Evaluating CX in 2023 is no mean feat – and can’t be captured in one short article! And based on what we’ve all failed to predict over the past few years, it’s virtually impossible to predict, with any certainty, what’s…
There’s no silver bullet or magic potion for how to poll hard to reach customers. But there are several strategies that can be employed to increase the potential for meaningful engagement when we know that the target respondent may be…
The last few years have been a rollercoaster ride for everyone. The challenge for businesses right now is not only how to market products and services to existing customers who may be more cautious about spending, but also how to…
In our last local government blog, we talked about how resident engagement through targeted resident research and feedback campaigns is critical in driving needs-based policy. In this blog, we talk about why robust resident research is now even more important…
We all know the old adage ‘there’s no need to reinvent the wheel’. However, organisations also know that if they want to continue to compete, meet their customers’ expectations and create a culture that embraces new ways of doing things…
Why resident engagement is vital to the development of local government policy Local authorities are under tremendous pressure to develop and provide services that meet resident’s needs. With budgets tighter than ever, making decisions through resident engagement is an increasing…
According to research by LinkedIn’s The B2B Institute and WARC published in Marketing Week about the “promise to the customer” (PTTC), campaigns that make a direct promise to the consumer are 60% more likely to report increased market share than campaigns that don’t. They are also…
It’s only a matter of months until the 20th anniversary of the publication of Frederick F. Reichheld’s now famous article ‘The one number you need to grow’ in Harvard Business Review. Summarising the research into the most effective customer satisfaction…
Originally a mainstay of public service organisations, customer charters are now becoming a key differentiator for forward-thinking businesses across all sectors. A clear statement of promises and intent to customers, a customer charter puts the concept of customer centricity at…
This post was triggered by a recent experience I had on the tube train in London. At the time it surprised me but, as I had time to reflect, I realised there were parallels with why the best organisations look…
Neglecting existing customers in pursuit of new ones is a common mistake which is why it’s an issue that lies at the heart of most conversations on customer retention. It’s been debated for years, and yet it still happens in…
It’s a shame to see, but some organisations still don’t understand that penalising customer loyalty can impact retention. In today’s competitive world, businesses need to work harder than ever to retain their customers and make sure they keep paying for…
We mentioned in our previous blog on CX maturity that most CX programmes only focus on the external elements of CX. In doing so, they’re missing a huge swathe of insight – insight that is critical to decision-making for both…
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them”, according to Ernest Hemingway. This applies not only to personal relationships but also to professional ones. When customers and organisations trust each other, it creates…
Today’s customers are more demanding than ever. To stay competitive, businesses must have a solid understanding of customer needs and expectations, and must stay in tune with these as they evolve over time. More than this, though, it’s also essential…
Evidence from the past three years has made one thing about CX clear: organisations that offer the best customer experience constantly check and reset. They re-evaluate themselves, the promises they make, the touchpoint experiences they provide, the consistency of their…
Customer-centric organisations are more likely to achieve better business results, with 73% of consumers citing that a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties. What’s more, companies that excel at customer experience have 1.5 times more engaged employees…
Whether you are a fan of Halloween or not, we can all agree that customer experience should be magical, not a howler. Customers deserve to be treated well and not haunted by a scary encounter. Different strategies, tools and approaches…
A few words from Paul Kavanagh… How time flies! It’s 15 years since myself and Rune Wennesland co-founded Beehive with the shared vision to deliver insight that tells a story. We were determined to provide clear recommendations and action prioritisation…
Beehive is pleased to announce that Paul Kavanagh and Nicole Holt are taking part in the UK Customer Experience Awards 2022 (CXA22) as part of the judging panel for the ‘CX Team of the Year’ and ‘Business Change & Transformation’…
Becoming a trusted advisor doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a commitment to collaborate, consult and to provide high quality products and services on a consistent basis. For Beehive, earning our clients’ trust has required steely determination to deliver insight that…
Beehive is delighted to announce that it is sponsoring the Computing Vendor of the Year and Software Distributor of the Year categories at the inaugural 2022 Tech Reseller Awards, in association with Tech Reseller Magazine. The shortlist has been made…
