Researching Research:TOWARDS GREATER CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

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The Market Research industry is changing. Interviewing methods change as new technologies develop. There is the never ending pressure to deliver research quickly and cheaply. There has also been the rise of platforms such as SurveyMonkey, where anyone can conduct their own surveys, making it essential that market research professionals are able to demonstrate the value of properly conducted and interpreted market research. Loyalty, more than ever, has to be earned. Back in 1955 in The Practice of Management Peter Drucker wrote, “The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.” And as Clive Humby of dunnhumby associates put it, “It’s not about customers being loyal to you. It’s about you being loyal to your customers. You earn loyalty by giving it.” As market research has become a global industry over the last twenty years, gaining loyalty through consistently high customer satisfaction has become increasingly challenging. The issues have been faced by many other industries; the difficulties associated with globalization have been addressed by many. The idea of Total Quality Management was developed in the early 90s to tear down organisational barriers which were hindering the meeting of customer needs; and there have been many books written on the subject, notably Market Driven Strategy (Day, 1990) and Customer Intimacy (Wiersema,1998).

Over the years, many benefits of satisfied customers have been identified.

In The Loyalty Effect, Reicheld of Bain and Co identified that loyal customers are more profitable, because the costs of sales are amortized over a longer period. In Brilliant Customer Service (2010), Stevens pointed out that experienced customers make servicing them easier, since they are less likely to need hand-holding. Additionally, if your existing customers recommend you, you get new customers for free.

There are also benefits around staff turnover. In 1988, the Forum Corporation conducted a research study among 3300 employees across 14 companies. The single factor that most strongly correlated with employees remaining in a company was whether employees thought the organisation was providing good service to its clients.

And in 2011, Roger Martin argued in Fixing the Game that customer-centric companies were more likely to generate long-term profit. “If you take care of the customers, shareholders will be drawn along for a very nice ride.”

Consistently strong performance

From starting in a small office above an estate agent in Leamington Spa in 1973, Millward Brown has grown to having 86 offices across 56 countries with new offices opening regularly. Unlike most market research companies, the majority of its business is not ad hoc; it has developed a number of branded research solutions, designed to address some common marketing issues. With around 6000 employees, it is essential that Millward Brown ensures consistently strong and reliable project management across all its solutions globally. This frees up the client service teams to be able to focus on understanding client markets and issues, and delivering results with focus and insight, wherever in the world they work. But with continued expansion, this becomes increasingly difficult.

“We knew we had to put something in place. While there have been many initiatives to improve client satisfaction over the years, this is not something we’ve ever focused on in a global, holistic, determined way before”, says Dominic Twose, Millward Brown's Global Head of Knowledge Management. “Many client service people are client focused, but we’ve not had in place all of the basics to drive a consistently great client experience. It is a challenge, but really it is just a natural evolution of a complex B2B business.”

A consistent experience is at the heart of any successful brand. In Managing the Customer Experience, Schmitt says, “Creating a customer experience that becomes synonymous with your brand is increasingly recognised as a vital driver of corporate performance.” As a pre-eminent brand in the marketing industry, Millward Brown saw the need for consistent quality, while recognizing that every client category and issue is specific, and needs a tailored, consultative approach. The company had to find a way of managing this apparent dichotomy to ensure that every project met client needs. As Whitely writes in The Customer Driven Company, “Today companies have to do right by the customer every time.”

Additionally, it was recognized that if its entire staff has a common way of working, it becomes easier for them

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to work with other teams on a global basis. “We knew from internal staff satisfaction surveys that our people were becoming frustrated with the difficulties of running a multi-country project,” says Dominic Twose. “There was a need for common standards, terminology and templates.”

