Customer Analytics
Frost & Sullivan’s Customer Analytics team creates innovative solutions – each one tailored to specific business situations. Through the application of advanced analytical expertise, we create powerful measures, analyses, and presentations that lead to actionable solutions.
We generate ideas for new products and services, then validate effective pricing, branding, promotional, and channeling strategies. We provide you with a picture of your competitive position in the market, and measure and track your customers’ opinions through solutions that can be operationally implemented.
Customer Analytics Key Issues
Frost & Sullivan’s Customer Analytics Group provides a full spectrum of innovative solutions to common research issues, as well as highly customized services to meet your specific needs.
Understanding
Understanding how customers differ in order to develop products and/or marketing strategies that are tailored to each group’s individual needs
Designing
Designing new products optimally, staying current on significant trends in product usage and preference, and understanding how customers perceive your products and brands
Uncovering
Uncovering back office issues that contribute to negative customer experiences
Analytics Solutions
Frost & Sullivan was founded on the simple premise that analytics should enable decision-makers to use marketing information in more innovative and meaningful ways. With this objective in mind, the company developed a comprehensive range of customer analytics services and state-of-the-art analytical tools. Frost & Sullivan has continued to grow, adapt, and innovate to meet the challenges and opportunities of today’s ever-changing business world.
Strategic Planning
Frost & Sullivan partners with the client to develop strategic planning programs that address the client’s needs and leverage Frost & Sullivan’s experience with similar models and qualitative end-user feedback.
Advertising & Marketing Communications
Our approach is founded on the concept that advertising can evoke a variety of responses from the target audience.
New Product Development
We work with our clients to ensure that each solution effectively addresses the pressing business issues.
Brand and Category Development
Frost & Sullivan’s Market Structure Analysis is based on purchases (what customers actually buy) versus purchase intent (what customers say they will buy).
Channel Development
Whether it is category management opportunities, point-of-purchase communication development, or sales force effectiveness, Frost & Sullivan can provide a customized solution to meet your needs.
Competitive Benchmarking Services
Purpose
The purpose of Frost & Sullivan’s Competitive Benchmarking Services (CBS) Choice Survey Program is to measure brand preferences of various products, processes, and services among those within chosen industries who are deemed “experts.” The research will result in Frost & Sullivan naming the “best” companies for their performance as judged by industry experts. Thus, the unbiased and non-sponsored results of this program may widely impact the industries in which this research is conducted, as the participants may be very influential to colleagues and professional peers, as well as to general consumers.
Best Practices Recognition Criteria
Once our analysis is conducted and carefully analyzed, we award those companies/brands/products/services that are deemed “best” by survey participants. Although each CBS project is somewhat unique, there are certain measures that determine whether best practices recognition will be granted. First, the participants of the survey analysis must be leaders within their organization – decision-makers – and/or professional users of the products/services being tested. Second, the recognition recipient must be a clear leader for the category being tested. Third, only one best practices recognition recipient per category is recognized.
Frost & Sullivan’s best practices team formally recognizes those companies/brands/products/services based upon our analysis and, in doing so, best practices recognition recipients have an opportunity to utilize these results externally.
Our mission is…
“To provide our clients with reliable and accurate data results they can use to evaluate themselves against their competitors and provide marketing tools to showcase their accomplishments based upon the opinions of experts/consumers.”
Areas of Focus
The CBS analysis focuses on the industries in which Frost & Sullivan has a long history of supporting with its expertise. To view the titles of the CBS analysis already conducted within these industries – as well as the best practices recognition recipients – click on the industry links below.
Value of Choice Awards
As described earlier, the CBS team conducts non-sponsored research, and the award recipients are chosen by the end-users directly. Given the unbiased nature of our research, award recipients can trust that a Frost & Sullivan Choice Award represents the voice of industry experts – business leaders and/or professional users – as we translate their opinions into measurable results.
The value of Frost & Sullivan research services is based on the wide toolbox of analytic approaches and techniques.
With our seasoned moderators – coupled with our research resources and capabilities – we can create solutions for those seemingly impossible challenges.
Utilizing multiple data collection methods, Frost & Sullivan offers a full suite of statistical and analytic techniques to maximize insights from quantitative research studies.
Frost & Sullivan supports specialized research in highly focused market segments to provide insights available through no other source.
Frost & Sullivan monitors many aspects of the market and presents awards for excellence in advanced business practices, technological innovation, and customer satisfaction.
Frost & Sullivan provides data collection services in virtually every country around the globe, along with comprehensive data processing and database.
