At October’s Innovation Day, we welcomed Dr. David Baxter, Associate Professor of Innovation at Southampton Business School. He shared various untraditional methods that can help provide new insights into customer satisfaction.
Whether you are building mechanical excavators, keyhole surgeries or managing sales teams, understanding your customers is crucial for successful innovation and breakthrough product ideas. And yet, customer insight is difficult to get, continual and often inexact. How well do you know your customers? What don’t they expect, but would be pleasantly surprised if they got?
Some needs are hidden beneath the surface, while others are simply impossible to express because customers are not aware of their existence. Over time, customers are less happy about excitement features which become expected, and businesses must create new, revolutionary ones. Yet, finding something that delights your customers is not down to guesswork or artistic flair. Rather, it can be uncovered, broken down and integrated as a process.
So where do we go from here?
Ensure your products are successful. Apply the Kano model to your business and focus on what your customers hope to accomplish.
Get (the best possible) data from your customers. There are some challenges involved with qualitative methods. There are often no set-questions, and customers might not understand what they have been asked. On the other hand, you can get highly accurate and personal responses which are hard to generalise. These methods can nonetheless help you understand in detail how people think about a product. To get the most out of your customers, it is key to search for different perspectives and disconnect from your normal way of thinking.
Mind the expectations gap. To regain ownership of the consumer journey, businesses need to engage more closely with consumer communities, acknowledging suggestions and personalising responses to their most valued consumers. To close the expectations gap and encourage loyalty, businesses should:
- Listen, engaging directly with customers,
- Inspire, developing tools and social media platforms,
- Co-create, giving consumers the ability to share and create content.
Avoid the swamp. Think in terms of Gap Analysis, also known as 3 Circles Growth. What is it that you are offering that your competitors don’t? How can you differentiate your products? Focus on the points of difference in relation to you, your customer, and competitors and stay away from the “swampy mess” area – that area that could have represented value but is no longer of value to customers.
Use a more human approach. To gain new insights into the life of your customers, try out new methods that do not channel consumers’ responses and go beyond traditional client segmentations. Use new approaches from anthropology and psychology, such as ethnography – the observation of how people do things – and design thinking, creating solutions in a human-centred way. Set the focus on the things that are going to make a real difference.
Are you ready to search for your customers’ unmet needs, expectations and desires?
These are just some key highlights taken from October’s Innovation Day. Each month, clients of the Innovation Programmes receive a full ACT report, capturing the guest expert’s research, the implications and next steps for leaders to apply back in their team and organisation.
Sources: Baxter, D. (2019) ‘Customer Insight: The Repertory Grid Technique’, KnowledgeBrief Innovation Day Presentation, 9 October.