RESEARCH
DCC Surveys
The Deep Customer Connections' survey is an industry standard. In the past seven years, 37,232 independent agents and brokers have participated, providing 163,721 ratings of carriers across North America. That quantitative database is complemented by more than a thousand pages of agents' written comments, which flesh out and add great clarity and detail and meaning. These surveys provide the information for Deep Customer Connections' annual industry benchmark report.
What You Can Expect
Regardless of the complexity of the engagement, our first step is to clarify your goals. We know the industry well enough to understand broadly what you may want to accomplish. But we've also been around long enough to know that you and your situation are a little different from that of other carriers. So we work hard to be sure that we are all very clear about what you're trying to accomplish.
In step two, we work equally hard at specifying our deliverables – what we'll do for you to help you realize those goals.
Third, we create the research methodology and content, working with you in an iterative process to ensure the design will achieve desired results.
Then we conduct the research and complete our analysis. Depending on the project's goals and your situation, some of your people will be right in there working with us on some or all of the details.
How the research results and recommendations are delivered also depends on your situation and needs. Typically Deep Customer Connections uses a high-impact, three-stage process; in stage one, we review and discuss the research results with you, focusing on the main messages and our recommendations, combined with free-flowing discussion. Often this is done via a 1- to 2-hour web conference. In stage two we provide documentation of the survey results for your study and review. About a week later, we meet with you for stage three, which includes a facilitated discussion of your review based on your further study of the data, leading to a list of major messages. These are then transposed into “opportunities” and are set in order of priority. Finally, working together we develop ideas for how to capitalize on those high priority opportunities and begin the planning process to implement high-leverage solutions.
Our Successes
- One client learned that their improvement plans had the wrong priorities; they changed their improvement priorities to two areas of operations where agents emphasized greater need for improvement and shifted some resources away from an area where agents rated them more favorably than expected. Over a three-year period, ratings improved significantly with client earning “top ten” national ranking.
- Many clients feed Deep Customer Connections survey results directly into their strategic planning process. It is hard to calculate the value of a more well-informed strategic plan.
- Typically every client makes a host of operational changes and changes in near-term priorities based on research input so that they are making the right changes.