1. Building a Global Index that Impacts Company Performance
Frost & Sullivan, together with a major telecommunication services provider and a global collaboration software provider, undertook a research program to understand how global enterprises use collaboration in their business. To understand thoroughly the impact of collaboration within an enterprise, a structural model was developed to evaluate its interaction with other organizational factors, like company performance, strategy, corporate culture, organizational structure, collaborative technologies, and environmental turbulence. Among the significant findings are the following:
- The quality of collaboration significantly impacts company performance.
- The impact of collaboration on company performance is significantly higher than the impact of strategy and environmental turbulence.
- Corporate culture, structure, and technology significantly impact the quality of collaboration.
From the structural model, a global collaboration index was developed that had both descriptive and predictive value. Collaboration, as measured by the index, is a key driver of all the dimensions of performance: profitability, profit growth, sales growth, labor productivity, product development, customer satisfaction, innovation, and product quality. The global validity of the index is demonstrated by the fact that top performing companies in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the U.S.A. had consistently higher collaboration index scores when compared to bottom performing companies. The index was used to compare relative collaborativeness across the regions and across six industry verticals. The global collaboration index has provided insights that can have significant impact on global, regional, and vertical strategies related to collaboration and company performance.
2. Measuring Customer Loyalty for A Global Company
A multinational industrial and consumer products manufacturer commissioned a global study with Frost & Sullivan to measure the satisfaction and loyalty of its customers. Frost & Sullivan understood that traditional customer feedback approaches, such as those based on satisfaction, are not likely to produce new requirements. Feedback studies are moving increasingly toward measurements based on loyalty, value, and actual behavior. This provides more information to the business planner to set priorities for market segments that offer potential, while at the same time, understanding what these segments are currently seeking and their motivations for using a supplier.
Close coordination of all aspects of the research study were required to ensure comparability of results across the countries under study. The use of behavioral scales solves much of this problem by ensuring cultural neutrality. Still, the many vagaries of a region or country must be well understood by the researchers. Typically, this requires a truly global presence and a long history of building operational knowledge of the many cultures (business and societal) and economies around the world.
Any multi-country study needs a systematic approach if the final delivered data is going to be of any use in terms of accuracy, comparability, and actionability. Frost & Sullivan recognizes the importance of these issues and has the requisite experience and resources to ensure that this study is closely managed by a project team well prepared to deal with the issues that will inevitably arise.
3. Understanding Consumer Behaviors and Industry Practices Regarding Recycling and Reuse: Custom Research for a Leading Automotive Company
A global automotive company was looking to market its self-imposed recycling/reuse initiatives within the U.S. but was uncertain if the investment would positively increase its brand image, and therefore, worth the investment. Specifically, it was uncertain of:
- Personal recycling/reuse behaviors among U.S. households
- Industry practices related to recycling and reuse
Frost & Sullivan was commissioned to conduct this research and had an opportunity to showcase the “Frost & Sullivan advantage” — the coupling of our Customer Research and Industry Analysis Research. We recommended this approach since it would provide this leading automotive company with a complete information picture: a demand-side and a supply-side perspective.
Specifically, the Customer Research team conducted a comprehensive survey among U.S. households that not only surveyed directly about their current and past behaviors, but also was able to apply behavioral psychology to reveal the influencers of recycling/reuse behaviors. Specifically, these results were obtained through the development of psychological indexes and were tested with our toolbox of statistical applications, thus revealing the strong influence that beliefs, attitudes, and social norms have on recycling/reuse behavior.
Simultaneously, the Industry Research team contacted leaders among targeted industries to determine what recycling/reuse policies are currently implemented. Given the extensive relationships Frost & Sullivan has developed with so many industries, we were able to identify the key decision-makers and approach them for their perspectives and their organizations’ recycling/reuse policies. Our experienced and skilled industry analysts were able to extract the general trend that “industries place stronger emphasis on efficiency and pollution reduction than on recycling.”
These combined methodologies provided extensive research capabilities in which to recommend relevant and actionable strategies. Specifically, we evaluated our separate conclusions to see where consumers and industry leaders seem to connect. In conclusion, it was determined that to increase recycling/reuse among both consumers and industries, there needs to be a cycle of support in which industries support recycling/reuse programs in communities, implement recycle/reuse strategies within their organizations, etc., while consumers need to call for organizations to increase their recycling/reuse efforts, request their support in developing recycling/reuse programs in communities, etc.
These results provided a basis in which the leading automotive company could make decisions regarding the marketing of their environmental strategies, and where they could become innovators of recycling/reuse efforts. Thus, positively increasing their brand image, while also “doing the right thing” for the environment.