Customer and market insights

We typically advise that businesses speak to their customers away from the ‘business as usual’ conversations, as insights have a different context.

‘Business as usual’ tends to be transactional, daily conversations. Whereas insights is a deeper, more strategic conversation, which can be transformational to any business.

We also often experience that customers and stakeholders may reveal more and be more candid with a third-party researcher about the business relationship and future needs.

Finally, in order to capture all the relevant insights for ongoing marketing plans, it is important to speak with current ‘regular’ customers, as well as ‘irregular’ and even past ones (not only your businesses current ‘fans’.)

Customer insights have many uses, from the ‘foundational’ work setting up your business plan and marketing strategy, through to supporting ongoing marketing and commercial activities. Anytime you are undertaking a business initiative targeted at customers or that they will interact with, it is incredibly beneficial to have input from them.

These are some of the typical reasons businesses use insights:

• Test viability of new products and services,
• Launch into new geographical locations,
• Better define target markets,
• Understand buyer behaviour,
• Test brand, creative concepts and messaging,
• Get a business ‘report card’ and customer experience scores.

Of course, there are more reasons, however, these are typical in most markets.

Customer insights help your business make transformational decisions – launching into new markets, launching new products – all actions that drive revenue.

A sharper positioning and value proposition can lead to better sales conversions through messaging that resonates with target customers. Something as simple as understanding how you can better serve could encourage current customers to buy more from your business, delivering additional revenue.

Every business needs to better understand their customers and markets. Customer insights drives a better and deeper understanding of customers and that should be undertaken by every business looking for growth.

Advances in digital research tools have also made big business research techniques more accessible and affordable to smaller businesses.

The frequency is very dependent on the ‘age and stage’ of your business and this is a different conversation for every business. The suggested minimum is once a year, however this depends on what you have planned from a business growth perspective and included in your marketing strategy. Research should not be considered a ‘one time’ exercise – it is a mindset change towards using customer insights more regularly in your business.

Understanding your business growth requirements helps us define research objectives, informing what to ask your customers. Perhaps you want to assess the appetite for a new product, test some messages, or enhance your understanding of buyer behaviour. All of these outcomes will demand a different set of research questions and influence methods and/or techniques.

A third party is able to translate your business challenge or customer knowledge gaps into a recommended research approach. What are the right tools or techniques to get to the desired output?

Third party experts also tend to have skills to develop the right questions – knowing what to ask is crucial. They also have the skill to ask questions in the right way and interpret the answers in line with business requirements. They are trained to extract key insights from a large amount of customer data.

Finally, they have no emotional attachment to the answers and your customers tend to feel more comfortable speaking with an expert outside of your business.

Yes, 10 customer interviews can be enough –this is a great start. It’s always wise to have an open mind about the services available and what’s appropriate to ‘get the job done’. Again, this goes back to the brief and research objectives.

If your business deals with different stakeholder groups, it may be prudent to conduct more than 10 interviews overall in order to achieve a consensus opinion for individual groups.

Individuals in your team are significant stakeholders and play an important role in the insights conversation. The behaviours of your customers and internal stakeholders are intrinsically linked – both need to be documented and considered. There are also many internal team members with strong customer facing roles and therefore can provide valuable insights into customer needs and experiences.

Yes, absolutely. Having customer insights generally gives a business more confidence in their plans and decision making, which can potentially lower business risk.

Understanding the ‘job to be done’ and finding the right research solution is key. The briefing is crucial and there are numerous cost-effective options that are available to small businesses.

The process of speaking with 10 customers takes approximately 4-6 weeks. This includes designing the questionnaire, contacting the customers, booking in calls, executing the calls, analysis of the conversations and presenting the report back to your business.

It does depend on the type of research being conducted, but a typical customer interview/survey project would take approximately 4-6 weeks to turnaround. This can depend on the availability of interviewees/respondents. Techniques such as social media listening, competitor analysis etc could take approximately 1-2 weeks.

This depends on the research objectives and identified target groups. The general principle is a mix of happy, regular customers and past, irregular or potential customers, as well as a key decision maker, someone who has a vested interest in the product/service or a key influencer on the buying process.

It can definitely be a ‘moment in time’ exercise to support a particular business/marketing need. For example, you are about to launch a new product and want to understand key influencers in that segment.

This should ideally be guided by your business and marketing calendar and the ‘age and stage’ of your business. As a rule of thumb, any time you are making key decisions or taking actions that are targeted at customers is a good time to gather customer data to support.

Part of a customer experience mapping exercise is to understand the more critical touchpoints or ‘moments of truth’ to prioritise. This can be revealed through customer research.

We look at a range of stakeholders in any business – some are easier to access than others. As part of the briefing process, we look at the value of those stakeholders and what speaking with them will add to research objectives.