New Product Development

THE CLIENT: A specialist information, data and analytics company that enables smart decision-making for business. One of their key business units was a market leader in global trade fairs, exhibitions and events.

THE REQUIREMENT: One of their flagship trade fairs had encountered a drop off in customer satisfaction. The trade fair in question was the key show for its industry and spanned three key markets (Europe, N.America and APAC). We were asked to analyse the reasons for this. We were also tasked with suggesting ways that digital technology could be used to enhance the customer experience. 

THE APPROACH: We put in place a structured plan to address this. First of all we set out to understand the issue. To do this we conducted over 40 one-to-one interviews with company employees, partners, suppliers and over 20 customers. This sort of deep-dive analysis very rapidly helps establish both what the prevalent issues are and their level of impact.

With the customer, supplier and team feedback in place we shared our analysis with the client and proposed an ongoing plan of action to address this. The plan included:

• sharing the customer feedback with all key stakeholders
• mapping the existing customer journey
• setting out the desired customer experience
• proposing changes to the technology stack, the existing processes and communication with customers

With sign off for our plan, we put together a joint team (our consultants, our chosen technology partners and key members from the client team) and embarked on the implementation of the project.

THE RESULTS: The outcomes were that we were able to present a new platform to the exhibitors at the very next event. This met the needs they had articulated in their conversations with us and addressed a number of the process failures that they had complained of.

The platform was eventually rolled out to all our client’s customers and achieved over 90% adoption rate amongst exhibitors at the events.