Who is Your Customer?

Customer Understanding is The Cornerstone of Your Business Success

Your business needs to know how and where to find potential customers for your products or services, establish relationships with them to help them make an informed decision, and create a frictionless experience so that customers stay with your products or services and recommend you to others.

Deciding who to target, where, with what, and how requires detailed analysis

There are standards to help you understand your customers:

1. You won't Find All of Your Answers in a Survey

Surveys may help you get customer feedback on a particular experience and gauge how customers feel about their overall experience. They may also help you validate the statistical significance of customer sentiments. That's why many businesses utilize them as the key building blocks of their voice of customers. Surveys have restrictions on the sorts of insights they can reveal.

If you want to discover why people did or did not do something, multiple-choice survey questions are tough to create. They only work if you have the answers beforehand. And when it comes to customer experience, the probability of knowing what customers want or need before you ask them is close to nil In addition, surveys rely on participants to see the truth. They frequently ask individuals what they intend to accomplish or if they want or do not want anything. However, most people aren't entirely aware of, don't recall, or just can't forecast their behaviors in scenarios they haven't experienced before.

That's why firms trying to acquire an in-depth understanding of what their customers truly need, want, and aspire to—and those who want to identify chances for satisfying those needs in unique ways—must improve surveys with qualitative research methodologies.

There are three key methods you need to know about:

A. Mining unsolicited customer feedback

B. Conducting ethnographic research

C. Gathering input from employees

A. Collect and Analyze Unsolicited Customer Feedback

Customers continually submit unsolicited feedback on their experiences via email, support calls, chat, and social network posts. These conversations may provide mountains of unstructured customer insights—but only if you know how to utilize them.

B. Go Deep with Ethnographic Research If you want to know what customers do, what inspires them, and what chances there are to better satisfy their requirements, you should perform ethnographic research. Ethnography, which has its roots in anthropology, is simply the observation of your consumers' behavior in a natural situation. That's why ethnographic research approaches like diary studies, in-home observations, and one-on-one interviews may help you learn how to design experiences that fit into the context of your customer's daily lives.

You need to get away from your desk and into the field.

C. Gathering input from employees

Tap Internal Knowledge and Expertise

The majority of customer insights should originate with the customers themselves. However, you should not underestimate the tremendous quantity of information possessed by Contact Centers representatives, retail employees, service technicians, account managers, and the like. Each of these frontline staff members interacts with dozens of hundreds of different customers every day and observes both positive and negative customer experiences firsthand. This front-row position allows them to identify problems and unmet customer needs long before they appear in traditional research.

That is why many businesses have launched voice-of-the-employee programs. For example, accounting software company Intuit built an online forum for its workers called Brainstorm, where employees may contribute ideas for enhancing the customer experience, vote on others' ideas, and monitor ideas from submission to execution. In addition to revealing feedback from customers, frontline and behind-the-scenes staff may assist you in understanding how internal operations, policies, processes, and systems negatively influence the customer experience.

2- Document Your Research Findings in an Easy-to-Digest Format

You must convert your customer data into a captivating image or tale that your colleagues can easily comprehend and share. Two tools are extremely helpful for your purpose: Personas and Journey Maps

A. Personas Help you Document Who Your Customers Are

Personas are fictitious individuals who represent your target customer's core behaviors, characteristics, motivations, and ambitions. Personas are brought to life with first and last names, images, and imaginative tales that reflect day-in-the-life scenarios

B. Journey Maps Help You Document What Your Customers Do

Journey maps are records that represent a certain persona's actions throughout time. Many journey maps illustrate the whole length of a customer's relationship with a company—all of the steps customers take as they discover, assess, buy, use, and obtain support for a product or service—and all of the touchpoints that they

3- Share Your Customer Insights Early and Often

Customer insights are worthless when they are locked in your head or squirreled away in a database. You need to share your customer research with people across your company. Personas and journey maps help facilitate those conversations. But there are other effective ways to share customers' insights too

A- Videos

B- Social Media

C- Presentations Software (Adobe, Power BI)

D- Touchpoints Reports ( Contact Centers Reports, Website Reports, App Reports, Customers Reviews, etc.)

4- Customer Understanding is the Foundation of All Customer Experience Efforts

If you want to fully realize the benefits of putting your customers at the center of your company, you must first understand who they are and what they want from you. This perspective will become clear when you study customer information from various research approaches and organizational barriers.

If you try to cut corners on this stage of the process and continue making assumptions about what you believe customers need and desire, you will not only fail to build meaningful customer understanding, but you will also put the rest of your customer experience initiatives at risk. That's because the insights you gain from this practice will create the framework for the other five customer experience disciplines.

Customer insights will eventually shape your customer experience strategy. They should be the foundation of your metrics and governance programs. They should be strongly woven into the fabric of your culture.

Thank You