Background to Survey
Background to SurveyAer Lingus Cargo (ALC) has over 100 freight forwarding customers with approximately 10 providing in excess of 60% of the €40m revenue. Whilst there was a general understanding of why customers currently use Aer Lingus Cargo, they wished to obtain deeper insights into the drivers for customers using their services now and ultimately use more of their services into the future.
ALC also wished to get a better understanding of their Customer’s Perceptions of the ALC Experience in order to:
- Improve Performance at each Customer Touch Point
- Enhance Marketing Messages
- Grow Revenues and Profits as ALC Focus on 2011 as the “Year of the Customer”
Methodology
With over 860 Contacts from 100 customers, of which 10 provide the lion’s share of profit, it was agreed that 3R would take a multi-tier approach to gain both quantitative and qualitative insights.
After conducting a workshop with the key stake holders in Aer Lingus, 3R, in conjunction with the management team, created an online survey which, after extensive internal testing, was sent to the bulk of ALC’s customers to obtain key quantitative data. The second phase involved a series of phone and face-to-face interviews with key contacts to gather crucial qualitative data.
From this, a comprehensive report and a set of recommendations based on the customer insights was compiled and presented to senior management. The results were further presented to staff and a series of workshops was arranged to facilitate an action plan to institute the recommendations.
Results
“As a result of the highly professional piece of work 3R delivered, we received customer insights that we could never have discovered for ourselves, had we just asked them,” said Peter O’Neill, Director of Cargo, Aer Lingus. “Some of the actions that came up from this survey will certainly help position Aer Lingus Cargo very well with all of our customers for the next 5 years. We intend to do this survey now each year, as both our customers and our staff thought it was a great initiative,” he added.
About 3R Sales & Marketing
3R Sales and Marketing is an Irish business development consultancy founded in Ireland in 2004, providing clients with proven sales, marketing and business strategies that are strongly based on business growth. Key services provided are sales and customer service training, marketing services (online and offline) and business English courses for non-native English speakers.
The company has a wealth of experience in conducting business research and gleaning customer insights that have positively impacted the bottom line of organisations such as Bank of Ireland, IBM, Zurich, the MBA association and Hertz to name but a few.