Client: Schindler Group is the largest supplier of escalators and the second largest manufacturer of elevators worldwide. It has around 40,000 employees and its operations span all five continents. Schindler designs, installs, services and modernizes transport systems for almost every building type worldwide. Globally, Schindler equipment moves more than 900 million people per day.

Case: Schindler had established a successful sales network in China. Nevertheless, over the years, the company had observed a declining customer retention rate. More and more customers of existing installations had been choosing other maintenance services over the one offered by the manufacturer – our client. Thus, the management came to Labbrand to obtain an in-depth understanding of the situation and evaluate their current business model so that a reactive strategy could be formulated and implemented in time.

Solution: A 3-phase project consisting of market survey, strategic analysis, and implementation was conducted in close collaboration with the client. Labbrand used quantitative market research to collect data on needs and perceptions of the company’s existing and lost customers. Qualitative research methods including interviews and focus groups were used at first to identify the key issues to investigate with both internal and external stakeholders. We then used sophisticated survey design technique in order to filter and facilitate the identification of decision makers as well as influencers. We performed advanced statistical analysis methods such as cluster analysis to identify different customer segments. Two types of segmentation analysis, reactive segmentation and proactive segmentation were used and led to the identification of useful sets of clusters. We further refined the results by using NPS, Net Promoter Score, to accurately measure the loyalty of each customer segment. 

Result: The national survey achieved a high telephone interview success rate – about 25% in both current and lost customers. We obtained a substantial sample size of over 300 current customers, representative of the geographical distribution in different cities. Distinct customer segments are defined in detail. The actionable insights generated directly facilitated the evaluation of pricing, one of the key issues under investigation and the formulation of new value propositions targeting different types of customer segments in line with the company’s objective of customer relationship management.