommend the company to a friend," wrote Harley Manning, Forrester's Vice President, Research Director, in his welcome letter to prospective forum attendees. Even conservative ROI models show that this increased loyalty can add hundreds of millions of dollars to the bottom line for large enterprises."

Books such as The Loyalty Effect: the Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value, and Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want also have grown in popularity as the marketplace struggles to find ways to grow the bottom line while keeping customers happy.

" [A]n enterprise that focuses on the customer does better at creating customer value," write the authors of Innovation. "[The] enterprise that focuses on the customer and has shared language and tools for understanding customer value does better still. Finally, an enterprise that focuses on the customer, has shared language and tools for understanding customer value, and has a systematic value-creation process does the best."

Not wanting to miss out on these "hundreds of millions," companies have also come to realize that conducting customer experience studies are a vital key to gaining insight into a customer's actions and opinions. Customer experience/satisfaction research is designed to:
  • identify areas of satisfaction and/or dissatisfaction with existing customers;
  • provide a better understanding of customers' unique needs;
  • identify opportunities in which a business can engage and improve customer satisfaction; and
  • provide the knowledge necessary to increase market penetration.
"Customer experience research provides direct, unbiased customer responses about your company from your customers," says Cynthia Porter, President of Porter Research, a marketing, research and consulting services firm that has provided recent customer experience research services to the likes of IBM ISS, ACS Healthcare Solutions, Medplus, Medidata, Availity, NMCH, Delta Health Systems and HID Corp. "This data is useful in that it puts your finger on the pulse of how you're perceived by your most important assets."

Click here to learn more about Porter Research's Customer Experience Program.







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