Client listening pilot
Embarking on a client listening programme can appear like a daunting task, especially if it’s a new activity for your business. There are so many questions to answer. Who should we ask? How should we ask? What should we ask? What are we going to do with all the data we gather? How do I get reluctant colleagues on board? To name but a few!
A client listening pilot is a great way to get started. It gives you an opportunity to test the questions and your processes, to begin to gain an insight into client sentiment and to garner internal support for a wider programme. It may be that you already ask for feedback via an online survey and want to evolve your programme to include interviews and a pilot approach helps here too.
A client listening pilot is a valuable activity in a number of scenarios:
– As a foundation for your refreshed marketing strategy
– As part of your client care activity
– To gather quotes and testimonials for your marketing, and to uncover what you do well in your clients’ eyes
– To identify and deal with any issues and challenges before they escalate
What’s included in a pilot
- Calls with your team to discuss the project
- Help to identify which clients to include
- Question formulation
- A communication inviting clients to participate
- Internal comms (if required) to tell colleagues about the project
- Ten qualitative interviews
- A comprehensive note of each interview pulling out the key points from the conversation
- A practical report including, but not limited to:
- SWOT analysis
- Quotes
- Marketing messages
- Client experience messages with proof points (relevant quotes from interviews)
- Content talking about the exercise for you to use in your external and internal comms (Why we did it, what we learned, what we’ll change as a result)
- Suggested actions to close the feedback loop (listed out into short, med, long term)
- Suggested next steps
What happens next?
Hopefully the pilot will demonstrate the value of gathering qualitative insight from your clients, and depending on the expertise within your team, we can go forward in a number of ways.
If you have an in-house marketing function, they may take forward the recommendations in the pilot report and I can work alongside them purely focusing on future client interviews. If you don’t have marketing expertise in-house, I can act as your client listening partner and help you to maximise the value of the insight I gather.
If you’d like to find out how I can help your client listening to take off through a pilot, please get in touch.
“I engaged Anna to kick off a customer listening pilot which has been instrumental in us raising the importance of our voice of the customer programme at Skill Dynamics. Anna’s vast experience made the process easy to run and the report she produced helped us to focus on the most impactful changes we could make to improve the customer experience. Our customers really valued the time with Anna who acted as a highly credible representative of our company – this combined with her fun and engaging style makes Anna a pleasure to work with and I look forward to working together on future projects.”
Marie James Phillips, Marketing Director, Skill Dynamics