Skip to content

Aligning Products and Services with Customer Needs

Big Village’s client is the premier manufacturer in their industry. Their dominance in thought leadership, product and system development, and product quality and reliability is second to none.

Their success can be tied to many things, one of which is a deep understanding of customers; their needs, expectations and goals. As such, our client was seeking a partner to help develop and deploy a holistic approach to gauge customers’ needs, expectations, experiences with their brand as well as the competition, to build on their success in the industry.

Big Village has established a global ecosystem in which research is designed, programmed, executed, analyzed, reported and socialized across corporate functions and hundreds of sales and service teams around the globe.

The global ecosystem is tied to CRM and ERP systems to upload and download data to maintain a 360° view of the customer and maximize data integration across functions.

Closed loop feedback provides account management and product/service teams with insight into problematic areas in need of immediate attention as well as opportunities for refinement and expansion. Analytics and data integration help codify results into meaningful priorities and action areas that will impact top and bottom line growth in a highly competitive environment.

Intelligence is customized for recipients by region, industry, competitor, company segment and tier, as well as functional role and tenure. A portal offers password protected access for thousands of users where they can review curated insights focused on trends, longitudinal progress against goals, prioritized action areas, and competitive advantages and disadvantages.

The Outcome

The impact gleaned from this ongoing research occurs at many levels. At all levels it gauges progress against customer experience goals and serves to proactively inform both strategic and tactical investments and initiatives.

Locally, sales and services teams are able to objectively assess initiatives that have been put in place at an account level to drive retention and expansion; supporting year over year sales growth above the industry average and retaining over 70% of their customers. As client needs evolve, the business case is built to substantiate the ROI, such as additional technical expertise to support the development of custom solutions.

At the industry level within region, direct head-to-head competitive assessments provide corroborating evidence of competitive vulnerabilities and strengths. This insight is applied to marketing and messaging in support of sales. It is also shared with corporate development teams charged with expanding and diversifying portfolios in support of industry trends and patterns.

At the corporate level, this intelligence is integrated to inform aspects of planning and strategy, product/service/solution roadmaps, enterprise-level account plans and initiatives. At the tactical level, this intelligence informs shorter-term forecasts for manufacturing and logistics to get products into market quickly. It surfaces problematic areas that require systemic resolution.