Client Profile & Challenge
Our client is a leading chemical distributor in the United States with international sourcing capabilities. They primarily serve the agricultural and industrial sectors.
Challenge:
Our client’s long-term strategic objective is to become an industry leader in self-serve and e-commerce capabilities. To help them attain this goal, our client has partnered with Messina for several years on improving their ERP system and selecting and implementing CRM and Marketing platforms. This has resulted in more reliable data and increased visibility into day-to-day business operations.
As the next step in this journey, our client is interested in building out self-service capabilities through an online customer portal. Most of our client’s customers conduct business manually, communicating with the sales team only by phone and email throughout the purchase process, from information gathering through service. Our client’s goal for the portal is to first enable informational capabilities, such as product information, order tracking, and basic mass marketing. This will serve as the first step towards full e-commerce capabilities. Before moving forward with a costly portal initiative, we advised our client to solicit customer input with a systematic, data-driven process to determine customer enthusiasm for such a portal, test the competitive landscape, and clearly understand the demand for different portal features to help ensure the ROI would be sufficient to build the business case for the program.
Solution Overview
Our client agreed to engage Messina to conduct a Voice of the Customer (VoC) survey on their behalf. First, we proposed a phased roadmap for the creation and rollout of the portal and an accompanying marketing program. Based on this roadmap, we aligned with our client on their target customer profile as well as the most impactful questions to ask during the VoC interviews. Messina spoke directly with our client’s HVT customers ranging in company size, industry, and digital proficiency. We gauged their anticipated adoption of the portal and verified which features they would find the most valuable. We then consolidated our survey findings and presented key quotes, interviewee demographic breakdown, high-level portal requirements discussed, and stack ranked all potential features mentioned. As a result of the survey findings, we updated our initial roadmap based on the customer interviews, ensuring that prioritized capabilities were high value to both our client and their customers.
Solutions:
“AFTER” BUSINESS VALUE CREATION
Our client was able to gain key strategic insights regarding anticipated portal adoption and portal features that were most valued by their customers, allowing them to prioritize in the development of the portal, and build the go-forward business case with confidence. An indirect benefit of the VoC surveys was a new library of fresh, glowing customer testimonials for our client to use for their own Marketing use.
