Who are your customers, and how well do you know them?

Knowing your customers

The most basic requirement for any business to succeed is knowing and tracking its market, and above all its customers’ expectations and needs

Much to business owners’ frustration, however, consumers have become increasingly invisible to companies.

This is the result of a radical shift that is moving power from organizations to customers.

Customers today

Today, customers decide how they want to interact with the companies they buy from, and what they value most, almost every time, is comfort, convenience and speed.

You used to have to go to the bank to make a payment or get a statement. With phone banking and ATMs, you no longer need to set foot in a branch.

Buying a home appliance or a car once meant a trip to the store or dealership. With the internet, that trip has become almost optional.

Even meals and grocery shopping have changed, with home delivery from restaurants and through apps (iFood, for example) becoming far more common.

As a result, direct contact between customers and salespeople, or between customers and store managers, is becoming increasingly rare.

Besides being less frequent, that relationship has also become more impersonal, since it now happens far more by phone, messaging apps, social media or email than face to face!

The distance problem

Without that direct, personal relationship, it becomes much harder for executives and business owners to keep up with, or even notice, the constant changes in their customer base.

Distance makes it impossible to see how customer profiles are shifting, to catch surprising changes in habits, or to hear the inevitable complaints and the valuable suggestions.

In other words, even while meeting the demands of today’s consumers, the gap between company and customer has grown so wide that it’s no longer possible to know & anticipate customer behavior, even when you’re right there “at the counter”!

If that was hard to do face to face, imagine doing it from a distance!

In a globalized world, with an ever-growing range of products, services and channels, consumers naturally choose whoever understands them best and, because of that understanding, can offer exactly what they want, on terms they like and when they need it!

To tackle these problems, large companies have turned to sophisticated technology, including modern (and expensive) customer relationship management (CRM) software.

That, however, is only one way to solve the problem, and even then it’s a solution for large companies, given the significant investment it requires.

Qualitative research techniques

A much more accessible option, within anyone’s reach, is qualitative research, which offers a range of techniques that can solve countless problems. A few examples:

• Focus groups capture a wealth of feelings, impressions and personal opinions, something few other techniques can match, even the most sophisticated ones.
• In-depth interviews, on the other hand, help explain how individual customers behave when faced with more complex issues.
• “Mystery shoppers” simulate interactions between company & customer, a technique that can flag problems so they can be fixed.
• And then there’s ethnography, the newest method to be used successfully in qualitative research. It draws on the body of knowledge built up in anthropology, with equally surprising results.

Most importantly, these are low-cost options with a high return and very fast turnaround.

Despite the sophisticated systems they use, even large companies still regularly “listen to” and “analyze” what consumers think, whether they’re current customers, former customers, competitors’ customers or people who aren’t customers yet.

These studies put executives, business owners, planners and decision-makers back in direct contact with their audience. They restore an “intimacy” that has been lost in modern times and provide valuable knowledge to steer the business toward success.