This project explores how collaborative innovation and co-creation between stakeholders can deliver value for firms. An extensive literature review was carried out, along with qualitative interviews with senior managers responsible for or involved in collaborative innovation in their firms.
The objectives of this study were three fold. Firstly, to determine if traditional market segmentation practices are relevant in online social networks. Secondly, to ascertain if there are new segments and practices emerging in social networks and thirdly to make recommendations, derived from the study’s findings, as to how to apply segmentation to online social networks as a marketing and communications channel.
This research report was commissioned to review the current status of homeworking in the UK, compare to the status in the US where the practice is much more prevalent and to develop an initial view of the important factors to consider when looking at a homeworking project.
This short report aims to help such companies to build a sustainable and trustworthy relationship with their customers online. To do so, the report considers the subject from the perspective of a pharmaceutical company. It will first discuss the current regulations around the healthcare industry, highlighting the constraints pharmaceutical marketers need to face. Then, it will review current literature discussing healthcare consumers’ online behaviour. In particular, it will focus on consumers’ negative comments and their possible impact on the business. Finally, the report concludes with some suggestions about how to cope with negative comments online and build a reliable relationship with customers.
This whitepaper reports on a study with Arise Virtual Solutions Inc. undertaken by Profiles International at the request of Henley Business School. It illustrates how profiling can be used to improve recruitment and training. The study focused on 15 members of the Arise Certified Professionals (ACP) team to create a pattern to identify:
1. The characteristics of the team’s top performers
2. The gaps between the top performers and the other members of the team.
3. The specific training and coaching needs of each study participant to maximise their performance for Arise.
Social media is a mix of psychology, sociology and technology offering great opportunities as well as challenges to businesses in today’s fast moving and competitive environment. This report examines the rise of social media and its potential business impact while exploring best practice in developing effective social media strategies. The review begins with a consideration of what constitutes social media and social networking before going on to consider the influences that motivate people to engage in social media. This research includes an extensive literature review of both academic and practitioner sources in order to identify best practice for developing effective social media strategies.
This report examines customer complaint management practices in an era where customers expect instant action from companies and, if service does not meet their expectations, they do not hesitate to voice their disappointment in both public and private arenas. This research includes an extensive literature review of both academic and practitioner sources in order to identify best practice for complaint management in the business to consumer environment.
This research whitepaper discusses the development of self-service from the latter part of the 20th century to the present day and explores both the contribution from, and impact on, each of the four generational groups active today.
This research study aims to provide insights into how suppliers can enable and support their
clients' sustainability initiatives most effectively, in a business-to-business context. A
detailed review of recent articles on the subject of sustainability, from academic and
practitioner journals, was undertaken. A qualitative research approach was followed: eight
semi-structured, in-depth interviews were carried out with senior managers from three
different organisations.
This whitepaper discusses the evidence from consumer research which suggests that the benefits of self-service are not being fully realized, and in many cases, self-service applications are damaging rather than enhancing the consumers’ overall service experience. The paper draws on factory and theatre metaphors to illustrate how two main recommendations might be operationalized.
In 2009, Dibley and Clark carried out research to identify best practice in managing
relationships with outsource partners. The objective of this new study is to take the most
dominant/complex success factors identified in the previous research (Dibley & Clark, 2009),
and provide guidance on how to implement them within outsourcing relationships.
The results of this study support a definition of online customer experience that views it as the outcome of an interaction between the customer and an organisation’s website. There are six potential components of an experience which are: sensorial, emotional, cognitive, pragmatic, lifestyle and relational. The relevance and importance of each will vary depending on the purchase context.
This report seeks to provide insights into best practice in managing outsourcing relationships. The author examines existing academic research and conducts case-based interviews to build a picture of the factors that are critical to the success of managing outsourcing relationships. The extensive literature review explores outsourcing issues in a variety of industry sectors, and with reference to a range of different types of outsourcing. Case studies were developed by interviewing senior managers involved in managing outsourcing relationships on both the outsource supplier and the client side.
