Conrad Customer Circle – It’s All About Customer Needs

An old adage advises businesses to treat their customers like royalty. Naturally, this implies letting them have their say. However, this isn’t always put into practice: only 37 percent of B2B retailers believe it is important to take customer requirements on board when implementing digital business upgrades, as shown by a survey jointly carried out by ECC Köln and Striped Giraffe Innovation and Strategy GmbH as a part of a project called “B2B Commerce – Economic Challenge Vs. Digital Efficiency.” Moreover, four out of ten surveyed wholesalers and manufactures confirm they only use internal data for decision making purposes.

To us, this feels strange. Because here at Conrad, external information related to customer needs is both seen as an asset and constitutes one of the factors driving our success. The world keeps turning and customer requirements keep changing. If you want to stay successful as a B2B company, you need to keep up. This only works if you are listening to what your customers have to say. And our company’s assessment tools take this into account. All processes and features – new and existing ones – of the Conrad Sourcing Platform are subject to scrutiny, over and over again, always starting with the question of “What do our customers want?”

The launch of Conrad Customer Circle constitutes yet another step in this direction. We’ve set up a feedback tool customers can utilise to participate in designing and developing our sourcing platform. Any team at Conrad that intends to assess platform features, both new and existing ones, can get in touch with our people at Customer Circle who will then put them in touch with business customers and come up with customised feedback concepts including surveys and multi-day workshops that give customers an opportunity to road-test new or upgraded features. Naturally, that also means dealing with negative feedback. But this is precisely what makes the Conrad Customer Circle an honest approach that pays off because everyone at the table gains new insights that help move our sourcing platform forward by increasing the platform efficiency for both parties in the process. Goes without saying that we always do our homework, collecting both market information and data derived from our in-house systems. However, we strongly believe that someone who wants to offer top-notch procurement solutions can’t be self-centred and simply respond to the markets. Because let’s face it: as long as the world keeps turning, customer needs will keep changing. And we want to be as well prepared as possible.

If you would like to play an active part in developing the Conrad Sourcing Platform and improving the customer experience, please sign up for our Customer Cycle by sending an email to myvoice@conrad.de

Yours sincerely

Ralf Bühler