• overview
• our members
• our people
• research
• models
• climate survey
• directions

Research

• Research History
• Research Reports

The Henley Centre for Customer Management operates on a continuing basis, with each phase of research leading to the next.

Professor Moira Clark has led our highly successful research forum since 2002. As a result, she brings with her a wealth of experience and the results of seven years of research projects into Customer Management practices.

Using the research agenda, agreed with the membership, Henley Centre researchers examine all existing research in the relevant area, delivering to the members a succinct and valuable review of the current state of knowledge in the field. They then go on to examine, often by exemplar case study, the best practice in the subject, pushing knowledge beyond what is published. In this way, members gain access to new thinking, new models and new processes.

From the research projects, we publish a number of research reports and white papers each year. After an initial period of exclusivity to members, the reports become available publicly. If you would like to receive a copy of any of our reports, please indicate which ones using the form at the bottom of this page and we will send them to you.

---

Research History

Research Projects 2010

In 2010, all member suggestions were collected and distilled into workshop themes and research topics. The resulting research projects fell into a number of areas as outlined below. These are in order of popularity (defined by the number of related issues discussed at the first workshop)

• Linking employee engagement to customer experience and profitability
  This research project will build on the existing work we have done in the area of Culture and Climate.  We are currently pursuing a number of opportunities to extend the research into looking for the additional linkages between climate and sales/profitability.  One possible benefit to champions will be to be able to use the methodology for a pilot project in their own organisation.
• Developing a Social Media Strategy
  This research project will take advantage of some survey work currently in process and build a model for developing a social media strategy.
• Implementing Strategic Partnerships
  This research project will build on last year’s outsourcing management research and is intended to develop a toolkit of guidelines etc to assist organisations in implementing arrangements.  Many of the lessons are relevant to other partnership approaches so will have wider implications beyond the pure outsourcing relationship.
• Engaging with female consumers
  This research project will explore differences in the factors that deliver a great customer experience that exist between genders.  We will also develop some best practise case studies.
• Sustainability
  We plan to revisit the research already reported on in the CSR report of 2008 and extend the research where appropriate to address the issues raised in the workshop.

Research Projects 2009

In 2009, our research programme included three major projects:-

• Using social media to enhance competitiveness - Understand how organizations are using online social media tools, such as wikis, twitter, linkedin, blogs, and social networking sites, to enhance competitiveness. This research project aimed to help organisations to understand  the impact of such tools on their business and to explore the commercialisation of such tools to enhance business performance
• CRM for ‘B2G’ organizations - Some members felt that most marketing models, concepts and frameworks are developed with commercial organisations in mind.  However, governmental organisations have very specific needs, processes (e.g., procurement) and gatekeepers that do not strictly fit the existing models.  Consequently, managers working in a ‘B2G’ environment have to try and contextualise such models to their working reality, themselves. This research was instigated to identify and summarise B2G- specific models and to assess how existing models have been adapted to the B2G reality
• Best Practice in Managing Relationships with Outsource Partners - The goal of this research was to deliver an up-to-date literature review and provide case studies of 2-3 best practice organisations looking at how organisations measure value, measure success and provide the ability to flex the contract to both sides advantage

In addition:-

• We continued to develop our research into the online customer experience
• We collaborated with IESE in Madrid, Spain and RIT in Rochester,USA in a project sponsored by Cisco to explore the impact of social media on collaborative innovation - Understand how organizations are using online social media tools, such as wikis, blogs, and social networking sites, to connect with individuals and companies outside of traditional organizational boundaries in order to solve problems and create knowledge faster.

