Inevitably, COVID-19 loomed large when I asked Iain about what’s occupying his time at the moment, as Interserve work to support their customers and make sure that they’re in a position to serve their own customers in turn. A “now, next, later” approach helps to clarify where each customer is in their thinking.

“We don't have any customers that aren't impacted in one way or another. The ‘now’ is the critical stage, it's about working with them to do whatever needs to be done with the backdrop that we've been dealt. The ‘next’ is how do we work with them to either reoccupy their workspaces or to start improving their productivity, to make sure they're able to service their customers. ‘Later’ is thinking about things like repurposing estates and what to do with corporate buildings.”

I was interested in what Iain was able to tell me about what the future of workspaces may look like. Are we looking at permanent, seismic, change; or will things return to normal as soon as the threat of infection is over (whenever that may be)?

Most likely it will be somewhere in the middle. There’s no question that the pandemic and lockdown have forced a step change, but that many of the adjustments we’ve made align with trends that were already in progress, such as increased flexibility of working. As Iain says,

 “The fundamental purpose of a workplace is twofold. It's around supporting your productivity as an individual, and it's about office space supporting your wellbeing. Now the challenge is quite straightforward when you say, ‘How productive can I be working differently? How does that flexibility support productivity, but also how I feel both physically and mentally?’.

We moved on to talk about research, and in particular the question of whether or not now is a good time to do research with customers. We’ve found that clients who have kept their surveys going have seen customers more than happy to take part, in fact they often appreciate the fact that clients are reaching out to them at this time, but for some there is a danger that steaming in with a standard questionnaire might seem a little tone-deaf. As Iain says,

“I'm trying to get back to business as usual, but many of our customers are facing considerable head winds still as a direct impact of COVID-19. So, do you really want to talk to them about how they feel about their FM provider? Probably not.”

So, is now the right time to run your annual survey with customers? Operational teams are working with customers very closely to make sure they have the support and expertise they need, but is it a good time to run your normal research? Maybe not, for a lot of businesses, but by the same token it would be a mistake not to engage with your customers at all. Iain comments,

“The question for me is, right now in the current climate, what is the role of insight? Should we be sticking to our usual calendar? Or should we be brave enough to adapt and be a bit more agile, and accept that what we've measured for the last five years we won’t be able to track. To use that budget, use that conversation time with your customers, to understand something a bit different. By having that conversation, they feel you’re switched on, you understand them, you’re connected to them, and you're not just going through the motions.”

So the point is not to delay your relationship survey until it seems like the right time, but to adapt your customer research so that it’s fit for purpose in the current climate.

“If we do something this year, maybe we'll do it a little bit differently. We'll try to reflect the current situation, where people are and what they're feeling, and maybe position the research in a slightly different way, so it's being more empathetic to what's going on. I still want to answer my usual five main questions for the purposes of benchmarking, but I also want to understand how you've experienced us and how we’ve supported you through this, and then I would want to understand how your priorities have possibly changed. It's back to this ‘now, next and later’.”

Business to business (B2B) customer research is different from business to consumer research in some obvious ways, but there are some less-obvious differences that many researchers can fail to understand. Perhaps the most important is that, in order to be effective, B2B customer research has to dovetail with account management.

One of the immediate benefits of conducting a relationship survey in a B2B market is that it often highlights at-risk customers that no-one knew about, and conversely customers who represent a great opportunity for growth. It’s not uncommon for a B2B survey to pay for itself after a single follow-up call to a key account who was beginning to feel unloved. We often find that this is a vital hurdle to clear in the first year of a survey, to demonstrate to the business the immediate, practical, utility of customer insight:

“Our clear purpose for our relationship survey is about retention. It's about not getting caught out at the last minute, and it's about identifying opportunities to grow contracts. Now we've got to that point where everyone's aligned and see that there is real value in it. People are engaged with it now because it has a very clear purpose, and everyone's now had time to see the benefit of it.”

This is great, but there’s a common challenge in B2B research which Iain has been wrestling with: what to do about customers who choose to respond anonymously? Their comments, however insightful, don’t permit you to take this kind of account-specific action. From a purist research point of view, that’s fine—we treat those customers as representative of wider trends in our customer base. Fine. But, that kind of answer doesn’t tend to go down very well in the board room (and believe me, I know exactly how uncomfortable it can be to face the incredulous glare from the CEO when you tell them you can’t reveal who gave a particular negative comment).

“My biggest frustration is how to not have these anonymous customers, because I want to be able to do something with it and I can't do anything that’s targeted and specific to them.”

A customer survey is a significant investment. How do you prove that it’s worth the money, time, and effort spent on it? One thing that will guarantee that it’s a waste of money is if you do nothing with it, so make sure you’re committed to taking action before you launch your survey.

Assuming that you do take action, you should be able to quickly prove the benefit of intervention in three crucial ways:

• Saving customers at imminent risk of defection

• Finding further opportunities with customers

• Proving the impact that interventions have on customer scores

Iain has taken advantage of all of these to ensure that all of his internal stakeholders are now bought in to the importance of customer research:

“When we first started doing this as an organisation, you had a mixed bag. You had those that were saying, ‘thank goodness, we're going to bring a customer lens to this’, and you had those that said, ‘I don't need to ask customers. I know what my customers want’. What you have to do is to demonstrate how they can use this and how it compliments existing data in terms of decision making. The way that we do our research, we connect it to the commercials and we connect it to retention, so it becomes an indicator. Whether you’re looking at a Net Promoter Score, an effort score, a satisfaction score or a trust score - fundamentally the real benefit is to say, ‘it looks like that customer account is in jeopardy’.”

The research doesn’t fix that of course, but it does highlight the customers who may be at risk and, just as importantly, it helps you to understand the reasons that they are at risk, and gives you the opportunity to discuss it with them.

“Whether you like it or not, research is only step one. The first layer for me is the Hot Alert process that we've got in place, which means that, good or bad, we get in touch. We also give the customer a choice about if they don't want the account lead to be the ones getting in touch. Then they would have, depending on what the customer chooses to do, further conversations and meetings to move through the gears in terms of understanding a bit more and then making sure that we have the right answers and improvement plans. The MDs will get involved, my team would get involved, I would get involved.”

One thing that Iain comments on is the way in which, particularly for their NHS contracts, the COVID-19 crisis has brought together Interserve employees and the people they work with in NHS buildings. There’s no question that a crisis helps to sharpen our focus on the things which really matter: 

“In the last three months you've got real shared purpose. No matter who pays your salary, if it's the UK Government or if it's Interserve, as key workers they've all come together. They probably haven't written it [purpose] down. They haven't come together to ask, ‘right guys, what is the shared purpose here?’ It's easy, right? It's save lives, and look after each other.”