Global Payment Processor Case Study

Utilized a customer survey program to provide insights and action items to revamp and maintain successful customer relationship strategies.

Situation and Challenge

Management thought it might need to revamp its customer strategy to sustain revenue growth but before proceeding, it wanted to assure a sound understanding of its customer’s perceptions and values
The Chief Commercial Officer asked Blue Ridge Partners to develop and conduct a customer survey program that would elicit insightful and actionable feedback. The program also needed to be repeatable so that the company could use the survey feedback to regularly monitor customer values and update its customer strategy
We were also asked to interpret the survey results and develop recommendations for the company’s new customer strategy

Approach

Interviewed senior management and internal sales people to ensure the most critical customer issues were addressed
Designed a comprehensive survey instrument with different question types including demographic, company-specific rating, competitor comparison, open-ended, constant sum, and conditional to capture insight from different angles
Conducted the survey, following up to assure adequate participation
Analyzed survey results with an emphasis on extracting key trends and correlations by segment, geography, etc. and held additional conversations with a number of survey respondents to gather more detail about particularly insightful comments
Synthesized results into key learnings and suggested action items that helped shape the company’s customer strategy. Key insights included:
- Customers rated the company highest in innovation and product breadth, indicating the company could differentiate itself from competitors based on those strengths
- Net Promoter Scores across the industry were low, suggesting an opportunity for the company to capture share from competitors by improving its service
- Customers often believed the company was reactive and ineffective in communication – many customers were unaware of a newly launched sales support function
- Initial purchase drivers such as innovation and price played to the company’s strengths, but the company exhibited sub-par performance in drivers of ongoing client satisfaction such as communication and technical issue resolution

Performance Ranking of Large Customers Suggests Best Practices Should be Shared by Others

Impact

The company viewed the program as highly successful. Second-year survey results indicated actions taken after the initial survey had a significant impact on customer plans to increase processing with our client. We were engaged in succeeding years to update the survey instrument and perform and interpret the survey results.