“Gofore thrives on its customers’ successes” has been one of our core values since the founding of the company. We therefore constantly strive to develop the prerequisites for the success of our customers and maintain long-lasting partnerships. In our most recent customer survey, we looked for things that our customers consider valuable aspects of partnership and co-operation.
1: The keywords of co-operation are openness, expertise, and teamwork skills
According to our customer satisfaction survey, the most valuable elements of cooperation and partnership are open communication and the fact that our customers feel that Goforeans are their team members rather than a service provider. Strong expertise and open communication increase trust, which is the most important basis of a functioning partnership.
One of the goals of the survey was to find out how we can support the development and knowledge growth of our customers as part of the daily work. Our customers are particularly inspired by modern operating methods but also value everyday interactions and sparring. Our experts’ skills to challenge and the ability to bring new information were considered valuable.
Our customers’ goals are our goals, which is reflected in the praised self management. However, our experts were especially warmed by the survey feedback, according to which we are a pleasant group of people to work with. It’s not surprising but really great, that the same things that we have consciously nurtured in our culture were named as the strengths of the collaboration.
2: Versatility enables comprehensive digital development
Versatility was highlighted as another important finding. The digital future must be built with an interdisciplinary view, not just one theme or competence at a time. Through company acquisitions, we are able to offer an ever-wider range of expertise both in Finland and in Europe. Thanks to our Customer Team model, experts from different backgrounds work as a team towards a common goal created with the customer. (Read how Finland’s leading communication and digital service provider Elisa has benefited from the model.)
Our rapid growth also causes concern for our customers – how do we manage to maintain our culture and service level when the number of Goforeans grow by hundreds every year. It’s undeniable that Gofore is no longer the same company it was a few years ago. However, when building something new, we respect the lessons learned over the past 20 years and value our culture, which is developing along with the new Goforians.
3: In change, the importance of dialogue is emphasized
The needs of our customers do not remain unchanged, but also the life situations and career goals of our experts also develop. This means that sometimes changes in team compositions are unavoidable. With the help of the survey, we wanted to understand the change situations and their effects even better. What makes a change successful and which pitfalls are important to identify?
Unexpected changes are the worst ones. Our customers emphasized the importance of openness and anticipation in their answers when talking about change. When you know how to prepare for a change of expert in a team, for example, the data transfer and resourcing can be handled smoothly. Anticipating changes is not easy, but in order to ensure psychological safety, it is important to maintain an open dialogue with both our experts and our customers. For example, we can try to identify typical career paths and support them in such a way that the interests of both our experts and our customers meet. In the best case, these development paths can be advanced within the same customer team.
One of the models preferred by our long-term customers is that we map together the job opportunities opening up at the customer, to which credit consultants looking for new challenges can be directed. On the other hand, in some of our projects, we have softened the changes by changing the cooperation model from a person-related one to a service based model, which reduces the risks associated with the project’s personnel changes.
We are once again extremely grateful to our customers who participated in the customer satisfaction survey and are especially happy about the open discussion and bold views. Let’s build a great year of 2023 together!
The source of this blog post is the customer satisfaction survey, which we carried out in October-November 2022 and which was answered by 195 respondents. In addition, the results of customer interviews and the findings of the spring 2022 (April-May) customer satisfaction survey (110 respondents) have been used as sources.