Research Projects 2008

In 2008, our research programme included four research projects falling into three areas:

• Customer Experience and Corporate Social Responsibility - What are the linkages between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and CE? To what degree do CSR initiatives enhance a customer’s overall experience? How might CSR affect CE? If there is a positive relationship between CSR and CE, will customers actually pay more for the firm’s CSR efforts? Amongst the different factors a customer considers, how important are CSR etc issues and are they becoming more important? Are they different by product or type of customer, wealth base? Can we improve customer experience through the use of Co-Creation policies? This project delivered two reports:-
  • Corporate Social Responsibility: Key Issues and Linkages with Customer Experience - This report reviews current literature and presents the case for CSR making a positive conmtribution to customer experience.
  • Co-Creation and the Customer Experience presents a co-creation case study.
• Delivering CE through Intermediaries - How can a company create and maintain a positive customer experience (CE) in the presence of intermediaries / distribution partners? This project delivered a review of the current literature and developed a framework and a set of questions to facilitate suppliers and intermediaries thinking through the various important issues that enable them to create a ‘positive customer experience’.
• Online CE and communities – This project extended the work commenced in 2007 and looks further into what makes a perfect on-line customer experience. The next full report will be delivered in 2009 but an interim report entitled “Web Quality and Research Update” was produced to discuss some of the 2008 findings.

Research Projects 2007

In 2007, our research programme included three major projects:-

• Online Customer Experience - Exploring perceptions of the perfect online customer experience through interviewing business-to-consumer and business-to-business customers about the nature of their perfect online customer experience.
• Beyond Customer service - This project looked at a number of contributory factors for organizations that want to develop their inbound call centre staff to help them to cross-sell, up-sell and retain customers. The report focuses on five areas: business drivers, customer insight process, measures & outcomes, conditions and plans for the future.
• Channel Migration – This project looked at best practice for encouraging customers to change their relationship from being a direct sales contact to using lower cost channels – the call centre or the internet. Interviews were conducted with organisations that have taken this approach in both the B2B and the B2C environment and the output used to develop best practice models. 

Research Projects 2006

In 2006, the research topics fell into three areas:

• Customer Experience - A key research topic for 2006 focused on looking at the customer experience from the customer’s point of view, building on the research started in 2005. The key questions addressed by the research were:-
  • How do B2B and B2C customers perceive the customer experience?
  • What are the key ingredients/constructs for customer experience from a B2B and B2C perspective?
• Customer Insight – The research project focused on the subject of “Turning Insight into Action” and considered the following:-
  • What types of customer insight are companies generating?
  • Which companies are actioning customer insight effectively and particularly at the front line?
  • What organizational and/or environmental context is enabling them to do this?
• Culture and climate - Assessing an organisation’s climate considers the practices, procedures and rewards systems in an organisation, or in other words, “the way we do things around here”. The 2006 research built on prior years results and a number of organisations were assessed. The results were compared to exemplar best practice companies so that areas for improvement were identified and a number of new techniques for analysis of the results were introduced.

Research Projects 2005

In 2005,the research topics fell into four areas:

• The Customer Experience - Managing the customer experience is becoming a major preoccupation for many organisations today. Recent research has shown that customers are becoming increasingly demanding and sophisticated. The increasing levels of marketing literate customers means that companies have to work harder to acquire, retain and develop long-term relationships with them. Of course the question is how can companies do this? The process starts with companies building more effective mechanisms to capture customer feedback and using this information to develop products and services and to understand how customers want to do business.
• Customisation Through Data - Data is increasingly seen by many organisations as their key to competitive advantage. Without the right kind of information about customers, companies are running blind. However, not all data necessarily creates value. The hypothesis is that certain classes of data are better proxies for customer needs and predict behaviour better than other data. If this is indeed the case, then we can better inform the design of Customer Management processes at two levels a) what we collect and analyse and b) what we deliver to the contact point to assist in the customisation process.
• Outsourcing theme - Outsourcing is also becoming a major topic of concern for both companies and customers alike and the decision of whether or not to outsource can have a major impact on a firms competitive standing.

