Never Stop Learning About Your Customers

Your customers should be at the heart of everything you do; put them first and the rest should follow. They can be both your greatest advocate and your greatest critic, so it's important to keep track of who they are and what they want from you.

Generally speaking, customers are often far less loyal and trusting than they used to be, especially in industries which suffered reputational blows during the financial crisis. Even in unrelated industries, you're probably feeling some of the same effect. At the same time, customers also have more power than ever before, due to the rise of social media, online comparison shopping and a greater proliferation of choices.

The diversity of those customers continues to increase, which puts a premium on mirco-segmentation and deep customer insight. However, by increasing the noise-to-data ratio, the data deluge resulting from the internet can actually make it harder to see and understand your customer base.

Economic uncertainty and data overload confuses customers as well as businesses. This makes them less interested in products than in flexible, adaptive solutions, creating customers who are trickier and more demanding than ever. Therefore, it's more important than ever to really get inside the heads of your customers and try to stand in their shoes.

Five Ways to Really Understand Your Customers and Know What They Want

1. Field diverse customer services teams. Diverse staff are more likely to be able to understand and communicate effectively with a diverse range of customers.

2. Understand partnerships. Most business, especially digital ones, are only successful these days if they are able to build strong partnerships. Being aware of the various important players and their roles can help illuminate the specific nuances of an industry. This can also provide good opportunities for disruption and potential cost savings if a vendor or provider can be removed from the equation.

3. Use social media. Having social media accounts is a must in modern business practices, allowing you to interact with customers and track their preferences/habits/activity. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide a wide range of insights into current and potential customers, including their buying habits.

4. Use big data sources and leverage that data to obtain critical insights into your customer base. Make sure you focus on the quality of the data, rather than the quantity but at the same time, use every bit of data you can collect from as many sources as possible. Also, remember that your business operates in real time so your analytics should as well. This allows you to understand what's happening as it's happening and to take appropriate actions to ensure optimal user experience and obtain the best results for your business.

5.Anticipate what your customers will want tomorrow, a strategy which has served many entrepreneurs well, such as Richard Branson and Steve Jobs. Use different tools, such as scenario planning to explore how underlying market shifts may affect your customers in the future.

Smart Scenarios

Good scenarios provide competing intellectual windows onto a complex phenomenon and challenge how you think about it. The aim is to test your current strategy and to make sure that your plans include enough flexibility that you can weather whatever the future brings. For example, if automakers in the US had examined various globalisation and technology scenarios a few decades earlier, then they might have switched their design and manufacturing strategies much sooner, shoring up and protecting the industry.

Start by defining the issue – look at it in terms of time frame, scope and decision variables. Then, make a list of what you already know. Ask which current trends will affect your industry in the future, then document these trends and explain why each exerts a significant, lasting influence. Follow up by identifying what you don't know – this means potential uncertainties which could affect your business in the future. Briefly explain why and how each point matters, and how they may be interconnected.

In response to this knowledge, construct multiple scenarios with different outcomes for each uncertainty. Identify how and where each of your scenarios may be inconsistent and eliminate combinations which seem implausible. You should end up with a few diverse but plausible scenarios which cover a wide range of the possibilities your business may face.

Top Tips

1. Identify your knowledge gaps and how best to fill them. This will provide direction and help you to set measurable goals to track your progress.

2. Keep asking whether you're doing the right thing by your customers. If you are, that should mean you're also doing the right thing for your brand, business and team, too.

3. Don't be complacent. Keep learning, doing more and finding ways to improve as a brand, team and individual.

4. Never assume you know what your customer wants or needs. Stay objective and allow the data to provide insight.

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