Blauw

About Blauw Research

 

With over 90 employees and offices in Rotterdam, London and Nürnberg, Blauw Research is a leading European Market Research and consulting company active in a very wide range of business sectors. Blauw was winner of the “Research company of the year” award in the Netherlands in 2009 (and finalist in 2014 and 2015). Its corporate mission is ‘creating positive change’.

 

The Challenge

 

Blauw wanted to integrate customer experience research with the kind of closed-loop feedback approach now popular in many business sectors. The goal was to engage all relevant stakeholders with the Voice of the Customer (VoC): not just the customer- facing departments, but throughout the entire company and right up to the boardroom. This was a natural evolution for Blauw, given its track record in providing expertise in customer experience research to a very diverse range of companies over many years.

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Blauw had worked with several off-the-self solutions, but was disappointed with their limitations. Maarten van den Broek, Research Consultant at Blauw, explains: “Many companies are using these closed-loop feedback systems, but they are not really providing what our customers are looking for – they do not give them the strategic view that will help them in the longer term. We wanted to provide a new and better solution that will help clients get to the next level.”

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A data-driven programme such as the one Blauw envisaged needs sophisticated capabilities to direct relevant information to the right people on a daily basis. More than that, it needs to understand the business, so it can guide managers on what actions to take, based on the latest information.

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For Blauw, part of the answer was to offer much greater freedom in how surveys could be designed, allowing questions to change easily over time to respond to new challenges. Furthermore, outputs had to look good, and convey relevant information clearly and concisely. Maarten had found the information presented in those other systems were often ‘inflexible and not very engaging’ because reports tend to be highly standardised.

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Additionally, from a customer investment perspective, Blauw wanted to break away from the monolithic approach of most off-the-shelf enterprise feedback systems. As Maarten explains: “Our clients want to take a step-by-step approach, and not start with the full-blown project from the beginning because it carries too high a risk. We want to safeguard the success of their new VoC programme by allowing them to start small and roll it out according to the capabilities and the tempo of the organisation, not the other way around.”

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The Solution Provided

 

Blauw had been using Dapresy’s software since 2011 to create dashboards and enterprise reporting systems. It approached Dapresy to custom-build its flexible enterprise feedback system from Dapresy’s modular software platform. Dapresy developed a Blauw-branded system, leveraging the technologies of both its Dapresy software for flexible visual reporting of data, and also its Enfesys™ customer experience management software.

“Dapresy is one of the best software providers in reporting,” says Maarten. “It was soon obvious the best solution was to partner with them, so they could focus on tooling and reporting, and we could focus on implementing and making the whole Voice of the Customer programme a success within the organisation.”
 

Dapresy’s developers worked closely with a small team from Blauw to build a system with all the capabilities they had identified, from flexibility at the survey question stage through to the attractive, responsive dashboard displays Blauw wanted.

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Blauw also wanted to take its closed-loop system a stage further, to close what Maarten calls ‘the strategic loop.’ “So from the system we built, we can also send alerts based on aggregated data, and we have the option to take action and monitor actions based on strategic insights.”

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Regular meetings and weekly goals helped drive a large project forward quickly. “I think Dapresy is really flexible – we had clear ideas of where we wanted to be and Dapresy really did a good job of translating that into something concrete.”

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Maarten summarizes the achievements to date: “We now have several companies working with our VoC programme. We wanted flexibility, and that is working well – each of our clients is profiting from quite different benefits that the system offers. The dashboards are whatever our clients want them to be. Developing something like this can be a long, difficult process, so we are really happy we decided to work with Dapresy as partners, because together our focus is always to get to the solution.”

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Outcomes Achieved 

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• An extensive Blauw-branded closed-loop feedback system for rapid deployment to different enterprises safely delivered.

• Since launch, elements of several fundamentally different closed-loop systems implemented for very diverse clients.

• Highly customized EFM implementations can be delivered entirely through system configuration rather than software customization.

• Software that is quick to implement for different enterprises because it is all provided as a cloud-based solution.

• Every kind of dashboard required so far has been provided using standard capabilities in the new system.

• Clients have been able to implement different modules in a step-by-step way, working at the pace that best suits their organization.