Beehive is delighted to announce that Nicole Holt has been promoted to Head of Research. This is a new board position for our award-winning market research and customer experience insight agency. The promotion recognises her ambition and achievements as account…
If there is one thing we’ve learned over the past two years, it is that we all need to be able to embrace change and be flexible. For organisations, this requires a deep appreciation of how to handle planned, but…
The most effective customer experience management programmes aren’t just about investing in the latest CX technology or solely about tracking popular KPIs. They’re about developing a strategic plan to help the organisation change, grow, and be more competitive. By harnessing…
Tim Kerr our expert Qualitative Research Director reveals some of the lessons he’s learnt when recruiting respondents to B2B Qualitative research projects. The Observatory Science Centre in Herstmonceux, East Sussex is a great place to visit, not least because they…
The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) approach is best known when applied to product development and innovation projects. However, although this has been its primary use, we have found that adapting a JTBD ‘mindset’ does help when designing any research project. In this…
Gathering and analysing data in search for trends and patterns that will provide a deep understanding of what is happening in relation to a market or product or service is naturally at the heart of every insight project. However transforming…
Building relationships that stand the test of time is no mean feat. In the face of increasingly tough competition, it’s more important than ever that we go the extra mile to make our customers feel special to increase the likelihood…
Beehive has announced today that it has expanded its market research and customer experience insight team with the appointment of Kirsty Potter as Research Director. She will be responsible for client liaison and project management and will also take a…
We’re delighted to announce that Beehive has been awarded a 2021 Forsta AIR (Achievement in Insight and Research) Award in both the Project Innovation and Agency categories. The awards recognise those creatively breaking new ground in Market Research and driving…
With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner and Christmas only a few weeks behind, plans to maximise sales during the Golden Quarter are no doubt a top priority for retailers. More important than ever, given the latest…
Ask anyone for an example of great customer service and you’ll no doubt hear many tales about good experiences but more often than not they quote the bad. What really puts a smile on my face however are stories about…
Tapping into Text Analytics There’s no doubt that text analytics is a valuable tool in the insight arsenal. Well implemented, it can unlock meaning from unstructured data gathered from social media platforms, Voice of the Customer surveys, online reviews and…
Back to the future: resetting the CX dial In order to overcome the challenges posed by changes in the work environment over the past 18 months and to harness opportunities presented by the accelerated move to all things digital, it’s…
Beehive expands senior research team Beehive is pleased to announce today that two senior professionals have joined our expanding market research and customer experience insight team. Tim Kerr joins Beehive as Senior Researcher, bringing over 15 years knowledge and experience…
Beehive and BSI embark on fifth Global Organizational Resilience Index Report Beehive has today announced that it is collaborating with BSI, the business improvement and standards company, on its fifth annual BSI Organizational Resilience Index Report. Respondents are now being…
5 Key Findings from BSI’s Organizational Resilience Research study in the light of COVID-19 2020 (and 2019) was a year unlike any other. Many organizations were not prepared for the speed of change that COVID-19 delivered and organizational resilience was…
Overcoming the challenges of international market research Global research is important for the survival and growth of many businesses, whether it be to gain insight into new markets or to measure their customer experience internationally. However, one methodology may not…
Customer experience measurement programmes are great, but only if they lead to CX leaders making decisions and improving the commercial performance of their organisations. As a consultancy that specialises in customer experience measurement for organisations that make premium products and…
Getting the most out of your customer experience measures Customer experience KPI’s are a great way of tracking how well you are meeting customer expectations, but they are too often used just to tick a box. If you aren’t acting…
How to improve your NPS score You are tracking your NPS score and it’s not where you want it to be. What’s gone wrong? Why don’t your customers want to recommend you to others? Customers become detractors all too easily…
Net Promoter Score (NPS): The pros and cons Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been widely adopted by businesses worldwide as a measure for determining whether their brand is viewed positively by customers, and it is the bedrock of many customer…
Why is customer retention so important? Neglecting existing customers in pursuit of new ones is a common mistake. While customer acquisition is important for business growth, meeting the needs of your existing customer base can be just as critical. Businesses…
