An Interview with Davies Hickman

Please introduce yourself and your role 

Hello, I am Jo, a Director at Davies Hickman. We are an independent market research consultancy with expert knowledge in customer experience management and innovation. Our research and consultancy services provide CX strategy services to a range of B2B and B2C brands. At Davies Hickman we analyse opportunities for improvements in the customer journey. Using our online consumer, business and expert panels we create primary and exclusive research to drive successful transformation programmes. Our VEVE framework, recently introduced to drive customer engagement, highlights a four stage process to transform organisations’ customer loyalty.

What were the main reasons for sharing your story at our conference?

A Financial Times article in April 2024 considered the decline of customer satisfaction, particularly with large organisations, across a range of sectors. According to the FT journalist customer service has become “a living nightmare” and suggested it could be improved if customers are offered the opportunity “to speak to a real person”. This FT article and the pending 2024 Customer Engagement Transformation Conference prompted us to complete primary research in collaboration with Engage Customer. Our research with 1,027 UK consumers in May 2024 explored the building blocks of customer engagement from a consumer’s perspective.

What are the biggest takeaways that our community can learn from your story?

The most important takeaways are that customer engagement is an organisation-wide issue and leaders need to figure out how to build the right relationships with prospects and customers to deliver their defined outcome of change. To help organisations facilitate and tailor customer engagement, Davies Hickman introduced the VEVE framework that emphasizes what conversations need to take place within organisations to build long-term customer relationships and loyalty. The first stage of the VEVE framework is creating the value proposition to engage customers.

Are there any projects that you’re currently working on that you’re excited about?

We are working with a large global telecoms firm to identify ways to improve customer experience by building scenarios for the future of customer engagement. This project has involved talking to leaders in the CX world, consumers and businesses and uses future focused techniques. Our client is deriving great insight into the drivers of change in CX and is understanding how they should respond. This type of project is all about being ready for change and not being caught out of step with industry trends.

Looking to the future, what would you say are the key trends shaping the industry?

Our presentation explored consumers’ expectations of customer engagement in the future. In this research we showed respondents three possible scenarios for the future of customer engagement and asked them which of the three options would be most likely. The results showed 44% of consumers agreed customer engagement would become more powerful as organisations increasingly recognise the importance of customer engagement. An additional 18% agreed AI paradise will occur when advancements in AI technology precipitate a leap in the quality of customer engagement. This tells us that 62% share a positive view of the future, leaving only 37% predicting customer engagement will get worse, thinking that technology may be deployed unwisely with customers feeling less engaged with large organisations. In summary, most consumers think that customer engagement will have a positive influence shaping the industry in the future.