Case Study: Lawson Global Support: How to Use Research to Develop Improved Offerings

If research is to serve as a reliable guide for making major changes to offerings, companies need to take a comprehensive approach. They need to consider all the pieces of the business that will be affected by the decision—from customers to operations, strategy, and profitability—and factor them into the research. Companies also need to make sure that they gather the opinions of all the different constituencies that will be affected by the decision. Important stakeholders need proof, through research, as to whether their own experiences, views, and hunches are borne out by the facts before they can support major changes in the ways they do things.

Certainly, Lawson, a maker of enterprise software, could not afford to have doubts when it was considering changing its support and maintenance offerings in 2007. Support and maintenance comprise the largest and most profitable aspect of the enterprise software business—the quiet, steady engine behind new license sales. And as the market for enterprise software became saturated after the dot-com crash, the role of support and maintenance on the balance sheet has become even more important. Any changes that Lawson made promised to have major, long-term impacts on the overall fortunes of the company.

To identify those that would be affected by its decision and make sure that it covered all perspectives, Lawson created a discovery strategy. (Disclosure: ITSMA consulted with Lawson on its research strategy and helped carry out the research.) This strategy included the following steps:

• Develop a base of objective evidence
• Illuminate the data with interviews
• Bring in the influencer perspective
• Gather competitive intelligence
• Test internal perceptions

Let the Customer’s Voice Lead the Change

Lawson’s research approach became the foundation of its campaign to market Lawson’s improved offerings with customers—as exemplified by a letter sent to all customers with the tagline, “You Asked. We Delivered.” The research gave sales and support managers a good excuse to have direct conversations with customers that went above and beyond the changes to the support offerings. Lawson also shared the results of the research and its planned actions through other delivery channels, including newsletters, a landing page on its Website, white papers, and Webinars.

Lawson’s improved support and maintenance offerings were launched in March 2009. By the fall more than 70% of its customers had converted to the new plans. In a survey of customers, 63% said that they were aware that Lawson had changed—and improved—the offerings. Given that not all customers need to contact Lawson support during a given year—much less be aware of changes in the offerings—the survey results confirmed the effectiveness of Lawson’s comprehensive research approach.

To learn more about the specific techniques Lawson used to support a successful change in its business strategy, go here.

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