What should retailers be doing during this crucial time of year? The festive season typically accounts for more than a fifth of annual sales (ONS Retail Sales Index), and this year it comes at an even more critical time, offering…
You can differentiate your organisation from the competition by delivering an experience that puts the customer at the heart. A customer-centric culture delivers tangible benefits, from improvements in customer retention and loyalty, to reduced costs and increased revenue. What does…
How will our FREE 24 page Online Panel Management Best Practice Guide help you? Sometimes online research can seem a little like the “wild west”, there are lots of pioneers out there, but not much clear guidance on how they…
Customer experience – when things go wrong! I have done my grocery shopping online for many years. I can’t remember the last time I did a ‘big shop’ in an actual supermarket. Online grocery shopping for me is quicker and…
How to Collect Effective Customer Feedback Collecting effective customer feedback means taking the time to understand what truly matters to your customers. And with these insights you can tailor every aspect of your business to reflect your customers’ needs: from…
Why is a customer service charter so important? A customer service charter is a key tool that can help to improve your customer experience and thus profits/revenue across your business. The set of written promises outline the standards that you…
Measuring & Improving Brand Loyalty How much can you really rely on your customers? Can you depend on them to keep buying from you, or are they likely to switch to one of your competitors without a second thought? Are…
What is Emotions Analytics (EA) & How AI is Improving Customer Experience As designers of advanced customer experience programmes for national and international clients, it’s inevitable that talk often turns to innovation and new technology. As we’ve all seen, Artificial…
Customer Service Chatbots: Benefits & Pitfalls for Customer Communication Engaging and understanding your customers’ journey and listening to their feedback are essential elements to any customer experience programme. As such, effective and timely communication is a key part of keeping…
7 Ways to Increase Customer Loyalty and Retention There are many ways to measure customer loyalty. The easiest way is simply to ask your existing customers how they feel about you, and the services you offer. You can also use…
At an event the other day, discussing the merits of Non-Executive Directors (NEDs), I was asked “So what is the difference between Advisory Boards, Advisory Councils and NEDs?” As the MD of a company that creates and manages Advisory Councils, they…
How to Ask for Customer Feedback In my last blog post “Shouldn’t customer experience measurement lead to insight and action?“, I highlighted three bugbears that I have with some customer experience programmes… 1. Are questions simply measurement for measurement’s sake?…
The Connection Between Customer Service and Employee Empowerment We’ve all heard the old adage: happy staff = happy customers. But we think it’s more than that. We think that it’s empowering your staff to solve customer issues that makes the…
Welcome to the first in a series of blogs from Beehive Research on the customer experience design. In this blog we ask the question as to whether the customer is always right? In the hyper-connected world we live in, with…
On my commute to work I read an article on how a large proportion of retailers were selling products on Black Friday at prices that shoppers could have bought cheaper on either side of the day. Correct me if I’m…
How to lose a customer and get negative word of mouth. I still find it incredible how easy it is for an organisation to lose a customer and get negative word of mouth through social media coverage. A short while…
Reduce customer effort and improve customer experience Last week, we considered the importance of teamwork and co-operation to ensure a customer centric journey. Equally important are customer focused processes to reduce customer effort and ensure a positive customer experience. In…
What bees can teach us about customer experience cx teamwork and co-operation We all know businesses are more successful when they focus on their customers and put them at the heart of all they do. There are different ways of…
What can gliding teach us about customer experience strategy? One of my passions is gliding and the other day, when flying on a crisp autumn morning, I found myself contemplating how gliding and customer experience strategy have many parallels. And…
It’s day 4 of National Customer Service Week. Following on from yesterday’s look at alternative channels of customer service, we now turn to self-serve customer service. Do It Yourself? Consider these modern-day scenarios You’re in the supermarket. You have a…
Part 3 in our series of blogs in honour of National Customer Service Week. Today we’re looking at the (very) public face of customer service feedback. Social media as a customer service feedback channel Social channels are increasingly being used…
This is the second in our National Customer Service Week blogs. Today’s theme: How do you create a NPS detractor? Sadly the answer is all too easily, especially if you don’t live up to promises, leave a customer chasing you for…
This is the first in our National Customer Service Week blogs. Today we are looking at: What makes up customer service excellence? The times when customer service really stands out is when a company goes over and above what you expect….
