Speaker 1: Why simpler indicators are often better indicators. I've been doing some work with a chemicals business. They are a B2B business, and they wanted to understand how good their relationships are with their customers. So they created a little team to develop better indicators and better ways of measuring their performance. And this team went off and said, how can we measure customer relationships? And they basically found in their search, found a consulting company that specialised in this. And they the beauty was that this company had a ready-made survey. And even better, they delivered a service that said we can do this for you. We can send the surveys out to your customers, collect the data back, analyse it for you. And then every six months you would get a ready-made report that will give you lots of data, lots of insights. So they were pleased with this. They signed up for this service. I came in and asked a few questions. I said, OK, tell me how you're using this data. When was the last time you made a management decision based on all the information you're getting every six months? Very quickly, it became apparent that over the last year or two, not one single management decision was ever taken based on this seemingly interesting data. So what we did is we stepped back and said, OK, what is it actually you want to know? So I help clients really identify their information needs. So we identify what questions do you really want to have an answer to? So we went back and they said, OK, we want to develop win-win partnerships with our customers, because what we found is if we have better relationships, these customers tend to be loyal. They tend to be ordering more. And we are usually they come to us with new ideas and we are on the table with them to discuss this early on, which then gives us an opportunity to tender early on for potentially more business. So that made a lot of sense. So what they really wanted to understand is what is their relationship like? And again, I ask a few questions. What does it mean to have a good relationship with your customers? And they said, OK, we have a good relationship with customers means we probably have relationships on different levels. So there's usually the person that makes the purchasing decision. Then there's and sometimes there are two or three of them. And then there's usually a senior leadership team. And if we have a relationship across the business with the senior leadership team and the people that make the purchasing decisions, that usually is better. If we only have one relationship with one person, this can sometimes leave us vulnerable. So, OK, so we develop what we call a relationship depth indicator. We say, OK, let's look at all the key people you want to relationship with this in this business. And then we said, what does a good relationship look like? And sometimes you have no relationship. So we again develop a little scale, no relationship, a good, good professional relationship or a really tight relationship that almost is a personal relationship where people go out and play golf together. What we then did is we created a very simple matrix saying this is the depth. This is how good the relationship is. And instead of sending out a survey, which annoys people, you simply ask your account managers because they deal with these businesses day in and day out. So, OK, just rank them. Where do you are on the scale? Have you got all the relationships you want? How good are these relationships? And this can then trigger actions. The other thing they did is they say, OK, this is an internal view. We still want an external view. So we created a very simple survey saying on a scale from one to two, seven. How good would you rate the relationship with this business at this point in time? So instead of sending the previous survey, which had about 45 questions on them and lots of them, I spoke to some of their suppliers and basically what they were saying is I have to fill this in once every six months. I do this because they are an important supplier of ours. But to be honest, half of the questions seem to be irrelevant. I'm not sure what they're getting from this. So even the customers were getting annoyed and they were the ones this company wanted to develop a better relationship with. So what we did is we now sent out this email with a very simple question. How would you rate the relationship? This is done internally to the database compares the two numbers. And if they match, which they very often do, it gain people gain insight. If the internal person thinks this is quite good, the external person thinks this is not great. Again, it triggers a little action to say, pick up the phone and speak to them. The other thing that we did is we do this now more often. We do this every month because what they realize is if you have six months of potentially deteriorating relationships, by the time you find out, it might be too late. So they saved about £100,000 a year, creating in the past they had lots of data, but very little insight. What we did is we identified the true information needs, designed a measurement tool that really gave them the answers to their critical questions and something that actually helps to build the relationships they were trying to measuring. And this is what I do with clients. I help them develop better ways of collecting data, using metrics to really deliver insights that drive business performance. If you would like to learn more, head to my website at bernardma.com where you can find tons of articles, white papers and videos that will give you a lot more insights into real world case studies and examples.