Keeping posted nimbly with a customer survey

Our mission is to make everyday leadership tasks easier with survey research, data analytics and consulting services for informed decision making. Innolink covers all key regions globally and has delivered more than 6000 surveys in over 100 countries.

As a pioneer of knowledge-driven leadership, we regularly analyse our own activities, our market position and the reactions of our customers in the dynamically changing market field by means of brand, customer, employer, motivation, project monitoring and sales surveys.

Because our customers mean the world to us, and since improving the customer experience is one of the focal points of our strategy, we carried out a customer survey in May to see how happy our customers are with our operations. In addition, we measure the customer experience rate of each project with the help of operational research.

Innolink CEO Pekka Vuorela describes our own journey to the core of customer experience: “Knowledge-driven leadership at Innolink took a major turn in January 2016, when we made the organisation-wide decision to establish Must Win Battles to guide our goal-setting. Customer experience has been one of the four MWBs ever since. It is a force that ties us closely together. Along the years, improving the customer experience has required investments and a transition from a sales-oriented organisation to a customer-centric one. It has been a challenging journey, but I am glad to say that progress has been made.

At present, companies are facing enormous pressure due to the coronavirus, and we wondered if now would even be a good time to carry out a survey and see if the results have deteriorated due to the changes in the economic situation. After some consideration, we decided that since customer experience is at the core of our strategy, this is, in fact, the best time to implement the survey and obtain an insight into our customers’ situation at this very moment.

Measuring the customer experience is a part of our architecture of knowledge-driven leadership, and it helps us monitor development processes which are based on knowledge that is significant for our organisation. We combine Innolink’s financial indicators with measurable experience-based data and constantly compare the results of our customers and employees. I am particularly proud of this year’s customer survey results, in which the service attitude of Innolink’s contact personnel was rated at 4.8 and the level of expertise at 4.6 on a scale of 1–5. This goes to show that our organisational model is indeed becoming more customer-centric.

We ask a lot of ourselves and constantly encourage each other to work toward improving the customer experience. Leadership, strategy, key indicators, culture and operating methods must all be harmonised in this extensive entity. At Innolink, we have in place a reward system for the entire staff, which brings an exciting extra boost to our work and forms an inherent part of our customer experience culture. A nice bonus is added to our personnel fund at Mandatum Life every year, when the target NPS is achieved. This system balances our high targets and demands nicely.

In this ever-changing world, we want to react to our customers’ needs in the most agile and customer-oriented way possible. For example, in this year’s customer survey, we asked how our customers feel about their changed operating methods in the current market situation caused by the coronavirus crisis.”

Read more about our customers’ take on the situation in our performance notice below.