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Recent Telecoms Case Studies
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Consumer Digital Touchpoints Relationship Management for a Global Mobile Device Firm
This KPI tracker was set-up to measure the impact of our client’s digital touchpoints on key metrics such as brand retention, brand commitment, cross-sales and engagement. It comprised of:
- Online pop-up surveys among visitors to the client’s main websites in 32 countries and related regional sites, in approximately 20 languages
- Separate online pop-up surveys among visitors to specific website areas, such as e-commerce and key products in approximately 10 countries and languages
- Online email invitation surveys with the client’s digital communities in 17 countries and 12 languages.
- Those opting for SMS communication at community sign-up were invited by SMS to do a shorter WAP survey
- Mobile internet surveys among visitors to 14 country mobile sites, in 9 languages
- 40,000+ surveys per year, overall
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Mobile Handset Purchase Journeys
This study targeted people who were planning to buy mobile phones in the coming months. The study explored the planned versus actual purchase process in great detail, to provide an in-depth understanding of the ‘journey’ people take when buying a phone. It explored the considerations and behaviours along the way as well as final outcome versus original plan, all in a competitive context.
As such it enabled extremely in-depth and rich analysis of the ‘pathways’ that consumers take and provided great detail on the drivers behind brand choice, retention and switching and the related consumer profiles.
The study was conducted via thousands of mixed-mode (online and face-to-face) pre and post purchase surveys in both developed and emerging markets.
The study has been conducted twice, two years apart, to determine any significant changes in consumer behaviour, touchpoint/brand effectiveness and consumer profiles.
Client reference:
"This study has been a source of new thinking around the marketing organisation. Previously we talked about brand measures in isolation, as a goal in themselves. Now we have the means of differentiating each of the brand measures on a cost/value basis per market. Previously we focused on brand retention as a key metric. Well we still do, but now we have the understanding of what drives retention behaviour, as well as what drives consumers away from the brand. This has to be one of the most referenced pieces of research in my experience at this company. Also, the depth and richness of information collected meant that we could analyse the decision, priorities and trade-offs in more detail than ever before."
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A B2B Customer Relationship and Loyalty Programme for a Mobile Telecoms Company
We have been working with this client continuously since 2005 to track satisfaction and loyalty amongst business decision makers in all company sizes, in a competitive context, in a range of mature and emerging European markets. We complete thousands of detailed telephone interviews, in local languages, each year.
Over the years, different waves of the study (typically twice per year) have varied between full diagnostic surveys and top level KPIs tracking, depending on business needs and priorities at the time. At a top level, the study has historically focused on traditional measures such as overall satisfaction, likelihood to recommend and continue to use.
More recently we have evolved the study in line with current best thinking to incorporate more emotional and intentional/forward looking aspects in order to give a more holistic, granular and business oriented view of customer relationships vs the competition (SWOT) in each market. With full diagnostics, at a number of touchpoints, this delivers a new perspective and more actionable outputs linked to business processes and outcomes.
The results are communicated to the core, central team first and followed-up by a mix of initial conference calls and then full in-person workshops with each of the country management teams involved, in their local offices. The workshops typically contain a blend of reviewing the previous wave’s key results and actions taken since then, looking at the current wave’s results with historical trends, and indentifying priorities and action planning for the next 6 months. We also look at comparisons and best practice in the different markets to see if lessons can be learned and tips taken from other markets’ activities and performance.
In the wider sense, to keep the survey evolving and adding more value, we are now proactively considering how to extend this multi-country study into new/additional emerging markets, how we might expand the scope to look at other business communications offerings and how we might blend offline and online data collection modes to help manage expansion cost-effectively.
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B2B Telecoms Brand Strategy, Rebranding and Tracking
Harris Interactive has worked with this leading fixed line business telecoms provider since 2004, across a broad range of projects including customer satisfaction/loyalty, NPS benchmarking and diagnostics, concept testing and brand strategy.
Following a significant merger, a proposed new brand personality needed to be evaluated and tuned. We conducted brand positioning research to evaluate the perceptions and fit of the respective brands. We conducted intensive research amongst communications decision makers to establish a deep understanding of customer needs map and measure each brand’s awareness and positioning. Our brand mapping technique enabled us to identify the key needs drivers and each brands ‘footprint’ across these needs, to show brand strengths, weaknesses, differentiation, stretch potential and strategic positioning against competitors. We used the footprints to understand where the two brands had synergy/conflict and respective strengths/weaknesses.
One brand had overall stronger positioning in the market but there was sufficient synergy with the other brand’s footprint, which also had a good fit with the business audience and offered significant potential to leverage its broader brand equity, all of which resulted in a new unified branding. Following the rebranding, we have continued to track brand performance and the impact on positioning of evolving capabilities and equity. We still track this brand today and conduct related analysis today.
