Change Story

Rebuilding customer trust in Key Accounts

Healing and rebuilding key stakeholder relationships through bespoke in-person experiences.

The challenge

One of the world's largest market intelligence providers had experienced a profound impact from the COVID-19 pandemic. Demand for events dropped to zero overnight, leading to significant staff reductions, a loss of expertise, and much reduced connectivity to key accounts.

Post-pandemic, demand for events started to pick up and our customer needed to address the challenge in their key account relationships. They sought help from Veriteer to design and execute this process - with a focus on changing the narrative from a total focus on problems, towards a more collaborative focus on solutions.

The approach

To facilitate a shift towards solution-oriented thinking, we designed a series of face-to-face workshops, with representatives from Key Accounts and a strong team from our customer. The workshops aimed to reset relationships, validate assumptions, identify new challenges, and drive meaningful, solution-oriented discussions.

The preparation for these workshops required:

Remote interviews: Employees participated in a series of interviews to create a full picture of the relationships with key accounts and learn more about the context of the situation.
Customer journey mapping: We audited existing customer journeys, hosted validation sessions with the client team, and created assumption-based journeys.
Discovery report: All the research was compiled into one document for easy access and distribution within the client’s organisation.
In-person workshops: Two days of workshops facilitated by Veriteer, spending the first day prepping with our customer whilst the key account representatives joined for an action-packed second day.

The results

The workshops were strategically designed to gain insights into the key accounts' experiences with the client's systems. Through engaging in co-creation activities, journey mapping, and guided discussions, productive and solution-oriented conversations were fostered between the client and their key accounts.

The main output of the workshops was an actionable roadmap, where the expectations of the key accounts were blended with the client's cross-functional project roadmap, allowing for urgent priorities to be aligned on both sides.

By the conclusion of the workshops, the main factor that had shifted was that the key accounts were sceptical and cynical about the client's efforts to improve their situation and make their relationship better. However, after the workshop, the attitude had dramatically changed and the hopes for improvements were restored. The client also received an action plan for the future to keep their team constantly delivering upon the promises that were made in these workshops.

With these workshops, all participants were soon in alignment and prepared to take the next steps in collaboration towards stellar customer experience improvements.

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