Why Deeper Customer Understanding Drives Business Growth
Yes it's true... customers don't know what they want! Yet, customers are the ultimate decision makers on the success of your product. This makes understanding customers deeply (possibly better than they know themselves) no longer an option but a business essential.
Do shortcuts exist? Can you simply see what your competitor is doing and better it? Possibly yes, but you would see temporary success at best. Spending more time understanding competition and not customers will only lead to incrementally better me-too solutions and not disruptive solutions.
Collecting data, talking to your customers, defining who your customers are simply isn't enough. We need to develop insights that go beyond who, what when and tell us WHY customers behave the way they do. Insights come from a deep understanding of customers. Use these insights to develop Need-based customer segments. Insight is the deep understanding of customers that comes from gathering, analyzing and synthesizing customer intelligence. Insight goes beyond the Who, What, When and Where to tell us Why customers behave as they do, guiding better business decisions and delivering results.
Customer needs are diverse and tend to evolve as they grow. Organisations need to build a rigorous method to deeply understand their customers and actively evolve that understanding. And no, this is not just for customer service, marketing or marketing but, for every department that impacts the customers’ experience directly or indirectly.
Understanding your customer needs is the foundation for a successful growth strategy.
To begin with you DISCOVER YOUR CUSTOMERS - be curious and understand what they are doing, why they are doing what they are doing, how they do it today, what decisions do they make and who influences them.
Then FALL IN LOVE WITH THEIR PROBLEM (what Intuit has ingrained in me) - group customers with similar needs together and articulate the problem they need solve & how they would measure success aka customer value.
And then, BEAT YOUR CUSTOMERS’ EXPECTATIONS - don’t just meet their expectations, beat them by creating awesome customer experiences.
Often organisations create personas or segments based on demographics. Now this is useful for marketing teams to target and advertise your solution to the customer but it does very little for your solution teams to know where to find them. Solution teams need to understand them deeply, build #customerEmpathy and create solution experiences that will add customer value (the way the customer defined it).
Without the needs-based segmentation, your teams will end up creating features (feature farmers, as they are called) adding bells and whistles that your customers don’t desire or value.
The era of customer empowerment demands new tools to learn what customers want. In order to compete today, companies must look beyond data, using customer intelligence to arrive at actionable business insight. To succeed, companies must understand the different sources of customer intelligence and take advantage of tools that will help them get closer to their customers. Needs-based segmentation is a tool that we have used at Pensaar design to identify whitespace opportunities for our clients, helped employees get customer obsessed and redesigned solution experiences to create awesome customer experiences.
LinkedIn Article:
www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-deeper-customer-understanding-drives-business-growth-deepa-bachu/
Useful content used for this article can be found here