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Understanding Mobile Solutions Needs and Behaviours
This international qualitative research project was designed to understand consumer behaviour and language in relation to mobile solutions, in the context of consumer needs, experiences, benefits, who they interact with and how.
Four key research objectives underpinned the overarching aim:
- Exploring current needs, behaviours and benefits in relation to mobile solutions
- Generating consumer language and understanding of mobile solutions
- Identifying issues and barriers to usage of mobile solutions
- Unlocking solution trends and aspiration
An international program of qualitative research consisting of 20 in-person focus groups and 25 face-to-face depths were conducted across 5 countries, the UK, US, China, Brazil and Italy. The fieldwork captured users of varying sophistication from basic users to Innovators.
This in-depth understanding of user behaviour and language underlined just how integrated mobile technology is within today’s society and how it is much more than just a communication device, helping to cement a shift in our client’s marketing focus. The study also revealed the barriers to uptake and solution winners. The study gave clarity to the development of a much bigger and wider research and analysis program and direction in marketing the benefits of solutions & services more clearly in the minds of consumers.
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Mobile Services Uptake and Opportunity
With mobile services such as music, navigation, games and email becoming increasingly important, from both a revenue and retention perspective, our client launched a number of specific services, which met with mixed success. As a result, they wanted to better understand the overall services market to provide a sound basis for further development work. In particular, they wanted a clearer understanding of: uptake of a range of services on their devices versus key competitor devices, the service suppliers being used, the relationship between use of services and loyalty/brand preference, at the device level, specifically, likely intention to repurchase a handset.
Respondents were handset owners, in UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and USA who had ever used services. The results were used primarily to:
- quantify potential and set targets for growth and market share
- focusing efforts to improve relevance of key services to consumers day-to-day life
The study was so well received that exceptional demand was placed on a repeat study 18 months later, primarily to determine how the market had moved on, how our client had progressed versus competitors and where the business priorities should be.
Client reference:
"We repeated the very well-received 2009 Services study in 2011, after numerous requests for an update from around the business. The team at Harris Interactive helped make the reporting short and snappy – for maximum impact with stakeholders – and we got the message across well! Overnight, the debrief deck became “this month’s most read” report on our internal Consumer Portal, leading to requests for a company-wide Intranet article and presentations to the global research community".
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Mobile Device and Services Usage and Satisfaction
In order to monitor performance and fulfill a range of business planning needs, our client needed constant up-to-date information on all aspects of purchase, usage and satisfaction amongst recent mobile device purchasers around the globe, within a competitive context.
We designed and implemented this study in 2004 primarily as a monthly device purchase and satisfaction tracker in six developed and emerging markets. It evolved over the years to encompass services and solutions, with the following key objectives:
• To monitor multi-brand, make and model device uptake uptake
• To track sales success and customer satisfaction in services and solutions, relative to competitors
• To understand and monitor retention and the drivers of retention
At its peak, the study was conducted monthly in 21 countries representing global coverage – six countries were researched online and the rest via face-to-face. We completed between 500 and 1,500 interviews per month in each country (a total of 16,500 interviews every month).
Monthly data was delivered via our ViewPort online reporting tool to hundreds of users worldwide, which also enabled flexible user-generated analysis. The HI executive team on the study produced numerous in-depth insight reports on a range of topics.
Client reference:
"The Devices monitoring study we set up with Harris six years has grown into one of the most valuable and actually used pieces of research we run, with over 300 regular users of the data across the company. It is one of the key sources we rely on for Devices consumer understanding, in a current market and competitor context. The Harris team has supported us strongly on everything from data analysis training to delivery of strategic insights."
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Business Mobile Market Sizing and Trends
For several years we provided the major UK mobile networks with data for the size of the mobile communications market among UK businesses. The requirement was to size and provide share estimates for the market for business owned/contracted mobile communications, irrespective of tariff, whether on a business contract or a consumer tariff, including PAYG.
The research was used for a variety of purposes, such as planning and forecasting, marketing initiatives and in some cases reward and recognition programmes. The study covered all sizes of private sector businesses across the UK. We provided discrete analysis for various sectors - sole traders, SMEs and large businesses. All aspects of mobile communications were covered, such as voice and data, and via different devices, e.g. handheld devices, mobile broadband via dongles, data cards, etc. Other topics, for example tariffs (business and consumer), switching behaviour and propensity to switch were also covered. For various categories, for all service providers, including MVNOs, we reported: penetration, uptake by businesses, number of connections, spend and ARPU.
As an example of the findings, we were able to plot the migration of connections from voice and SMS only to voice and data connections, and the adoption of different mobile operating systems by British businesses over time. We were also able to track the rapid uptake of mobile broadband and the change from data cards to USB modems/dongles.
This was a syndicated survey with the major mobile network operators participating over time. Data collection was continuous, and reporting was quarterly. Respondents were telecom decision makers, which in the case of smaller companies were usually the proprietor/owner. Sample size was approximately 1,800 per quarter.
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