About Us

CIR is a full service, national market research firm founded in 1996 and specializes in custom primary and customer satisfaction research.  While many market research firms conduct customer satisfaction studies as they have become standard for many clients, few have the depth of understanding of customer satisfaction from both theoretical and applied approaches as CIR.

The two principals of the firm, Dr. Robert S. Rutter and M. William Leary, have over 50 combined years of solid experience in customer satisfaction data collection and analysis.  Bob was the lead researcher for AT&T Universal Card Services during its launch and growth period, which culminated in winning the Baldrige Award.  He had direct responsibility for the design and execution of the customer satisfaction research that contributed very heavily to the Baldrige win. Indeed, senior executives of the firm praised his efforts by acknowledging that his work in the customer satisfaction area was critical to the success of the effort.

Mr. Leary has direct experience managing the customer satisfaction area in diverse industries such as big box retailing, telecommunications, finance and health care.  He is also a pioneer in theoretical research in customer satisfaction and has developed the Financial Metrics/Satisfaction Model which links internal financials of an organization to customer satisfaction results.  This model, proprietary to CIR, reveals the correlation between movements in customer satisfaction scores directly to financial results on an individual client basis.  This model has been successfully implemented by some of the country’s largest and most respected businesses.

Scott Hendricks – VP Market Development – Mr. Hendricks has over 20 years of experience in customer value and process management in the telecom and cable sectors. Scott was Founder and Principal of Global Customer Value Management LLC and The Value Management Group LLC, and provides consultative support to Fortune 1000 companies. He also has conducted customer research programs for Taylor Nelson Sofres, Market Probe and Nortel Networks where he  a ‘best-in-class’ customer value program and conducted correlation studies exploring the relationship between customer value and employee value. This work won him the prestigious APQC Global Best Practices Benchmarking Award for Customer Value for two consecutive years.

Prior to Nortel, Scott spent 23 years with Bell Labs and AT&T in a variety of different capacities ranging from global software/hardware/product development, marketing, education and sales.

Scott co-authored Customer Value Management: A Guide For Your Journey of Best Practice Processes, published in September 2001 by the American Productivity and Quality Center; ISBN 1-928593-52-6. Our client list includes some of the country’s largest and most prestigious organizations, from the Fortune 500 to firms serving local geographies.

CIR has extensive experience in conducting attitudinal, awareness, image, and customer satisfaction research for clients in numerous industries, including banking/finance, credit cards, healthcare, residential real estate, Internet service provisioning, dot.com retailing, and others.