The intention was to go beyond consistency; the goal was to ensure that that client needs were driving every aspect of our business. “Over the years we’ve developed a great suite of solutions and tools, which we could offer across the world,” says Paul McClean, one of Millward Brown’s Global Account Leaders. Millward Brown conducts an annual client satisfaction survey, covering around 2000 respondents every year. “The research identified a need to build better partnerships with clients through better account handling,” summarises Paul. “We needed to spend time getting to know our clients’ businesses better. If I know the decisions my client needs to make, and know the information they have, the information they don’t have, and any constraints they have, I can then help them resolve any barriers. That might be through primary research, but it might not.” Tim Wragg, Millward Brown’s Chief Executive Officer for Europe, says “We wanted to raise the floor, but also raise the ceiling.”

The challenges

Millward Brown recognized the importance of responding to the results of its client and staff surveys. However, this was no small task. Working cultures differ not only across the world, but also across different research companies. Growth and churn rates result in continuous recruitment of staff with widely different backgrounds. Besides, as Frances Hesselbein wrote, “Culture does not change because we desire to change it. Culture changes when the organization is transformed; the culture reflects the realities of people working together every day.” An article in Business Week expressed it like this in 2006; “Building great consumer experiences is a complex enterprise, involving strategy, integration of technology, orchestrating business models, brand management and CEO commitment.”(The Importance of Great Customer Experiences). Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos expressed it bluntly: “One of the things that you find in companies is that once a culture is formed it takes nuclear weaponry to change it.”

Tim Wragg highlighted one aspect of the problem. “In the UK we’d rolled out a training programme on how to uncover the real client issues behind any research project. It got terrific feedback, people loved it; but then found it made little difference to their work patterns when they came back to the office.”

GreenWorks

With this in mind, a cross-disciplinary team spent over a year developing GreenWorks, the Millward Brown Client Engagement Model, based on client interviews, and looking at the best ways of working from around the Millward Brown world, as well as external best practice. The model is focused on changing the way people do their jobs, developing a mindset of creating a more useful outcome for clients. A pilot was conducted with one of our biggest clients, covering over 30 offices and a couple of hundred projects. The senior team involved in the pilot spent weeks visiting the different offices, coaching and giving guidance, and learning how to improve the scheme.

The cornerstone of GreenWorks is the Discovery phase. “The aim is to move to more consultative conversations. It’s about sitting down with the client, finding out the issues, who the key stakeholders are, what the financial constraints are,” says Tim. As Watkinson expresses it in The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, “What we need to do is focus on building an empathetic connection with the customer, rather than just interviewing them.” The Discovery phase emphasises that not only is it essential to take the time to truly understand the key issues, it is also important to understand what ‘success’ looks like for the client. This provides clarity for Client Service teams to know when a positive impact has been made on the clients’ business, making it easier to demonstrate the value they are adding. It is also about providing guidance upfront to the client as to what the issues are and what are realistic goals.

Since GreenWorks began, there has been an evolution in how Millward Brown’s people see the role of their research within the client organisation, from the fairly basic (for instance, “give them an understanding the current brand predisposition”), to a detailed understanding of the client’s financial targets and budgets, and the importance of the brand and marketing activity to the company.

Another key issue that is being emphasised through GreenWorks is the value of synthesizing data; connecting other relevant available data with the research outcome to better answer the client’s issue. “Our analysis shows that synthesising multiple data sources generally makes for better, more useful work”, says Tim.

Finally, the importance of impact is recognized: delivering results in a meaningful way that will be acted on. To this end, there is training to help our teams communicate, collaborate and present ideas more effectively with clients, with greater confidence, poise, and flexibility.

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Making it stick

Embedding GreenWorks throughout the whole company is acknowledged to be a massive undertaking. Recognising this, the project has a senior sponsor, Tim Wragg. “This is about managing a culture change. We’re approaching this in a pragmatic way; turning a big tanker takes time and resource,” says Tim. “We need to ensure it is properly resourced, and we need to recognise this is a marathon, not a sprint. There was an initial launch to some key accounts; but the broader launch took place only this year, and the roll out is still not complete.”

“GreenWorks is a great tool, but it is still just one piece. Good client servicing and account leadership is about behavior not templates,” he continues. Paul McClean agrees; “Tools can be helpful for guiding thought processes; but this is about establishing principles and a philosophy.” The programme is supported by elearning modules, in-market knowledge-sharing sessions, and workshop-based skills training, developed using the training companies Imparta and Rogen SI. “There is also a massive cadre of coaches around the world,” adds Dominic, “looking for ways to embed GreenWorks through the business.”

