Helping the South East Business & Innovation Centre (BIC) Determine How Best To Serve Their Clients

Introduction

South East BIC, a public private partnership, supports the generation and development of new, innovative enterprises while also assisting existing SMEs in Ireland’s South East to innovate and expand.  They provide high quality business consultancy with a particular focus on helping their clients with project evaluation and development, business modelling, planning and sourcing finance.

The Challenge

The South East BIC interacts regularly with its clients – and thereby had gathered a respectable amount of anecdotal evidence on how it was viewed by those clients.  But the BIC had come to increasingly realise that it needed to know more:

  • The BIC had depended on the aforementioned anecdotal evidence and needed to know more detail on their clients’ opinions and how they could service their needs better.
  • The BIC didn’t have access to full profiles of their clients – how they were doing, their size, etc.
  • The BIC did not have a clear picture of how aware/unaware clients were of the range of services offered by them.

The Solution

South East BIC decided to close these information gaps and therefore commissioned SurveyGuru to get it the required answers.

SurveyGuru devised a survey that was deliberately non-anonymous.  Non-anonymity was chosen because the modest number of clients meant that the BIC would be able to be accountable to particular clients for what the survey would reveal.  Also, given the survey’s non-anonymity, it was important that SurveyGuru frame the research for the BIC’s clients to emphasise the importance of them being open, frank and direct.

A combination of an online survey and telephone calls was used to reach the target clients.  The respondents were first given an opportunity to take the survey online and then, if they chose or preferred not to answer online, they were interviewed by phone.  This approach was both effective and responsive – each of the clients being able to engage in the manner that best suited them.

A very high response rate of 85% was achieved.

The result was that the clients did speak very freely – exactly what the BIC wanted to see happen.  This allowed SurveyGuru’s detailed report to include a series of very specific recommendations.

The Benefits

South East BIC received a data-driven, up to date and representative view of how its clients viewed its performance and what those clients were looking for.

In particular, the frank feedback received from non-anonymous clients provided the BIC with a number of very specific actions that the clients wanted to see implemented.  The non-anonymity has also allowed the BIC, where appropriate, to liaise directly with particular clients.

The results showed a variance across the BIC’s various services in how it was viewed by its clients.  Correspondingly, this variance gave the BIC a very clear picture of where it most needed to make improvements – where its efforts could be best directed.

The results have also allowed BIC to make particular clients aware of services that are available – services that could be of benefit to those clients particularly in light of the BIC’s new-found knowledge of how those clients’ businesses are doing.

At South East BIC, we wanted to get a clear view of our clients, what their needs and expectations are, what their understanding is around our service offering and most importantly, use this information to make improvements to what we offer and how we offer it. We enlisted the services of SurveyGuru as we wanted an independent professional approach to this research with clear recommendations and observations from the data gathered.

We would highly recommend SurveyGuru for any type of client satisfaction research. The insight and support offered by Brendan and his team during the development of the research, and the professionalism we experienced in the execution and delivery was of exceptionally high quality. The resulting report and feedback, along with the recommendations offered, have provided South East BIC with key terms of reference in the development of our future client engagement strategy.Aidan Shine, CEO, South East BIC