The findings of the study have concentrated on identifying the best practice approaches which are particularly significant in the B2G context. There is a lot of similarity between B2B and B2G relationship building but the method used in the B2G situation may be different due to the mandated procurement processes. The findings have been presented in accordance with the 3 phases of the procurement process: early engagement before formal procurement starts; during the competitive bidding phase; after contract award.
This report explores how social media tools are being commercialised by business. It provides an overview of the relevance of social media to both business to business and business to consumer operations; lists common channels of social media; places development of social media into a historical context outlining future predictions; identifies and answers a range of common problems facing companies looking to commercialise social media; looks at a taxonomy of opportunities for commercialising social media; and presents ongoing research findings.
To understand how organizations use social networking and web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, and social networking sites, to collaborate outside traditional organizational boundaries, and how process, culture and technology can solve problems and drive business model innovation, three leading business schools, IESE Business School in Spain, Rochester Institute of Technology in the USA, and Henley Business School in the conducted a study between April and September 2009. They interviewed large companies such as 3M, BAE, Bank of America, Daimler, and IBM well as smaller, more nimble organizations across 20 countries, interviewing 97 businesses in total. This report presents the findings of this study.
The purpose of this project was to investigate connections between the communication of customer insight data to non-customer-facing employees, and increased customer focus amongst those employees. The findings suggest that the dissemination of customer insights to non-customer-facing employees is an overlooked and under-researched antecedent of market orientation, yet has the potential to be an important component of an organisation’s evolution towards being truly customer focused, and as such is becoming a feature of contemporary management practice.
This is an interim, update report by researchers at the Henley Centre for Customer Management. Drawing from the theoretical base provided by the concept of ‘service-dominant logic’ an in-depth case study is being conducted into a firm that is distinctive for its commercial success and approach to business. This report discusses both the principles of service dominant logic and how this is being tested in practice.
Previous research for The Henley Centre for Customer Management found that online experience consisted primarily of thirteen themes and 83 indicators of those themes. This years’ research has explored the web quality literature. A systematic review of the field revealed a range of scales that have been used to measure web quality. One web quality scale has been explored in detail, presented with a methodology for members to implement this in survey format.
This study explores the question “How can a company create and maintain an ideal/perfect customer experience (CE) in the presence of intermediaries / distribution partners”? At this stage the results have been validated against a ‘list’ created by the attendees at a Henley Centre for Customer Management Workshop which was looking specifically at maximising value through relationships. The list identified suggestions that would enable an organisation to deliver the perfect Customer Experience through Intermediaries. This was further developed after the literature review to a more comprehensive checklist detailed at the end of this paper.
This paper explores the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and the impact CSR initiatives can have on customer experience and reactions. CSR is an organisation’s obligation to evaluate its social, environmental and economic impact on its stakeholders, and on the surroundings that it affects through its activities. Organisations should aim to have a positive impact on the people and environment they affect, through a clear focus on environmental, social and economic sustainability.
This project was conducted on behalf of the Henley Centre for Customer Management and explored the perceptions of both B2B and B2C customers with online experience in both Europe and the United States. 132 people were interviewed in depth using a qualitative version of Repertory Grid. Over 100 hours of interview were analysed. The research also adopted a cross industry approach as an aid to generalisability. The analysis identified a number of themes and factors necessary for the optimum B2C and similarly for the optimum B2B experience. The report also contains a checklist of factors members should consider when crafting the optimum experience for their online customers.
This research looked at organisations that have taken such a channel migration approach in both B2B and B2C environments. In addition to considering the effect of the approach on customers, the project also looked at the internal company impacts that are usually caused by a change in the “go to market” strategy. It considered, for example, the impact on sales people and on customer service representatives.
This research project builds on the September 2006 Henley report “How companies use customer insight to drive customer acquisition, retention and development” by concentrating on one aspect of the customer insight framework, namely how customer insight is actioned through the customer service function. The purpose of this project therefore was to investigate how companies use customer insight in inbound service call centres to cross-sell, up-sell and retain customers.
