Customer satisfaction - Loyalty research

IRL has built a high level of expertise in providing clients with data that identifies customer requirements and monitors customer satisfaction and loyalty. IRL customer surveys are designed to help you understand your company's brand/corporate awareness, in absolute terms and relative to the competition:

- Your customers' expectations in terms of product and service features
- Customers perceptions of your company's performance
- Reasons for dissatisfaction and performance gaps
- Your company's strengths and weaknesses
- Your customers' purchasing intentions - reasons for remaining loyal or switching to a competitive supplier

Studying the performance of competitors is an essential part of the process. Customers can become aware of exceptional performance by competitors and may be drawn towards them even if their current supplier is performing well. Equally, they may remain loyal even though they are not fully satisfied because they know that the competition is no better.

At IRL we pride ourselves on our ability to customise our approach to meet your needs. In addition to the core components described above we can expand the analysis to cover topics which deepen your understanding of the market situation and enhance your ability to define solutions that will strengthen relationships with existing customers and increase market penetration. These topics include:

- Loyalty - high levels of satisfaction do not ensure loyalty. IRL research identifies loyalty drivers and measures purchasing intentions, extent of multiple sourcing, willingness to recommend and availability of alternatives.
- Perceptions of market leadership
- Market positioning analysis
- Corporate image
- Opportunity analysis - identifies the areas of opportunity for your company by taking into account your company's, your competitors' performance and the importance of each attribute - the larger the opportunity score the less well served the market is as a whole
- Internal audit
- Key account monitoring - key account perceptions require individual probing and reporting. The aim of key account research is not just to measure relationships but to provide qualitative insight to help you improve them.

The information gathered would enable you to focus your efforts on those areas that have the greatest impact on customer retention and acquisition, thus improving business performance. IRL can also help you to develop a winning product or service strategy by providing you with data on the product and service levels that generate the highest satisfaction amongst customers. This research approach uses conjoint analysis to measure the values attached to product/service attributes and levels.