Customer arena: Evides brings customers and employees closer together

Evides believes it is important to give clients a voice internally. They do this with their online client panel, where Blauw presents various questions to their clients. But in order to give the client a real face, we recently organized a Client Arena for Evides, where employees themselves talked to clients in order to hear their experiences, needs and expectations.

Challenge

Evides gives their customer a voice in the organization

Evides is a supplier of drinking water to 2.5 million consumers and businesses in the southwest of South Holland, Zeeland and Brabantse Wal. Customers cannot choose their water supplier and therefore deal with Evides as a matter of course. Evides puts the customer first and strives for happy customers, who feel seen and heard. As a result, they know who their customers are and what is important to them.

Vision

Customer arena: engaging with customers yourself

A Customer Arena is a qualitative research method. During a Customer Arena, employees enter into a discussion with customers with the aim of gaining customer insights and finding out what is going on with customers. Our vision is that the Customer Arena has the greatest impact if employees themselves enter into discussions with customers. Under the guidance of Blauw Research, employees draw up their own discussion guide. This guide helps to keep the conversations structured and to think carefully in advance about how to get the most out of a topic.

Solution

What does it provide?

A win-win situation due, on the one hand, to enthusiastic employees who have come closer to the customer and immediately want to work with what they themselves have heard in the dialogue with customers. And on the other hand a number of involved clients who greatly appreciated the fact that Evides organized such a client event in which they were listened to.

Result

5 tips for a successful Customer Arena

‍‍Carean inspiring location; customers find it interesting to visit the company. It is also important that the location is easily accessible to customers.
Consider a warm welcome, something to eat and drink, and a thank you afterwards. Clients take the trouble to give you valuable feedback, so show your gratitude.
A Customer Arena has the most impact when employees engage with customers themselves. Make sure they are well prepared for their role. Prepare the discussion topics and themes in advance and choose a focus area that affects customers in their (daily) lives.
Invite engaged customers. These do not have to be just people who are very dissatisfied or very satisfied. And provide a point of contact if there are customers with a complaint.
Provide proper guidance during the Customer Arena by a market research firm with advance training in setting up an interview guide and interview techniques. And providing tools afterwards for analyzing the results, so that what was said can lead to actual insights that can take the company a step further.

"Beforehand, I found it very exciting to engage with customers. Suppose customers start asking awkward questions? But afterwards I found it very instructive and fun to do! The customer now really gets a face and this helps in my daily activities."