Research Projects 2004

In 2004, the research topics fell into three clear areas within the overall context of ‘Maximising the Value of Customer Management Investment’:

• Culture Change - Organisational culture and climate is increasingly becoming a top boardroom agenda item. Companies are recognising that their staff can really add value to customer relationships and as a result are jealously guarding their cultures and their relationships with their staff.
• Customers - Most managers would agree with the view that customers have become more demanding and sophisticated in recent years. Customers often have quite precise expectations of the products, services and relationships they are seeking and have become bolder in making their requirements known.
• Data - The lifeblood of any organisation is the information it keeps and generates about its customers, and the test of organisational longevity is how it then uses this data to inform the strategy making process. Unfortunately, all too often this data is either not available or is stored in many different locations/channels in the organisation. As a result companies frequently do not have ‘one view of the customer’. Having one view across multiple channels is essential to Customer Management success. It enables companies to look at all the customer touch points and to see how the relationship is developing in total and over time.

Research Projects 2003

In 2003, the focus was on answering member’s questions in the areas of:

• CRM justification. To understand the complex mix of tangible and intangible factors that the most senior executives consider when approving CRM investment.
• CRM organisation. To understand how companies manage the complex cross- functional teams that are often needed for CRM implementation.
• CRM analytics. To develop a more effective approach to CRM analytics by combining statistical analytics with current best practice in market segmentation.

Research Projects 2002

The first task of the forum was to develop a working definition of CRM as follows:-

Customer Relationship Management is the management process that uses individual customer data to enable a tailored and mutually trusting, valuable proposition. In all but the smallest of organisations, CRM is characterised by the IT enabled integration of customer data from multiple sources.

In 2002, the forum completed a highly successful research programme centred on studies of CRM within sponsoring and exemplar organisations to answer the following questions:

• Is CRM valuable to my organisation?
• What form should my CRM process take?
• How should I prepare my organisation for CRM?
• How should I implement CRM?

The end result for members was a list of tools and pragmatic answers for their most pressing questions. Outputs for the first year of the research included:

• The CRM Eco-system. How to know if CRM is right for your company.
• The 5 sub-species of CRM. Which CRM process is appropriate to your company?
• The CRM Space. How to identify and create the pre-requisites of CRM success in your company.
• The CRM Implementation Manual. A systematic approach to auditing, designing and implementing CRM processes for your company.

---

Research Reports

If you would like to receive a copy of any of our reports, please indicate which ones using the check boxes below and complete the contact details that follow. We do make a small charge for some of our reports and will contact you to arrange payment and/or delivery of your chosen reports.

Select the research reports/white papers that you would like to receive.

