Case Studies

From our Financial Services research team:

• Delivering a proprietary panel for a leading bank retailer
• Market place evaluation study for a leading price comparison site
• Building a global brand for a premier financial services firm
• Syndicated customer satisfaction monitoring in general insurance market
• New product for major credit card provider
• Understanding usage, perceptions and expectations from corporate internet banking
• Bringing to life an internal segmentation for a financial provider

Delivering a Proprietary Panel for a Leading Bank Retailer

The Co-operative Financial Services

Business Issue

• Meeting the needs of multiple stakeholders through ad hoc research can be costly, resource hungry and time sensitive. The client side research department wanted to develop a research tool that would help them to deliver to stakeholder requirements in an efficient and economic manner.

Solution

• Our panel operations team built a customer panel of over 2000 active members segmented by customer type, and taking account of the best method of contact for different groups – online and postal. The omnibus style survey enabled the client to cover up to six topics per wave of research.

Action

• The client has used the panel as a sounding board covering a broad range of topics including gauging customer response to new products and communications, as well as external industry issues.

In the words of the client the panel “has allowed us to collect information on a range of attitudinal and behavioural issues that wouldn’t have justified an ad hoc approach and would not have been included in research programmes”.

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Creation of a Market Place Evaluation Study
To Guide a Leading Price Comparison Site

Assuring customer satisfaction, loyalty and profitability is a key objective for organisations everywhere. We are dedicated to helping our clients address this issue - offering actionable research that provides insights into the key drivers of commitment and loyalty, which in turn can stimulate growth and enhance business performance. Here are some of the areas we have covered:

• Claimants
• Sales
• Service
• Complaints

Business Issue

• The business sought a firm understanding of market place dynamics, along with measures of performance for itself and amongst leading competitors.

Solution

• A preliminary round of ‘PC clinic’ focus groups provided a complete breakdown of the price comparison process from the user’s perspective as well as an understanding of consumer attitudes and motivations.
• Using our Harris Poll Online^SM Panel, the quantitative stage was designed to give a holistic picture of the marketplace providing market and brand drivers as well as a detailed overview of the entire price comparison process.

Action

• Results enabled our client to establish a corporate scorecard which assessed the performance of each area of the business. Identified improvement areas, breaking down each stage of the process to help increase customer loyalty and attrition as well as feeding into future communications development and targeting.

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Building a Global Brand From the Bottom Up

A leading global financial services firm

At Harris Interactive we understand that a brand is more than simply products and services. The ultimate aim of a brand and the communication surrounding it has to be to change behaviour and engender loyalty and commitment towards it. This is achieved via a combination of emotional and rational factors and it is essential to establish the relationship between the two.

Business Issue

• How does a firm that has acquired more than 70 different financial brand names around the world create an entity that will be consistent, recognised and relevant to its audiences, wherever they are in the world?

Solution

• A programme of global research was designed to fully understand target motivations and provide content for the construction of the brand and probe the feasibility of a single global brand.

Action

• The firm’s advertising campaign was launched and increased awareness of and interest in the brand was achieved with a single brand strategy amongst its target audience.

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Ongoing Customer Satisfaction Monitoring in General Insurance Market

Harris Interactive conducts numerous syndicated programmes in the following areas:

• Household insurance claims
• Broker satisfaction
• Motor insurance claims

Background

• In these challenging economic times, when budgets are stretched even further syndicated programmes provider an extremely cost efficient way of generating actionable insight.
• Harris Interactive has been involved with a syndicate of insurance companies for over 10 years and currently manages two large-scale studies (home and motor) monitoring satisfaction among people making a claim on their policy.

Business Issue

• The objective of both studies is to help individual companies improve key areas of the home and motor claims service, as well as gauge relative performance in the marketplace.

Solution

• Interviews are conducted on a continuous basis with periodic qualitative ‘refreshers’ to ensure the survey remains relevant and focussed on the issues customers deem important.

Action

The studies have enabled our clients to:

• Focus on key areas of the claims process that improve the customer experience
• Understand what differentiates the best from the worst performers
• Monitor performance in relation to the marketplace, identifying key strengths that can be leveraged as well as weaknesses that are a priority for improvement
• As well as providing an ideal networking opportunity.
  

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Developing and Validating a New Credit Card Proposition

When looking to introduce a new product or service a financial company needs to understand what its target audience require and what specific features are triggers for purchase. This type of research can provide vital insight in selecting features, name, price and communications and gives a high degree of direction in designing and/or refining a successful proposition. Using several techniques Harris Interactive designs projects to facilitate financial clients in creating or refining products to enhance market share and/or profitability.

Business Issue

• A major credit card provider wanted to understand the impact of different product features, benefits and branding upon the credit card market.

Solution

• Discrete Choice places respondents in a real purchase situation, presenting respondents with a more realistic and natural purchase decision task, which includes current competitive products. Respondents are then asked which product (if any) they would purchase.

Action

• The output showed the optimum product offering and demonstrated the potential market share that could be obtained. In addition, it demonstrated the impact on share of each single, independent, change to any product feature or brand.
• Using the resulting ‘What If’ Simulator, the client was able to clearly identify the impact upon penetration of different features, benefits and enhancements.

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Understanding Usage, Perceptions and Expectations from Corporate Internet Banking

Understanding trends in usage and awareness can inform strategies including attracting new customers, increasing website traffic, areas for improvement and new product development. Here are some of the areas we have covered:

• Term assurance
• Payment protection
• Financial advice
• Mortgages
• Ethical investments
• Credit cards
• Price comparison websites

Business Issue

• Our client wanted to develop and grow their current online banking proposition by increasing the frequency of usage amongst current online customers, non online users and non customers.

Solution

• We recommended a programme of qualitative research (focus groups and follow-up depth interviews) amongst customers and non-customers across different sized organisations aiming to:
• Understand the motivating factors as well as any potential barriers
• Understand how internet banking is currently used within organisations and how our client’s online proposition was perceived
• Identify potential new products/services and what actions the client would need to take to develop these.

Action

• The research highlighted areas for improvement and key elements to introduce across the corporate internet banking process as well as in relation to new products and services.

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Bringing to Life an Internal Segmentation

Different profiles of consumers have different product needs and proliferated feature requirements within each part of the financial sector. Harris Interactive's extensive work in the financial sector gives it a full appreciation of the need to identify both the similarities and differences in the financial needs of profiles of consumers. This type of research can be pivotal in financial providers targeting the right people in the right way to ensure that marketing and sales activity is as efficient and as profitable as possible.

Business Issue

• A financial provider carried out some internal analysis which resulted in six segments being of value to them. However, they needed to better understand their customers current financial behaviour and future financial needs.

Solution

• We designed a quantitative programme to establish current financial product holding, what customers deemed to be important when selecting a provider, any future requirements and how their current providers perform as well as understanding the best way to communicate to them.

Action

• The research clearly identified the requirements of each segment and therefore helped the client to understand the potential opportunities and how best to take advantage of them. And perhaps most importantly from a communications viewpoint, the best way to engage with each segment.
• Segmentations can be approached in two ways, either like this where clients establish their own segments which are then brought to life through survey data or through using Harris Interactive’s predictive segmentation techniques which blends survey data with internal customer data. This segmentation can then be applied to all customers within your database allowing clients to target the most profitable customer for your products.

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