Game changing consultative agency helping businesses unleash their true potential: Gongos

Gongos, Inc. is a consultative agency that places customers at the heart of business strategy. Partnering with insights, analytics, marketing, strategy, and customer experience groups, Gongos operationalizes customer centricity by helping companies understand and activate on customer needs. Gongos works alongside B2C and B2B companies in guiding strategy, insights, innovation, and transformation initiatives. From product development, to customer experience, to marketing optimization, Gongos helps organizations enhance customer retention and acquisition. Spanning the entire customer centricity value chain, Gongos’ consultative approach ensures internal adoption and implementation that inspire customer-committed cultures.

Through its mission to reorient the relationship between customer and corporations to create mutual value, Gongos leverages two key pillars. Its patent-pending Value Exchange Model enables companies to gain marketplace advantage by strengthening Customer Performance Indicators. The model identifies explicit opportunities where providing the intrinsic outcomes valued by customers will increase Future Customer Value. Its Customer as a Stakeholder™ service model aims to enhance engagement strategies to ensure a more authentic fusion of the customer into corporate decision making. It’s one thing to understand customers and all their complexities. It’s quite another to transform that understanding into meaningful business outcomes. That’s where Gongos come in. As one of the most important stakeholders in business, customers are often viewed in a myopic way – capturing only snippets of their lives and perspectives. Engage customers as stakeholders through a purposeful engagement framework that connects internal teams to customers in a more authentic way. Shift the relationship from treating customers as takers of a product or service to engaging them as creators of the product or service to foster reciprocity and meaningful growth.

In a world where customers are increasingly considered stakeholders, cultivating a customer-centric culture is of the essence for any organization. Actualizing this aspiration through the elevation of customer experience was core to the 10-year vision of a newly appointed CEO in 2019.A renewed focus on the end customer would be imperative for this global B2B2C company, which had traditionally placed emphasis on viewing operations through the lens of distributors. And achieving this mandate would require the rethinking of tools and technology historically envisioned to serve B2B users. This was of paramount importance due to ongoing development of a newly launched e-commerce platform. Knowing the design of a digital experience that addressed end customers’ needs would depend on a deep understanding of their journey distinct from that of distributors; enterprise marketing and digital teams engaged Gongos in partnership. Together, Gongos created a framework from which its clients could map the customer journey to surface expectations and pain points at every step along the path to purchase. This qualitative research methodology applied UX principles, such as the use of “talk out loud” protocols, to the broader customer e-commerce journey and focused on identifying jobs to be done during the online shopping process.

Ultimately, this qualitative research, conducted in six countries, was integrated with a broader customer-centric perspective from parallel competitive benchmarking research and analytics of existing behavioral e-commerce customer data. These unified findings forged a clear roadmap guiding the future development and refinement of the digital e-commerce platform. Examples of the customer needs identified as part of this roadmap include improved search and navigational functions, a more intuitive cart experience, and simplified customer registration, just to name a few.

Based on this body of work, the digital and marketing teams were able to engage in an immersive learning and ideation experience, informing their development of annual operating plans. Research findings were socialized across the organization and continue to guide overall customer experience strategy, which has included further research into the customer journey. What’s more, the customer shopping experience garnered executive cross-functional alignment for implementation as a 2020 strategic investment and operating priority. All in all, the opportunity to refocus the e-commerce business around B2B and B2C customer needs created a way to further develop digital as a primary channel for customer acquisition and retention, expand business prospects for distributors, and drive sustainability in an increasingly customer-centric culture. Preparing a company for its future and the unseen opportunities to remain scalable requires more than just a glimpse of trend data and annual inflation rate projections. A successful decade-down-the-road strategy continuously pulses based on enormous amounts of perfectly woven input so that it’s not only easy to digest, but is scythe-like in its ability to hack out a clear path.

When the Insights team of an iconic brand sought to create a mosaic of what America will look like in 2020, it required directional findings from socioeconomic strata, population data, and cultural drifts, how the millennial generation will impact the evolving family structure, and more. The development of an interpretive yet cohesive framework would allow for the identification and evaluation of white-space growth opportunities — and implications — for its business. This extensive undertaking solicited collaborative efforts from teams across category management, marketing, research and analytics, as well as external subject matter experts. The depth and breadth of discovery enabled the identification of relevant sources from which to mine, and the course of action for supplementary research to fill in gaps of knowledge. The intensive synthesis and analysis of numerous information sources would address working hypotheses that would either be disproved or lead to the universal application of a roadmap for the future. Painting a picture of 2020 through the lens of this organization gave way to an unrivaled mural of marketplace relevance. The consolidation and curation of disparate inputs led to near-certain projections: what the mainstream mindset would become; how households will be structured; what communities will resemble racially, culturally, and socioeconomically; and how classes will shift and influence buyer behavior.

Camille Nicita, President & CEO of Gongos

“Spanning the entire customer centricity value chain, Gongos’ consultative approach ensures internal adoption and implementation that inspire customer-committed cultures.”