The Client:

H+H has over 60 years’ experience in the manufacture and sale of aircrete, with products including the well-known brand “Celcon Blocks”. Today it is Europe’s second-largest aircrete manufacturer. Their customers are primarily contractors, developers and builders’ merchants.

The Project:

H+H have a strong commitment to their customer base and as such seek to conduct regular surveys to gauge and benchmark customer satisfaction. H+H engaged Competitive Advantage’s services to complete these surveys, as well as collate and interpret the information, which on completion Competitive Advantage presented in a report format personally to the management team.

The Objective:

In commissioning the research H+H sought to: determine current customers’ opinions of H+H’s products and service benchmark performance against other industry suppliers note the affect of the past 18 months on opinions of H+H meet quality control obligations gain customer opinions on the downturn and recovery Identify key issues for customers Identify competitor strengths and weaknesses Identify opportunities for improvement to the H+H offering

The Methodology:

In conjunction with H+H, Competitive Advantage developed a questionnaire which covered the issues and also ensured a good standard of response.

Competitive Advantage’s expert in-house research team then completed over 300 telephone interviews with Builders’ Merchants as well as Housebuilder Buyers and Site Managers.

Competitive Advantage then collated the information and, using their commercial experience analysed and interpreted it and identified key issues of importance.

In addition to the completion of a written report the findings were also presented by Competitive Advantage to the H+H management team, so providing an opportunity for them to consider and discuss the implications. Doing this ensures that the information is acted upon, and does not just sit on the bookshelf!

The Benefits:

A feature of the Competitive Advantage report is the use of multi-attribute attitude mapping. The report for H+H presented key information about the priorities for customers and performance of H+H and its competitors as a single chart, providing an easy to understand summary of the situation.

By including benchmarking H+H’s performance was presented within the context of the industry’s overall performance.

With regular surveys being conducted H+H are able to make informed decisions when developing their business plan and fine tuning their customer service delivery.

As a result of regular surveys H+H:

• understand the key issues that are of relevance to their customers
• know how they compare to their competitors
• are empowered to react to customers’ needs
• can gauge market influences
• are able to track their performance