Mobile Operators Mobile operators are today at a crossroads; caught between a future as a service provider and an access provider.
Japan's Global Engagement CVA has provided this area as a resource for those interested in Japanese business and its relationship to the rest of the world.
Sustainable Growth CVA understands that sustainability is not just a risk management issue, but also a potential source of value creation and strategic advantage.
Value Flow CVA, as our name suggests, has always been focused on 'value' and management's ability to create 'value' for the business.
For many years now CCVE® has proved to be a uniquely powerful tool for our clients.
While many consultancies claim to have "customer-centric" approaches we differentiate ourselves on two fronts.
Firstly, CCVE® combines a focus on customer needs with the cost and economic implications of meeting those needs. Businesses can then align their operations more closely to what customers want and, in the process, take steps (or even leaps) towards the panacea of happier customers generating healthy profits.
Secondly, CCVE® offers our clients a better understanding of customers that can provide a more accurate prediction of their behaviour. Over the years, CVA has developed a range of tools and techniques to help businesses (and governments!!) better understand their customers. The "Relative Attitudes Framework" is one such tool that is used to understand the drivers of customer satisfaction. Another is the "Individual and Circumstance Framework" that explains price elasticity.
Arguably, the most important and useful has been the framework which assists us in segmenting the customer based - the CVA "Mind" Diagram.
This approach allows us to get behind the preferences that customers articulate to understand importance and perceived needs. From this, we can then understand the underlying needs, attitudes and behaviours of the different customers. This is then used as the basis for segmenting the customer base. Using this approach CVA has led the trend of increasingly sophisticated, detailed and overlaid segmentations.
CCVE® has not stood still over the years. In these changeable and uncertain times our clients' appetite for a major overhaul of their business has reduced. Thus CCVE® has evolved into lighter versions that help clients optimise their existing offers. This may involve optimising their offer portfolio, optimising their individual offers or the individual components of those offers such as price, brand, channel or service.
Work of this nature necessitates looking in greater detail at specific "micro-transactions" and it is here that the latest evolution of CCVE® has focused. At this level it might be thought that we must move from "macro" frameworks into tailored and specific behavioural insights. Our experience over the years and in many markets leads us in a different direction. Rather than focusing on the increasingly complex analysis of individual customer data from CRMs, CVA is using its evolving understanding of "emotions" to inform our understanding of the customer.
It is our contention that the ultimate goal of a one-to-one segmentation, the "holy grail" for many marketers, is incorrect for most volume markets. The complexity costs and dis-economies of scale will ultimately limit the value created by ever-increasing tailoring. We agree that in general technology and automation will increase the level at which the "returns" of more detailed customer understanding will break-even. But a purely "logical" approach offered by most CRMs fails to compensate for the idiosyncrasies of human behaviour. This is evident in the frequent failure of CRM systems to manage a mass customer base.
It is our belief that increasing the amount of emotional understanding in predicting customer behaviour provides an antidote to this trend. The emotions that customers experience are often common across cultures and societies - everyone around the world hates call centres and pushy salesmen for the same reasons! Understanding these emotional factors and their implications for the customer is vital to business success. We only need look at the world's most successful companies to see that their sustainable advantage comes from more than just the "rational" product and price offered. Our hope is to improve the "emotional" component of CCVE®. This will enable us to provide clients with better, simpler, customer-centric strategies that are intuitive and actionable. No mean feat.
In order to respond to this challenge we are taking our existing knowledge of customers and combining it with both R&D from leading-edge neuroscience research and with our own expertise in experimentation. The result is a "Marketing Lab" - a joint R&D project currently being run with one of our clients in Germany.
For our client this lab will provide understanding of not only the "rational" drivers normally examined but also the emotions and feelings affecting the interpretation and motivation for customer's actions. It will also test actual solutions enabling rapid implementation with proven improvements. For CVA this provides the opportunity to pilot our research techniques and develop our latest methodology evolution, CCVE®+. Watch this space for results (and a better name!)
While many consultancies claim to have "customer-centric" approaches we differentiate ourselves on two fronts.