	Key Influences upon Online Customer Experience The results of this study support a definition of online customer experience that views it as the outcome of an interaction between the customer and an organisation’s website. There are six potential components of an experience which are: sensorial, emotional, cognitive, pragmatic, lifestyle and relational. The relevance and importance of each will vary depending on the purchase context.
	Best Practise in Managing Relationships with Outsource Partners This report seeks to provide insights into best practice in managing outsourcing relationships. The author examines existing academic research and conducts case-based interviews to build a picture of the factors that are critical to the success of managing outsourcing relationships. The extensive literature review explores outsourcing issues in a variety of industry sectors, and with reference to a range of different types of outsourcing. Case studies were developed by interviewing senior managers involved in managing outsourcing relationships on both the outsource supplier and the client side.
	Best Practise in B2G CRM The findings of the study have concentrated on identifying the best practice approaches which are particularly significant in the B2G context. There is a lot of similarity between B2B and B2G relationship building but the method used in the B2G situation may be different due to the mandated procurement processes. The findings have been presented in accordance with the 3 phases of the procurement process: early engagement before formal procurement starts; during the competitive bidding phase; after contract award.
	Commercialisation of Social Media This report explores how social media tools are being commercialised by business. It provides an overview of the relevance of social media to both business to business and business to consumer operations; lists common channels of social media; places development of social media into a historical context outlining future predictions; identifies and answers a range of common problems facing companies looking to commercialise social media; looks at a taxonomy of opportunities for commercialising social media; and presents ongoing research findings.
	Social Media Research - Cisco White Paper To understand how organizations use social networking and web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, and social networking sites, to collaborate outside traditional organizational boundaries, and how process, culture and technology can solve problems and drive business model innovation, three leading business schools, IESE Business School in Spain, Rochester Institute of Technology in the USA, and Henley Business School in the conducted a study between April and September 2009. They interviewed large companies such as 3M, BAE, Bank of America, Daimler, and IBM well as smaller, more nimble organizations across 20 countries, interviewing 97 businesses in total. This report presents the findings of this study.
	Customer focus amongst non customer facing employees - 3M Paper The purpose of this project was to investigate connections between the communication of customer insight data to non-customer-facing employees, and increased customer focus amongst those employees. The findings suggest that the dissemination of customer insights to non-customer-facing employees is an overlooked and under-researched antecedent of market orientation, yet has the potential to be an important component of an organisation’s evolution towards being truly customer focused, and as such is becoming a feature of contemporary management practice.
	Co-Creation and the Customer Experience This is an interim, update report by researchers at the Henley Centre for Customer Management. Drawing from the theoretical base provided by the concept of “service-dominant logic” an in-depth case study is being conducted into a firm that is distinctive for its commercial success and approach to business. This report discusses both the principles of service dominant logic and how this is being tested in practice.
	Web Quality and Research Update Previous research for The Henley Centre for Customer Management found that online experience consisted primarily of thirteen themes and 83 indicators of those themes. This years’ research has explored the web quality literature. A systematic review of the field revealed a range of scales that have been used to measure web quality. One web quality scale has been explored in detail, presented with a methodology for members to implement this in survey format.
	Customer Experience through Intermediaries This study explores the question “How can a company create and maintain an ideal/perfect customer experience (CE) in the presence of intermediaries / distribution partners”? At this stage the results have been validated against a ‘list’ created by the attendees at a Henley Centre for Customer Management Workshop which was looking specifically at maximising value through relationships. The list identified suggestions that would enable an organisation to deliver the perfect Customer Experience through Intermediaries. This was further developed after the literature review to a more comprehensive checklist detailed at the end of this paper.
	CSR and the Customer Experience This paper explores the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and the impact CSR initiatives can have on customer experience and reactions. CSR is an organisation’s obligation to evaluate its social, environmental and economic impact on its stakeholders, and on the surroundings that it affects through its activities. Organisations should aim to have a positive impact on the people and environment they affect, through a clear focus on environmental, social and economic sustainability.
	Exploring Online Customer Experience This project was conducted on behalf of the Henley Centre for Customer Management and explored the perceptions of both B2B and B2C customers with online experience in both Europe and the United States. 132 people were interviewed in depth using a qualitative version of Repertory Grid. Over 100 hours of interview were analysed. The research also adopted a cross industry approach as an aid to generalisability. The analysis identified a number of themes and factors necessary for the optimum B2C and similarly for the optimum B2B experience. The report also contains a checklist of factors members should consider when crafting the optimum experience for their online customers.
	Channel Migration This research looked at organisations that have taken such a channel migration approach in both B2B and B2C environments. In addition to considering the effect of the approach on customers, the project also looked at the internal company impacts that are usually caused by a change in the “go to market” strategy. It considered, for example, the impact on sales people and on customer service representatives.
