Advantages for corporations

The main root of business risk in partnership relations is projecting one's own business maturity level onto the partners. In B2B relations and capital goods the real user (beneficiary) is very often far from the  decision maker. The amount of the beneficiaries’ knowledge passed on to the decision maker depends on the quality of information flow within the company, which is closely related to the corporate maturity (the flow is only a symptom of deep strategic integration of the company).

  • If the information flows without obstacles the two roles are very close, and we have a situation similar to that of consumer goods, where the decisions maker and the beneficiary are the same person.
  • Larger and hierarchical organizations with top-down information flow the beneficiary may not have any opportunity to pass on the information concerning quality drivers, complaint  handling, etc.  The decision makers expectations do not reach the decision makers. 

The product we offer is a specific business literacy audit of selected set of business partners. The data are used to create detailed customers’ profiles which together with their interpretations present how the real B2B prosess and it’s future perspectives may look like.

As the theory basis of the survey the new NCSB (new Norwegian Customer Satisfaction Barometer)  Model of Customer satisfaction is used. This model is based on critical analyses of the several most popular models and was tested in Norway. We proposed the new NCSB modified for the purposes of the capital goods and specificity of the Eastern and Central Europe companies.
    In the rational model supplier’s perceptions and satisfaction are taken for granted. However if we speak of a company on the global market, the supplier factors and characteristics may be as important and play crucial role for the satisfaction as those of the customer. This is why looking from the cross-cultural perspective and having in mind the global character of many companies we have added the supplier as a stakeholder which now is included in our analysis. Studies of Hays and Hill (2000) show that employees are important group to be considered in  perceived service quality. The idea of employee-customer  influence lies behind the fundamentals of TQM and can be measured (e.c. with the special questionaire) as the level of maturity. In the proposed model there is also the division of customer role between beneficiary and decision maker. In the case of consumer goods usually customer is both the beneficiary and the decision maker responsible for the loyalty behaviour.  The decision makers seldom use the capital goods themselves. When a new corporate information system is installed or new production equipment bought, it is seldom the decision makers who on one hand can appreciate the quality drivers and on the other hand who experience complaint handling.  The decision makers know all of it from the beneficiaries, while they are directly influenced by price.