Customer Experience Research

Hansa|GCR is a global leader in helping companies enhance their customer experience by gaining actionable insight into how to differentiate and capture customers’ business. Principals of the firm have assisted some of the world’s leading companies in the development and execution of their customer experience strategy.

We have distinctive competencies in three areas of customer experience research: Customer diagnostics, product and process improvement, and customer and brand tracking.

Basically, we help clients answer fundamental business questions, as illustrated in the exhibit, Customer Experience Research:

1. What is going on with customers and why? What leads to deeper customer relationships? 2. What should companies do to increase customer relationships? What could be product and process innovation opportunities? 3. How are we doing? Are we making progress in moving the needle in the customer experience? Are we gaining increased customer advocacy and business results?

Hansa|GCR brings distinctive capabilities to these questions, including:

  • Unique ways of measuring brand and customer advocacy that provide concrete metrics for business management and enhanced predictability of business results.
  • State-of-the-art techniques to map the customer experience and pinpoint opportunities to remove customer pain points and create purposeful emotional bonds with customers.
  • Specialized expertise in managing customer lifetime value and return on investment from marketing activities.
  • Groundbreaking approaches to uncovering latent and subconscious needs of customers that can provide new insight into how to build deeper customer relationships.
  • An ability to cross the bridge from research data and insights to helping clients manage their execution of their customer strategy.

Hansa|GCR capabilities include:

  • Customer relationship and brand evaluation.
  • Product evaluation, including concept testing, naming, positioning.
  • Process analysis and facilitated innovation.
  • Brand positioning and message testing.
  • Usage and attitude studies to gain practical customer insight.
  • Tracking programs to support business management.

Product Insight & Innovation

Hansa|GCR supports our client needs around new product research through a comprehensive process depicted in the exhibit below.

Systematic Innovation Process

Our process is designed to enable a client to uncover unmet customer needs and gain insight into customers' fundamental needs. Our research methods are adapted to each client situation and can include observational research, exploratory investigations, ideal experience development, customer experience mapping, and a range of quantitative methods to isolate and prioritize customer needs, develop and test concepts, and test go-to-market strategy. Underlying our product innovation approach are two fundamental principles:

(1) Customers will tell you what they know, not what they don't know. Put another way, we strive to uncover the latent needs of customers that elude traditional research techniques.

(2) The voice of the customer is critical input to a product innovation process, but ultimately it is the company's responsibility to innovate and invent -- we call this innovating on behalf of the customer. Throughout our engagements we strive for a collaborative partnership with our clients, believing strongly that leveraging the client's expertise is as critical as gaining the customer's voice.

Principals of Hansa|GCR have supported product and service enhancement in a variety of industries, including health care, retail, and packaged goods, among others. Example product innovation work has included research and ideation in support of the development of a widely successful health-oriented snack food line, a new benefit offering for a major credit card firm, new product concept development in the breakfast category, store of the future innovation for a major retail drug store chain, and more.

Article of interest: Creating Emotional Bonds by Wayne Marks