how to tell what your customers want without asking them
TRANSCRIPT
1Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
By Digital Alchemy Team
2Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
CUSTOMERS DON’T ALWAYS KNOW WHAT THEY WANT
Often marketers like to think they know what their customers want, but
no matter how seasoned and talented they are, it’s just not correct to
believe so.
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”-- Steve Jobs
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”-- Henry Ford
“Customer feedback is great for telling you what you did wrong. It’s terrible at telling you what you should do next”-- Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote
The truth is however, sometimes the customers themselves don’t
know what they really want.
What Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and Phil Libin told us about asking what
customers want can help us begin to understand this better.
2Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
We live in a dynamic world and the average customer is ever-
changing their likes, dislikes and purchasing behaviour.
3Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
RESEARCH MAY NOT HOLD ALL THE ANSWERS
The Institute of Decision Making published an article explaining why customers aren’t
good at telling you what they want, or what may influence them, especially in traditional
research situations as follows*:
So, how can you find out what customers want without directly asking them?
Well, follow their footprint.
* Willcox, M. 2012. Why Consumers Aren’t Good At Telling You What They Want. The Institute of Decision Making [Online]. Available at <http://www.instituteofdecisionmaking.com/why-consumers-arent-good-at-telling-you-what-they-want/> [Accessed 22nd July 2015]
Research makes people pay more attention than they do in the real world
We’re not as rational as we think
If people think they are going to have to explain a choice, it affects the choice they make
What people say they like can change
3Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
4Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
* Cameron, N. 2015. Forrester: Customer analytics still immature across the region. CMO [Online]. Available at <http://www.cmo.com.au/article/563659/forrester-customer-analytics-still-immature-across-region/> [Accessed 23rd July 2015]
It’s not just about implementing customer data analytics
Based on Forrester’s latest report “Asia-
Pacific Companies Embrace Customer
Analytics”, less than half completely trusted
the data quality and analysis results of
their company’s business intelligence
applications, while 17 percent had little or no
trust in these capabilities*.
The report also puts emphasis on brands
that fail to translate customer insights into
business action. Those who do build their
marketing tactics using data analytics tend
to focus on customer segmentation and
Customers leave their footprint as they interact with your brand
Every interaction a customer has with a
brand provides information about them.
For example, POS data (what, when, where
they buy), social media data (what do they
say about your brand?), and multichannel
touch points (how they respond to your ads/
campaigns) - you can analyse this data to
understand what customers want before
they do.
IT BEGINS WITH DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYTICS
campaign performance measurement, but
fail to recognise the importance of looking at
the whole customer lifecycle.
5Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
MAKING CUSTOMER DATA COUNT AND PREDICTING THEIR NEXT MOVEAs the expert for your product or service,
it’s your job to show the customer what
will best fit their needs. You can’t do that if
you only focus on using data for customer
segmentation and campaign management.
The first step to predict your customers’ next
move is to understand what motivates them:
The insights generated from the customer
data should enable you to optimise
marketing campaigns based on the margin
or long-term value by customer and prospect.
Brands fail to meet marketing ROI if they only
take data analytics as software to analyse the
customer data for segmentation or generate
insights that are just FYIs but not actionable.
Take HotelClub as an example, the leader
of online hotel booking uses big data to
understand a customer’s lifetime value to
the company. They compiled data over a
six-month period to map out the customer
journey to create a model for predicting a
customer’s value. From the analytics, they
learnt that customers who had a good
experience on trialling a product, came
back to the site and increased the length of
stay; so the value was higher. By leveraging
customer data to understand the retention
lifetime value of individual customers
by estimating their future worth, helped
HotelClub to understand whether they
* Cameron, N. 2013. Using big data analytics to power customer lifetime value. CMO [Online]. Available at <http://www.cmo.com.au/article/532949/using_big_data_analytics_power_customer_lifetime_value/ > [Accessed 28th July 2015]
should spend 15 minutes, 20 minutes or
an hour to retain a customer because they
know if a customer is most likely to book
with them in the future. With the model,
HotelClub’s call centre can determine how
much time should be spent on on-boarding
and assisting customers who call in,
versus directing them to other channels for
information*.How they use your productsWhat job your product or service is hired forWhat their hesitations and concerns are
6Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
TRACKING RESULTS IS ESSENTIAL
If you ask customers for feedback, integrate them into the centralised data
Even though we can predict what customers
want without asking them, we still should obtain
their feedback. For one it validates our original
set of hypotheses and more importantly, it gives
us a more dynamic look into a customer’s mind.
This way we can weed out all discrepancies.
Customer feedback can also tell you what
they are happy or unhappy about, and thus
is extremely useful to consistently improve
products or services.
6Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
7Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
INTEGRATING ALL DATA FOR ACTIONABLE INSIGHT
So if and when you are going to gather customer feedback, it is
important to integrate this new data back into the complete database.
You have to listen carefully to customers who tell you what doesn’t
work as, Bill Gates once said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” And that is still true.
However, without integrating customer feedback into data analytics
approach, it’s just an FYI insight, and barely actionable. And an insight
that isn’t actionable is a wasted treasure.
9Copyright © Digital Alchemy HOW TO TELL WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS WANT WITHOUT ASKING THEM
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Digital Alchemy Team
Digital Alchemy Limited (DA) is Asia Pacific’s leading Database Marketing Services Provider. DA’s team of professionals are dedicated to working with clients to improve their marketing efficiency and to capture latent customer value. Established in 2003 and operating in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Nanjing, and Singapore, DA has been contributing to the success of an expanding breadth of clients including leading companies in financial services, telecommunications, retail, motoring services, media, and other industry sectors.
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Copyright © Digital Alchemy | September 2015
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