Industry - Customer experience Management for Industrial Companies
Customer relationship management, B2B mystery research, surveys, competition monitoring
For more than 20 years, concertare has been a reliable partner to the industry for a wide variety of tasks, especially in the areas of customer experience management, customer relationship management, business intelligence / competitive monitoring, and price analyses.
In the area of Customer Experience Management: The main focus is on analyzing the customer journey with regard to the customer's experience and how they experienced contact with the company.
In Customer Relationship Management: The focus is on solutions for customer acquisition and customer retention.
The goals of customer experience management and customer relationship management are essentially an improvement in customer orientation, service orientation. and closing orientation.
In the areas of Business Intelligence / Competitor Monitoring: The focus is on systematic observation of the activities of competitor companies. Instruments used here are in particular price analyses, competition tests, trade fair tests, distribution network tests, surveys, and other market research instruments.
A special field is the identification of unauthorized suppliers and the auditing of existing suppliers.
SOLUTIONS TO INCREASE COMPETITIVENESS
Within the framework of the projects for industrial and B2B companies, the following objectives in particular are pursued:
Activities for systematic employee development
- Targeted and individual further development of sales staff and customer consultants in B2B sales with regard to sales arguments, advisory and sales skills, and customer loyalty.
- Survey of the training needs of the company's own B2B customer advisors and sales staff in order to improve the acquisition of leads, achieve a higher rate of new customers, and improve the quality of advice in B2B customer contact.
- Evaluation projects and training success monitoring programs: evaluation and optimization of sales training, coaching, target setting, and successful implementation of sales offensives.
- Employee surveys in the industry.
Activities to optimize the customer experience
- Analysis and further development of contact quality at touchpoints and customer interfaces along the B2B customer journey.
- Competitor research and monitoring: price analyses, generation of important control information, such as the identification of regional sales strategies of the competition, insight into sales documents, of the competition.
- Campaign checks and trade fair tests.
- B2B customer surveys.
Activities to optimize competitiveness
- Identification of non-authorized goods and supply sources such as gray imports and plagiarism.
- Audits and mystery research tests to verify compliance with legal standards, such as data protection controls.
- Dealer surveys and partner surveys.
CLIENTS AND PROJECTS (EXTRACT)
B2B Mystery Research: Methods and Instruments
Many principles of successful customer experience management and customer relationship management apply equally to B2B and B2C relationships. Mystery research methods are used in both areas to optimize the customer relationship.
What they have in common is the goal of evaluating processes using objective survey methods and using these findings to optimize the company's own sales strategies.
The differences between B2B mystery research and mystery tests in the B2C area lie in particular in the implementation of the measurement procedures:
In B2B mystery testing, the inquiries are mostly made via real companies. For many projects and industries, we draw on a network of existing companies whose employees are specifically trained to collect the criteria to be tested. These are usually factors such as the accessibility of the customer advisor, the perceived quality of advice, the preparation of information material, the follow-up of leads, and much more.
The great strength of these methods is that they not only measure the customer experience, but also derive concrete implementation proposals for improving one's own organization from the test consultations and the analysis of key figures. From individual coaching sessions to entire training programs for sales departments or corporate and industrial divisions, targeted further development opportunities for employees can be devised and implemented.
If desired, our methods enable direct feedback from the test customer to the sales staff, in which the employees receive direct feedback on the customer experience.
B2B mystery research thus enables the testing of all relevant contact points along the customer journey in order to capture the holistic customer experience, which is also important for corporate customers. As a rule, such a project evaluates all phases of the customer journey in modules with the analysis of the information and (online) search behavior of industrial customers before contact is made, the perception of telephone, personal or email consultations, contact at trade fair booths, as well as processes downstream of the purchase or consultation, such as follow-up communication and recommendation.
Mystery research methods in B2B are also used where classic customer surveys cannot provide reliable data. For example, the normal corporate customer is unable to assess factors such as compliance with internal company standards, legislative requirements, or requirements for trading partners. B2B mystery shoppers sensitized in training courses know these standards and can objectively measure their compliance.
Customer survey and other surveys in the industry sector
Customer surveys are a proven instrument for many companies to be able to systematically measure expectations, satisfaction, or willingness to recommend, also in the B2B sector.
For many years, concertare has been conducting various surveys among customers and trading partners of industrial companies with a high level of expertise in almost all industries. In addition to classic customer surveys, these also include non-customer or potential customer surveys in industry, which help to develop new sales strategies, adapt sales arguments, and open up new industrial customer segments.
Used over many years, different industry sectors, departments, or sales regions, our standardized surveys provide an important internal benchmarking tool that systematically helps to raise the quality of advice and the customer orientation of employees in customer contact to an equally high level within the company.
More management information through systematic competitive intelligence
An important project component in B2B mystery research methods is covert competition monitoring. Three frequently used project types can be distinguished here:
Price analyses: An important control instrument in sales policy is the price of services and goods. Knowing the pricing policy of the competition from the customer's point of view provides every company with a key competitive advantage. Especially in the B2B sector, these prices are difficult to determine. To collect granted discounts or conditions for price reductions is one goal of covert price analyses by means of mystery research. Price analyses are an excellent instrument for detecting regionally different pricing strategies of the competition and for knowing with which price and product strategies the competition occupies which target markets.
Analysis of competitor presence with regard to marketing and sales activities: By observing marketing activities in defined regions, it is possible to identify which campaigns and methods the competition uses for marketing.
Via special tester panels, whose members are registered with competitors as potential or real customers, companies gain access to all activities for existing customers. All activities are recorded and made available in an online system to authorized persons on the customer side.
Test visits to the trade show reveal how the competition offers and argues for its own services and how the competition talks about other market players.
Identification of non-authorized flows of goods: Via test purchases and test inquiries, we identify sources and supply routes of non-authorized goods such as counterfeits or gray imports. The information authentically generated in this way helps to warn off and close anti-competitive sales channels and to repopulate these markets with authorized goods.
In many special business intelligence / competition monitoring projects, information on possible or actual violations of the Unfair Competition Act (UWG) is collected, which enables you as a customer to prove violations in a court-proof manner and thus also to put a stop to the violations by taking legal action.
B2B Benchmark Data for industrial companies
Benchmark studies are an important instrument for industrial companies to compare their own service quality, their own pricing policy, or the satisfaction of their own customers with competitors.
A benchmark comparison can cover different points in time or internal company divisions in order to be able to continuously influence the development of these key figures. Benchmark tests using competitor checks are usually cost-intensive, as they involve a large number of surveys.
For many years, concertare has been conducting a large number of benchmark tests in the B2B sector, also with large German industrial companies, in which the performance of market participants in their segment is measured in a comparable manner. We make this benchmark data available to our customers upon request.
More about B2B-Mystery Research
More information on the topics of mystery research in B2B, competition monitoring and competitor research can be found on the concertare blog and on request.