To maintain a competitive edge in a fast paced environment, successful organisations are mindful that keeping up to speed with what’s happening in their markets and acquiring customer insight is vital in order to make good decisions and meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s customers. Regular stakeholder research gives insight into what’s going to drive your success for the future. Our research programmes help you deliver consistent, robust and comparable data, providing actionable market intelligence cost effectively.
Our independence, commercial understanding and language skills provide you with the information you seek and more. We can guide you on the best mix of techniques to achieve your objectives, then project-manage delivery and even help you manage change through your organisation if you wish.
Whatever the gap in your knowledge, our services can help. We talk to your customers, competitors, employees and prospects, whoever can give us the intelligence to help you to build strategies for success.
Mystery shopping can take many different forms and be used to identify how your sales approach compares to your key rivals or to understand and streamline your customer journey.
We can help you check the performance of your front-line teams and to identify and track improvements over time. Mystery shopping provides indisputable evidence as to how employees perform during each transaction with customers. Measuring actual performance against your customer service standards is the concrete way to ensure that standards are maintained and improvement opportunities identified.
Alternatively, mystery shopping can be used as a form of competitor intelligence to help you to uncover and benchmark how your sales process and service attributes sit within the marketplace.
For more immediate, direct and focused information, you may prefer to carry out competitor benchmarking, where we approach known buyers and ask them to evaluate your proposition, your approach to marketing, or your service delivery against that of your key rivals.
Either way, you get the opportunity to benchmark your offering against those who will also be targeting your customers. Another powerful insight into your competitors’ offerings can be gleaned through win/loss research, which takes an independent look at your recent bid outcomes.
Your programme will be tailored to help you to drive through improvements to service and to focus your resources on areas where improvements are needed and will be most valued. Our focus is on completing the picture you hold already, providing direct measures of satisfaction only where you lack such information, so you spend money only where you need to.
Using personal telephone interviews and a ‘with permission’ approach not only allows you to target the customers you most want to reach but also creates the most positive impact on your customers, communicating how much you value their business and care about what matters to them. Customers who prefer not to receive a telephone call may participate through an alternative channel of their choice; a face to face interview or online survey, for instance.
Using satisfaction surveys and mystery shopping gives you independent evidence of what is really going on at the sharp end, what needs to be done to improve service and value, and also of what you have achieved over time as your delivery systems evolve.
Please call us on 03333 447 214 or contact us for more information, whatever your research goal.
“Fast Track’s common sense approach to customer surveys gave us new insight into the reasons behind customer behaviour. Best of all, the programme paid for itself.”