C-Understanding

Development of Customer Understanding in Strategic Industrial Services

C-Understanding is an on-going project in the Tekes Serve program. The project is coordinated by VTT and carried out jointly by VTT and Turku School of Economics (TSE).

The main goal of the project is to deepen knowledge about developing customerships and customer insight in service business. The project focuses on industrial B2B services that support customers' business processes and that are strategic to customers. The project is divided in two sub-themes:

1. Buying behaviour of customers (conducted by VTT)
2. The role of sales and marketing function in service development (conducted by TSE)

The theme 1 analyzes customers' buying behaviour and factors affecting buying decision when purchasing strategic services. Services have wide-ranging effects on the customer organization, direct benefits as well as costs and other (often unanticipated) negative consequences. These effects are often related to customers' specific business situations and may also have subconcious implications on customers' buying decisions. The focus of this study is on these hard-to-perceive factors affecting customers' buying decision with special emphasis on the factors inhibiting affirmative decision to buy. This knowledge is needed both for service development and for the support of sales and marketing.
We seek answers to the following questions:
• How are the buying decisions of strategic services made?
• What are the major factors affecting buying decisions of strategic services?
The result is a conceptual model describing the key factors affecting service buying decisions and the mechanisms through which these factors influence the decision making process in different situations.

The purpose of theme 2 is to describe and analyse the role and position of marketing and sales in service innovation and service development processes of industrial b2b service companies. By enhancing the service development industrial companies are better able to improve their service concepts to better match customer needs. As a result, companies can profitably improve services.
Here we seek to answer to following questions:
• What is the state-of-art of service development?
• At the company level, how do the different functions contribute to service development?
• What are the different possibilities for company personnel to interact with the customer, and how is the acquired customer information incorporated into service development?
• What factors affect positively/negatively in the service development?
The result is a framework describing the customer-oriented service development process.

The research is conducted as an international comparative study by VTT and TSE in collaboration with nine participating companies and their customers and international research partners. Research consists the following methods:
• Literature review
• Thematic interviews with the participating companies, chosen customers of the participating companies and reference companies abroad
• An international survey to a wider customer base
• An international survey to service providing companies
• Round table discussions between researchers and companies

Schedule is 06/2008 - 11/2009.

Research has received funding from Tekes (Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation).

Heidi Korhonen
Project Manager
+358 20 722 6786
heidi.korhonen@vtt.fi