Our boutique CX Agency is in the running for a Best use of Voice of the Customer award. We are overjoyed to announce our selection as a finalist in the Best use of Voice of the Customer category of the Engage…
Going global What to consider to acheive truly global insight The world is becoming a smaller place with people, products and services travelling all over the globe. For companies with an international remit, global insight is important in order to…
Millennials vs gen Z (and others) in the workplace It’s the rise and rise of the Millennials apparently. They get a lot of press. But is it all about them? Every day it seems there are more headlines about Millennials…
What lies ahead for market research? Now, then, and the future of market research In a world where technology is at the forefront of most things we do in our lives, from online shopping to banking to heating our homes,…
Optimising customer experience management strategy Building your action plan Effective customer experience management strategy isn’t just about robust results, interpretation and prioritisation. Simply knowing which direction your tracked KPIs are moving in does not give you sufficient information to facilitate…
The importance of brand loyalty, and how to be customer centric I recently left my gym in central London, part of a big red chain. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t cancel because I wasn’t using it; I went there…
Do all companies deliver the best customer experience? In this final blog in the series about “My three bugbears with some Customer Experience programmes” I will focus on the question of whether all companies deliver the best customer experience and…
The warranty safety blanket There can be little doubt that longer manufacturer warranties do influence the purchase decision for many automotive customers. Choosing a vehicle with a warranty of longer than 3 years gives the customer that ‘cloak of comfort’ that the car will…
It’s always possible to make a service better, it’s what many of us spend our waking hours trying to do. When you know what the problem is, who it affects, or what is causing it, you can focus your attention…
How should you manage customer experience? It’s crucial to all businesses, regularly talked about, yet some companies still seem to struggle with the concept. For those that consistently get things wrong the impact must be massive. So how is it that some appear unaware, unwilling…
Sourcing relevant, informed opinion on products, solutions or services is a perennial challenge for B2B organisations. External opinion is vital, but bespoke research can be expensive. Topics are frequently complex and nuanced, making it harder to use structured questionnaires. To circumvent this problem many…
Global Mobility is playing a strategic role Global Mobility continues to play a vital strategic role for medium and large business across the world. Not only are companies investing significant sums in relocating key staff overseas to fill skills gaps, they are also using…
The changes impacting automotive brand loyalty The automotive industry is enjoying a period of upheaval, with consumer decision-making changing fast and loyalty all but disappearing. But these shifts are not happening in isolation, as this infographic demonstrates. This is taken from our whitepaper…
How employee career progression affects your business’s operational efficiency I’ve just read an interesting report published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) – Employee Outlook, Employee Views on Working Life. It says that a third of UK…
The scale of Volkswagen’s emission test cheating As reported by the BBC, Volkswagen is the number one global car maker in terms of sales. However, with Volkswagen admitting it deceived regulators in exhaust emissions tests by installing a device to…
In our last blog based on the findings of our Loyal Losers Part Two (LL2) study we looked at consumer attitudes towards recruitment and retention adverts. In this post we look at what consumers want from brands’ ad campaigns. While…
Following on from our last blog post about the four loyalty personalities – Loyalists, Passive Loyalist, Neutral/Unengaged, Conditioned Switchers – we thought we’d take a closer look at the findings from the qualitative phase of ‘Loyal Losers Part Two’ (LL2)…
Further to our last blog about our recently published Loyal Losers Part Two (LL2) study, we thought we’d delve a bit deeper into the four consumer loyalty personalities that emerged from the quant phase of our research. The 2,024 UK…
Offering great deals might be the usual way to attract new customers, but as more brands recognise the value of long-term customer relationships, the number of promotions to retain them is increasing. In our study Loyal Losers Part Two (LL2)…
Concept testing is a vital part of brand innovation. It provides valuable insight into the likelihood of success and the steps needed to maximise it. It allows brands to tweak their ideas to meet the specific needs of their target…