This report studies best practice in crafting and profiting from the multichannel customer experience, through in-depth study of major multichannel projects at First Direct, IBM, BT Global Services and General Motors Europe. Findings were also informed by interviews with boutique hotel chain Eton Collection; DVLA; UK Trade and Investment; a high street retailer; and a financial services company.
The findings of the research undertaken in this report are based on an independent assessment of each retailer website in terms of the measures developed in our Online Customer Experience research project. Each of the retailers was given a score for features relating to a positive customer experience; culminating in an overall percentage score for each of the retail companies surveyed.
The researchers spent approximately 34 hours with 40 respondents discussing customer experience in-depth in Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) environments. The research is not limited to a particular industry sector but adopts a cross-industry approach. The team discovered 119 experience factors that are mutually exclusive. These form the basis for the Customer Experience (CE) Model. The results show that CE is context-dependent. The report highlights the key factors that are important in driving customer experience in B2B and B2C markets.
This report sets out the findings from a research study of a range of different organisations and compares them to the results from previous research conducted with best practice CRM companies who have been past winners of a Unisys/Management Today Service Excellence Award. The study was focused on analysing the organisational climate of these organisations using a previously developed questionnaire .
The purpose of this research was to explore how companies use customer insight to drive customer acquisition, retention and development and to propose a theoretical model for generating and actioning customer insight. Using the qualitative methodology of case research, 25 in-depth interviews with five UK-based large companies from multiple industries were undertaken.
For knowledge-based marketers, the critical issue is how knowledge leads to market insight, drives offer development and creates value. Previous research has defined CRM practice as the use of individual customer data to drive value. This previous work has also defined the necessary preconditions for effective CRM and the way successful firms adapt CRM to fit their situation. Like all good research, however, this raised further questions, especially about the detail of how firms use data to create value. This project undertook a comprehensive review of previously published research followed by 13 in-depth interviews with firms who were heavily involved in the data-to-value process.
The objective of this paper is to discuss the role for outsourcing within CRM strategy and identify the issues that organisations need to consider when deciding whether or not this is appropriate. The paper focuses in particular on outsourcing call centre activities as this has emerged as a key topic of interest to CRM Research Forum members.
To understand how companies are handling customer requests, Broadsystem commissioned our researchers to contact the top 100 UK advertisers (as ranked by Marketing magazine), using their websites as a means of establishing contact details, and rate them based on the experience and against an agreed set of criteria. The purpose of the research was to rate companies from a customer perspective and to identify areas of best CRM practice that organisations can learn from.
The research identified a number of issues that organisations are facing in managing their data strategies. Several of the key issues underline the need to ensure that an effective information strategy is developed and implemented as vital first steps in the overall CRM plan. The final section describes the data related goals that organisations are aiming to achieve over the next few years. In many cases, the priorities identified will not be satisfactorily achieved without a structured approach to data management and commitment from across the organisation.
This report describes the work carried out to build on previous research conducted in 2003, when CRM was defined and characterised. It seeks to answer three research questions that arose from the 2003 research, namely:
This copy of an article that was developed in 2003 and appeared in the “Journal of Operations Management 24 (2006) 189-209” is included in our archive because it is the earliest illustration of the use of the ‘Repertory Grid Technique’ by our research team for relationship analysis. This approach has since been used extensively in our research into the customer experience in 2006 onward.
The primary research involved the in-depth, qualitative study of eight exemplar companies in B2B and B2C sectors, in both products and services. This phase revealed that effective CRM operates within a CRM eco-system defined by both market and organisationally based factors. Awareness of this eco-system allows organisations to avoid wasteful investment in CRM when it is not appropriate to their business situation. Secondary research was used to synthesise a generic model of CRM which broadly but accurately describes the management process better than previous models. This model allows practitioners to understand and create the necessary preconditions for successful CRM in any organisation.
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