Case Study:

Our Client

Our Client is a major North American print media wholesaler who distributes more than 4,500 magazine and book titles across the continent. With a corporate history dating back 100 years, our Client is one of the founding organizations of print media distribution in North America, delivering the products of major publishers to the largest retail chains in the world.

Our Client’s Need

Our Client Lead is the Vice President in charge of Canadian Sales and Marketing. He was evaluating the impact of recent changes in the organization’s sales, marketing and operations. He needed an independent analysis of client satisfaction to benchmark performance and identify opportunities for improvement. He also wanted to deliver value to his clients by aggregating perspectives on emerging trends across the supply chain. Without this information, our Client was in danger of making decisions that would dramatically erode client satisfaction. At stake were millions of dollars of retail contracts if the company failed to demonstrate understanding of customer needs and how they were delivering enhanced value and services to their customers.

Our Methodology

We provided insight to our Client in the following areas:

• Conducted in-depth interviews with our Client’s senior executives and key personnel to gain an understanding of the key performance variables to be measured.
• Conducted in-depth interviews with key industry participants to measure their level of satisfaction with our Client’s services on various dimensions, and to identify changes that they wished to see in our Client’s service delivery and in the industry as a whole.
• Analyzed the findings from the primary interviews and identified key improvement opportunities in the delivery of services. We also delivered insights into industry trends that provided opportunities for our Client to play a pivotal role in the industry’s structure.

What We Delivered to Our Client

Our ability to obtain critical information allowed our Client to clearly understand:

• How they were performing in the eyes of their customers and suppliers, both in absolute terms and comparatively to their competition.
• Strengths and weaknesses in the operations and communications areas at all points of interaction between our Client and their business partners.
• The recommended actionable and practical improvements and new initiatives to improve their relationships with their clients.
• The necessary basis to develop a market position as a thought leader and expertise centre within the industry.