In our last post we highlighted the importance of understanding how your business is performing, which areas have the greatest impact on overall satisfaction, and which of these areas you should focus your efforts on. This technique can equally be…
In our last blog on measuring the key drivers of client, stakeholder and employee satisfaction we looked at assigning a relative importance value to the key drivers of customer satisfaction. Prioritising the key drivers of customer satisfaction We also talked…
No matter whether you are in the business of measuring client, stakeholder or employee satisfaction, the key thing is to be sure that you’re measuring customer experience effectively. Measuring customer experience This might sound obvious, but it is all too…
The Customer Experience Exchange for Retail is taking place this week in London. Amongst a who’s who of brands speaking at the conference is Nespresso. We know from our work with Nespresso that it is a world-leading retail brand for…
Watch an interview with Beehive Research MD Paul Kavanagh at the IQPC Customer Experience Exchange Conference Holland Nov 2013 where he discusses Beehive’s latest loyalty research ‘Loyal Losers’ Loyalty research – the ‘Loyal losers’
From our recent work on loyalty we’ve extracted some valuable insights into why people switch suppliers/providers. Perhaps more importantly, we’ve identified what brands need to do to retain those precious, loyal customers – those so often overlooked in favour of…
We recently carried out a piece of research to evaluate the loyalty of car insurance and energy customers and their tendency to switch suppliers*. What we discovered provides useful learnings for brands working in other sectors too. A significant number…
Why do consumers stay loyal – even when they know they could save money by switching?
That’s the question we wanted to answer when we set out to understand ‘Loyal Losers’ recently.
Are the results of your customer satisfaction programmes truly understood by your whole business and effectively used to inform strategy and drive business performance? And is customer satisfaction management embedded at the heart of your business? If the answer to…
If you read our blog regularly, the likelihood is that you already have some idea of the benefits of using custom panels to get closer to your customers – wherever they are in the world – in order to understand…
In the third in our series of posts on global panel management we thought we’d look at some of the things to consider when deciding on your online research panel size, and how to recruit and incentivise participants. Online research…
Global panels – what drives engagement? It is certainly easier for consumers to engage with some brands and topics over others. People are more likely to want to talk about their favourite brand of coffee than their personal finances, for example….
Everyone has a different business or research objective for running a customer online panel, whether for concept and product testing or customer feedback. Your objectives are the starting point for us at Beehive, as it influences just about every aspect…
It’s been a good start to the year and the hive is a buzz with the news that our head bee, MD Paul Kavanagh, has been awarded the rare opportunity of a place on the Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small (10Ksb)…
Aston Martin has selected online and research consultancy specialist, Beehive, to help define and implement a research framework for its global customer satisfaction and insight programme…
The research industry as a whole should strive to add more value
One of the lesser discussed topics and one that can cause far more issues is whether the panel or ORC should be managed in-house or fully outsourced.
A research community is a different proposition to a research panel and harnesses some of the newer tools that have evolved as peoples use of the Internet has changed; it offers an organisation a completely different way of communicating and gathering feedback from customers and prospects.
The pervasive nature of the internet and the falling price of technology means there has never been a better time to set up an online Research Panel and tap into some of the insight available in the online world.
Ensuring the fundamentals are correct gives you a firm foundation to build a solid solution. It’s a simple premise but one that’s easily overlooked.
If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. It’s a common and universal proverb; it’s ubiquitous and can be applied to nearly every aspect of life and business. It seems so simple to follow but sometimes doing a job well is easier said than done.
Extract from published article in Research Conference Report.
Main Point: Co-creative efforts between research vendors, clients and respondents can produce innovative, evolving communities driven jointly by business needs and participant suggestions/desires. Examples of where co-creation is being used and some implications for research were provided.