Customer Closeness Programme

The purpose the Client’s Customer Closeness Programme is to undertake ‘closeness’ activities to better understand the lives of its customers. The Client requires the assistance of a specialist Provider to support its recruitment of sample customers for research purposes and provide wider expertise. The Customer Closeness Programme provides the opportunity for the Client’s staff to meet customers. The present contract has proved to be a highly successful programme across the Client’s organisation; it has gained traction with senior managers as a useful tool to engage staff and enable greater empathy with the Client’s customers. Customer Closeness has many names and is often referred to as Customer Immersion. Within the Client’s organisation the term used is Customer Closeness as it best represents the concept. For the Client, Customer Closeness entails: a) Customers and the Client’s staff having informal discussions. This enables staff to understand their point of view and see things through their eyes so the Client can make better decisions. Closeness activities take place as an informal way of learning and understanding real issues that the Client’s customers face; b) A way of helping everyone in the Client’s organisation become more customer focused, from those who have no direct customer contact through to those who deal with customers on a daily basis; c) An informal way of understanding real customer issues, Customer Closeness is not statistically robust and should not be used as a replacement for research. It can offer very valuable insights and highlight some key issues from the customer’s viewpoint, but cannot be used as the sole basis of business decisions. d) A vast range of activities that essentially bring customers and the Client’s staff together to consider and delve into our customer’s issues as outlined in Appendix A ‘Customer Closeness Programme’. The Provider is needed to provide: • customer recruitment services i.e. bringing customers in to the Department to engage with our staff; • immersion skills & knowledge transfer.