Enhancing The Customer Experience

Neil Lilford is the managing director of Greenfields Research. Greenfields Research offers quantitative and qualitative market research intelligence that helps organisations in achieving their competitive edge within their selected markets. Leadership spoke to Lilford to uncover the secrets of his success.

What does Greenfields Research offer clients?

Our primary research allows an organisation to identify behaviour patterns about their customers. The more data we have about the customer the greater the ability to enhance the customer experience. Digitisation within organisations has become critical in achieving a positive customer experience and enhancing the brand in order to attain competitive advantage.

We survey the client’s market and provide input on segmentation. In some instances, we can develop benchmarks for organisations, within specific industries and track their progress from a strategic perspective.

There are four key areas that we focus on in order to understand the customer:

1. Internal customer data: Secondary data which already exists that might sit on the organisation’s database, such as demographics, geography etc.;

2. Behaviour usage data: Various touch points from a customer experience perspective, including past complaints and reasons for dissatisfaction or terminations (e.g. medical aid members);

3. Market research: Going out into the marketplace to conduct quantitative surveys; exploring segmentation through focus groups; and

4. Social data: Data that comes from the client’s social media.

Please talk to us about qualitative and quantitative research.

Quantitative data is any data that can be translated into numerical form. The researcher analyses the data and applies statistics to it, to attain a result that can be generalised to an identified larger population. The data is obtained through sampling; and then a predication is made about what is true for the full population.