Insights Media created its new Customer Listening Programme to help learning vendors identify the value and impact they deliver for customers. The programme drives product and service enhancement, stronger customer relationships, and brand differentiation in the market. It achieves this by helping vendors align with customers toward understanding their individual needs and how they can meet those needs more effectively.

"It's really important to understand how your brand, product, and service generate value for customers," says Martin Couzins, director, Insights Media. "Through our Customer Listening Programme, your customers will tell you how you are driving value and creating impact for them and if there is anything you could do better. It's about really listening to customers, using us as a trusted, independent partner to gain those invaluable insights that can otherwise go unheard."

Corporate learning suppliers report facing a range of marketing challenges, including creating effective go-to-market strategies and effective and engaging marketing collateral, as well as facilitating client engagement and delivery. This is according to the July 2023 edition of the Learning and Performance Institute's L&D Dashboard.

These challenges are compounded by a crowded market, new entrants into the market, and marketing labels such LXP, which have made the buying landscape more complex.

The Customer Listening Programme has been created out of successful Insights Media client projects involving customer listening. One client, Paul Matthews, CEO, People Alchemy, says customer listening not only helped improve brand messaging; it also led to the development of customer case studies.

"We knew that the People Alchemy website didn't really reflect or clearly explain what we do. Consequently, website visitors would leave without contacting us. But as our learning software is very niche, having conversations with L&D people looking for solutions is imperative.

"After working with an agency that just didn't get what we did, we needed help with fixing the messaging and knew that it was critical to work with somebody who understood the L&D industry. So, we worked with Martin Couzins at Insights Media, who has the necessary background and years of experience working with clients in the L&D industry. He gave us valuable feedback on our current messaging and provided fixes for the website. Moreover, he provided very valuable customer insights through interviews with existing clients. These were developed into case studies that we will continue to use."

For another client, Emotion at Work Consulting, customer listening helped identify new commercial opportunities and reinforced the brand's commitment to evolving its offer to meet customer needs.

Phil Willcox, Founder, Emotion at Work Consulting, says, "We got huge value from the client-insight work completed with Insights Media. Commercially, the process identified new opportunities with clients that already knew and trusted us, which was great and more than paid for the work we did. Reputationally, it supported our commitment to improve, learn, and make a difference for our clients, too. Most value to us though was the data, as it allowed us to know for sure what approaches to retain, where to tweak, and when we needed to improve."

The programme uses a simple four-step process that enables clients to quickly agree and design questions and collect feedback from customers.