	Customer Insight in Inbound Service Call Centres This research project builds on the September 2006 Henley report “how companies use customer insight to drive customer acquisition, retention and development” by concentrating on one aspect of the customer insight framework, namely how customer insight is actioned through the customer service function. The purpose of this project therefore was to investigate how companies use customer insight in inbound service call centres to cross-sell, up-sell and retain customers.
	Multichannel Customer Experience This report studies best practice in crafting and profiting from the multichannel customer experience, through in-depth study of major multichannel projects at First Direct, IBM, BT Global Services and General Motors Europe. Findings were also informed by interviews with boutique hotel chain Eton Collection; DVLA; UK Trade and Investment; a high street retailer; and a financial services company.
	Customer Experience and online shopping The findings of the research undertaken in this report are based on an independent assessment of each retailer website in terms of the measures developed in our Online Customer Experience research project. Each of the retailers was given a score for features relating to a positive customer experience; culminating in an overall percentage score for each of the retail companies surveyed.
	Customer Experience Report The researchers spent approximately 34 hours with 40 respondents discussing customer experience in-depth in Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) environments. The research is not limited to a particular industry sector but adopts a cross-industry approach. The team discovered 119 experience factors that are mutually exclusive. These form the basis for the Customer Experience (CE) Model. The results show that CE is context-dependent. The report highlights the key factors that are important in driving customer experience in B2B and B2C markets.
	Organisational Climate Report This report sets out the findings from a research study of a range of different organisations and compares them to the results from previous research conducted with best practice CRM companies who have been past winners of a Unisys/Management Today Service Excellence Award. The study was focused on analysing the organisational climate of these organisations using a previously developed questionnaire .
	Customer Insight Exploration The purpose of this research was to explore how companies use customer insight to drive customer acquisition, retention and development and to propose a theoretical model for generating and actioning customer insight. Using the qualitative methodology of case research, 25 in-depth interviews with five UK-based large companies from multiple industries were undertaken.
	From Data to Dividends For knowledge-based marketers, the critical issue is how knowledge leads to market insight, drives offer development and creates value. Previous research has defined CRM practice as the use of individual customer data to drive value. This previous work has also defined the necessary preconditions for effective CRM and the way successful firms adapt CRM to fit their situation. Like all good research, however, this raised further questions, especially about the detail of how firms use data to create value. This project undertook a comprehensive review of previously published research followed by 13 in-depth interviews with firms who were heavily involved in the data-to-value process.
	Outsourcing Report The objective of this paper is to discuss the role for outsourcing within CRM strategy and identify the issues that organisations need to consider when deciding whether or not this is appropriate. The paper focuses in particular on outsourcing call centre activities as this has emerged as a key topic of interest to CRM Research Forum members.
	CRM Research - Broadsystem Paper To understand how companies are handling customer requests, Broadsystem commissioned our researchers to contact the top 100 UK advertisers (as ranked by Marketing magazine), using their websites as a means of establishing contact details, and rate them based on the experience and against an agreed set of criteria. The purpose of the research was to rate companies from a customer perspective and to identify areas of best CRM practice that organisations can learn from.
	Data Management The research identified a number of issues that organisations are facing in managing their data strategies. Several of the key issues underline the need to ensure that an effective information strategy is developed and implemented as vital first steps in the overall CRM plan. The final section describes the data related goals that organisations are aiming to achieve over the next few years. In many cases, the priorities identified will not be satisfactorily achieved without a structured approach to data management and commitment from across the organisation.
	Understanding the Devil This report describes the work carried out to build on previous research conducted in 2003, when CRM was defined and characterised. It seeks to answer three research questions that arose from the 2003 research, namely: a) What is the most effective way to organise for CRM? b) What is the best way to justify CRM investment? c) How can CRM analytics be improved?
	Supplier Manufacturer Relationship This copy of an article that was developed in 2003 and appeared in the “Journal of Operations Management 24 (2006) 189–209” is included in our archive because it is the earliest illustration of the use of the ‘Repertory Grid Technique’ by our research team for relationship analysis. This approach has since been used extensively in our research into the customer experience in 2006 onward.
	Achieving Excellence in CRM The primary research involved the in-depth, qualitative study of eight exemplar companies in B2B and B2C sectors, in both products and services. This phase revealed that effective CRM operates within a CRM eco-system defined by both market and organisationally based factors. Awareness of this eco-system allows organisations to avoid wasteful investment in CRM when it is not appropriate to their business situation. Secondary research was used to synthesise a generic model of CRM which broadly but accurately describes the management process better than previous models. This model allows practitioners to understand and create the necessary preconditions for successful CRM in any organisation.

First Name: Surname:
email address:

---