Customer Insight Research

BMRB is renowned for providing high quality customer research solutions for the public sector. We work closely with our sister company The Futures Company to offer a full programme of customer research and insight informed by the very latest thinking.

Sir David Varney’s independent review of service transformation in 2006 placed the customer at the heart of service design and delivery in the public sector. He called for “deep insight into customer needs, behaviours and motivations”.

This represents a shift from a focus on measuring customer satisfaction. We have long recommended researching the whole customer experience, with measurement of satisfaction not an end in itself. It is, instead, just a starting point: exploring what drives satisfaction, and how, provides insights to help improve the customer experience. At BMRB we can help you make that move from ‘results’ to ‘insights’. Customer experience measurement is at the heart of providing such insights, but is just one part of a much bigger cycle of service transformation.

We can help you out with any or all of the stages of this cycle, from first steps through to an action plan, including:

• Avoiding duplication of effort by uncovering your existing knowledge through, for example, insight audits.
• Exploring your service and customer needs, using tools such as qualitative research (with customers, internal clients/stakeholders and customer-facing staff etc), consultation events or customer journey mapping.

Helping you to fully define your service, your internal clients/stakeholders and your customers to ensure the best design for your research.

• Designing and running robust and actionable quantitative and qualitative research to measure customer experience, offering a full range of approaches to best meet the needs of your customers.

• Providing expertise in analysing and unpicking your results, including a range of statistical techniques to find out what drives a satisfactory (or unsatisfactory) customer experience, qualitative research to give more depth to your understanding, integrating other sources of information, advising on benchmarking and so on.

• Helping you to communicate your results in a tailored and interactive way to engage internal clients/stakeholders and customer facing staff in the organisation in the transformation process, as well as providing feedback for your customers about what you are doing.

• Advising you on how frequently you need to go round the cycle to assess the success of any interventions, and to uncover any new customer needs or issues.

In 2007 BMRB and The Futures Company were commissioned by the Cabinet Office's Customer Insight Forum to produce Guidance and a Toolkit on how customer satisfaction measurement can be used to drive service transformation. These have recently been published on the Cabinet Office website.