Client needed to understand what customers valued highly to develop an alternate revenue stream

Our client is an engineering company that provides equipment and solutions for the process industry. They are highly regarded among their customers for their pioneering systems which have improved production efficiencies significantly. The general feedback from customers signalled a need for after-market maintenance services. While there were opportunities in the after-market, the client wanted to operate in the high-margin value-driven space vis-à-vis the high-volume, low margin maintenance space.

The key, therefore, was to understand where the real “value” was, so that the client could leverage it for a high-value revenue stream as opposed to a labour-based one.

ValueNotes undertook an intensive Voice of Customer study to answer what customers would really ‘value”

For this, it was critical to understand the key strengths, knowledge and USP of our client’s products, services and technical competencies in order to formulate ways to leverage these. ValueNotes experience and expertise in the engineering domain enabled us to scale this learning curve effortlessly.

ValueNotes designed an effective discussion guide for conducting in-depth qualitative interviews to gain and analyze customer insights on issues faced in the maintenance of systems on a day to day basis; what was mission critical to them; what was causing downtime and outages; what would ensure uptime and availability; etc.

It was vital to understand the “why” of each aspect of the systems usage to arrive at actionable insights. Our primary research and elicitation techniques helped us gain a deep understanding of all the relevant issues. This resulted in incisive analysis and specific actionable recommendations for the client.

The unified “voice” of 120 customers enabled the client to develop a new revenue stream with high RoI

ValueNotes delivered to the client a deep understanding of the maintenance strategies of their customers in six top industry verticals, along with the key challenges faced by them. The VoC study provided insights on the intangibles that their customers valued highly, and how the client could convert these intangibles into cash flows.

Based on the insights from the study, the engineering company was able to design a knowledge-driven service offering, and introduce a new, high-margin after-market offering to existing clients.