For Tim Wragg the biggest issue is, “How to make that change without too much bureaucracy. How much guidance, training and content do you provide? There is a balance between hindrance and help, and this tension will always be there. Just asking people to please change their work patterns is not going to be effective; but we didn’t want to be too process heavy.”

Millward Brown also replaced its existing intranet with the award-winning Greenhouse, a cutting edge enterprise-wide social network, giving ready access to Millward Brown knowledge and expertise around the world, and making it far easier for cross-country client teams to share their learning.

Joan Wallach Scott once wrote, “Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history.” Tim acknowledges that feedback to the programme has been mixed; “The most surprising thing for me has been the extremity of the responses we’ve had from Client Service people to the programme; ranging from extremely positive, ‘this is fantastic, it has changed the way I work with clients and opened up new opportunities,’ through to ‘this is just bureaucracy.’ But in part that’s because the individuals involved are at different levels; so for some the initiative offered little that was new.”

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Understanding and dealing with the problems

A few years ago Impact Reviews were introduced in Europe; they have since been rolled out in the rest of the world as part of the GreenWorks programme. Impact Reviews, a series of questions around the research progress, are to be completed for most projects. Their aim is to help ensure the GreenWorks philosophy is adopted, by providing a focus for thinking about the impact each project has had had on the client’s business, and what prevented stronger impact. Collectively, they act as a catalogue of the success GreenWorks is having, helping to identify strong examples of impacting our clients’ businesses, and surfacing any common barriers to full success, which can then form the basis for process improvements.

The issue of ‘invisible problems’ can be severe. In The customer driven company, Whitely refers to ‘The Iceberg of Ignorance’; problems hidden from top management but which affect day-to-day business. This ignorance can cause major misrepresentations ; research in 2005 by James Allen of Harvard Business School, suggests that while 80 percent of businesses state that they offer a great customer experience only 8 percent of customers feel the same way. Impact Reviews help to pinpoint these problems within Millward Brown. And the senior support behind GreenWorks helps ensure these problems are fixed. Recent examples include streamlining of survey scripting, the development of a translation database, and improvements to financial reporting.

As Tim Wragg expresses it; “Impact reviews should become like flossing.” As encouragement, the Impact Awards scheme, which recognizes and rewards successes, was introduced. This scheme is taken sufficiently seriously by senior management that usually country Managing Directors or similar are involved in the judging. This is being supplemented by the GreenWorks Excellence Awards, a reward and recognition scheme designed to recognize and honour the individuals and teams that demonstrate quality, excellence and leadership in their use of GreenWorks and commitment to Millward Brown core values in their work. These awards carry a substantial cash prize. Not only do these schemes ensure recognition and reward for those who are making a particularly valuable contribution to the company, but the winning entries are publicised, for people to read, discuss and learn from.

Signs of improvement

While relatively new, and still bedding down in some parts of the world, the scheme is making a real impact on our business. This is being measured in a number of ways.

Research among client service teams involved in the pilot process was encouraging. Overall, 75 percent felt the model improved the value given to clients. And 83 percent of those who used the Discover tools and 68 percent of those using the Synthesise tools found them extremely or very valuable. There was a 16 percent increase in endorsement that, “I feel like part of global MB community” (in part due to the Greenhouse).

The process is having positive effects on research projects. To take a few examples:

Discover

Working in partnership with a client on a project to develop a new brand architecture, one Client Service team, conducted competitor analysis, concept development, and naming studies, and made full use of the GreenWorks Discover tools. The new range was first launched in India; the result was a 35 percent uplift in sales, equating to approximately US$6 million in additional gross margin.

One global brand was lacking differentiation – and momentum. The Millward Brown team conducted a twenty market brand equity programme, which signalled a clear route forward. The work was described as “transformational” and was put at the heart of all marketing activity. This led to an estimated $400m profit; 50 percent of which the client ascribed to the relationship the Millward Brown team had developed with them; a great endorsement of the Discover element of GreenWorks.

