Know Your Customer!
An easy thing to say, but what does it mean, and how do you go about it?
What does it mean?
In a nutshell, it means knowing who your customers are and what
drives them to make a purchase, be that a sofa, a car or professional
services. Customer motivations can be split broadly into two categories:
functional drivers and experiential drivers.
Functional drivers might include price, suitability for purpose,
convenience, ease of use and reliability; experiential drivers might
include choice, customer service, control and empathy.
How do you go about it?
The single most effective tool at your disposal to get closer to your
customers is primary market research. Research in all its forms drives
insights, and evidence-based insights make the difference between
thinking you know your customer and really knowing your customer.
What Your Customer Sees
You work for your company; if you’re the business owner you likely
work, eat, sleep and live your company. Believe me when I say: “You are
too closely involved to see what your customers see”. I call it internal
blindness. Mystery shopping gives you the perfect customer’s eye-view
of your product or services. Mystery shopping is carried out by real
people, people who either already are your customer or could well be in
the future. You can’t get much closer than that.
Newsflash! Customers are not a homogenous group: different customers
require different approaches and, in many cases, different services or
products too. Committing to an ongoing mystery shopping programme allows
you and your staff to get close to diverse customers and customer
behaviours. You can use those learnings to add nuance to your sales
strategies and differentiate your approach whilst maintaining or
improving universal elements of customer experience.
Reward Good Performance
Regular mystery shopping allows you to monitor, improve and reward
staff performance on a continuous basis which in turn delivers
continuous improvement in customer experience. Clever companies tend to
have very transparent training and reward programmes. Mystery shopping
becomes a key component of their staff training and employees welcome
the chance to both show off what they do well and learn what they can do
better. As a tool for consistent and high-quality customer service,
mystery shopping is hard to beat.
Mixed Methodology – Robust Results
Well-designed mystery shopping programmes deliver robust quantitative
and qualitative data – the holy grail of market insights. You get the
“what happened” story (data driven, quantitative data) and the “why it
happened” story (granular, qualitative commentaries). Add to that some
“so what?” reporting to weave the numbers and the anecdotal together and
you’re suddenly in a powerful position to see what’s going well and
where you might need to improve or adapt.
The same is true for other primary research methodologies which have
the customer centre stage; Carefully thought-out exit questionnaires,
focus groups with different customer profiles; there are numerous ways
to open the dialogue and find out what your customers are thinking and
why. The beauty of market research is that it’s conducted by a third
party, a research expert highly skilled at drawing out insights that
your sales team doing a follow-up call simply cannot. The market
researcher is an impartial sounding board who can build up trust and
follow avenues of discussion that a simple closed-question survey is
unlikely to reach.
That insight data and analysis has multiple applications in your
business; let’s take it back to the functional and experiential
motivations that drive consumers. Functionally, you can investigate
price sensitivity, assess the relative importance of different
product/service features, measure reliability and convenience. On the
experiential side you have a window on how your company makes your
customers feel; how much choice and control they experience when using
your product/service and, perhaps most importantly, would they recommend
you to friends and family?
At Know Your Market, we pride ourselves on offering a tailored approach to our
clients’ business and research objectives. Our clients use us as it
suits them, and that’s how it should be. We will give you our expert
opinion on how best to structure your research and what metrics you
should include, but beyond that the world is your oyster. The
questionnaires are individually created for each client allowing you to
cover whatever specific details about the sales process or CX you wish
to cover. Our mystery shoppers are a picky bunch and they’ll make sure
your business is not cutting any corners or fobbing your customers off
with sub-optimal customer service.
Know Your Market Insight Services offers a comprehensive suite of market
research solutions. Whether you want to know who your customers are,
what they think of your customer service or whether an innovative idea
is a viable product launch, we can help.