Impact

A client service team recognised that for one multi-national research project to have its full impact, there was a need to engage local markets with the core brand metrics. They developed an interactive dashboard, and came up with a launch plan, involving a short video and local market training sessions. The combination resulted in much greater levels of local engagement. As the client said, “This is a brilliant effort and paid off well.”

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Having developed a customer segmentation, and recognising that for it to gain traction within the client’s organisation it needed to be brought to life, one client team developed a set of dolls with attachable parts, to represent different aspects of the consumer, from basic demographic information to their shopping habits and attitudes. The client fed back that, “they help bring our consumers to life within the office.”

ROI

Teams are increasingly seeing the value of identifying the ROI of their projects. One global hair care brand relaunched with new variants. Copy testing revealed that the performance of the ads was patchy. A thorough review of all the copy testing work we’d done for them was conducted, to develop a success model for maximising the performance of new variant ads. In what is now referred to as a “pivotal moment” in the success of the campaign, the model was accepted by client and agency. From improvements in the advertising, it was calculated that the €20m media budget became an equivalent budget of €36m; an ROI of €80m was estimated for every €1 spent on research.

One major automotive client received a debrief on what made great automotive advertising, summarizing the key findings from research conducted for them, and building in Millward Brown learning. This led to the development of an ad with a simple, charming storyline, for which the ad agency won a creative award. More importantly, it lead to £4.5 million incremental cars sold.

Impact can be measured in a number of ways. One large beverage client was planning to advertise during a major sporting event and turned to Millward Brown for advice on how to optimise the ad to ensure it generated buzz. The client adopted the recommendations. The final ad received over 4 million hits on YouTube – more than twice the number of views the previous year’s ad had received.

Clients are noticing the effect. Client satisfaction ratings are improving: ‘clarity of recommendations’ is up 6 percent over 2011, and ‘business relevance of recommendations’ is up 7 percent.

This is matched by positive feedback:

“Millward Brown has become an integral member of our team.”

“The MB team are very much an integrated part of the wider UK brand team, and are a valued contributor.”

“The team knew the subject matter and came across as experts.”

“You’ve been a key strategic research partner.”

“I think we should listen to MB. Let’s face it, when they tell us to do something and we do it, we end up in a better place.”

But there are other, unexpected, signs of the effectiveness of GreenWorks. Tim says: “When we’ve recruited from other agencies, they’ve all said, ‘This is incredible, I’ve never seen anything like this.’” For Dominic, the most surprising aspect was to be seen in the Frankfurt office. “Once they understood the GreenWorks thinking, they recognised their office design didn’t encourage collaboration. So they redesigned the office; everything. They’ve got different zones, hot desk, different environments for different needs. They’ve completely embraced the thinking.”

Work in progress

All of those involved in the project are keen to stress that this is only the start of a long process. For Tim, the challenge remains, “How do we get more people to change their behavior?” For Paul the emphasis is on the depth of thinking; “We need to get more people to really feel and understand that this isn’t some ‘add-on’ to their everyday job; it is about an over-arching way of thinking about every aspect of the job. It is about new behavior, impacting how we think, how we meet, how we talk to clients, how we construct our teams, and how we perceive research as an input to business issues.” Tim adds, “We need to keep on challenging ourselves, listening to the feedback, refining the tools, getting the balance right, and changing behavior without too much apparent bureaucracy. It’s a dynamic process.”

Nonetheless, for such a young scheme, its presence is being felt throughout the business. As one senior manager said, “over time and with specific focus we’ve seen a big, big improvement in the ‘how we made an impact’ parts of the review. And indeed, in the company’s understanding of what a good impact actually looks like.”

The global reach of GreenWorks has been felt by most. “It’s received global attention,” says Tim. “We’ve got more people really thinking about how to service clients better. It’s a truly global experience.” Dominic agrees; “It seems to be a unifying initiative that has brought people together thinking about what we’re doing.”