How to Use Market Research to Build a Better Customer Experience
How do I begin building a customer experience strategy? That is the question that comes to me often. The other is "OK, now that I have some customer feedback, what do I do with it?" Whether you are new in your customer experience journey or far along the path to customer excellence, there are some traditional market research tools that can help you build your case for the need and help you drive continuous improvement on existing customer experience programs.
Many companies struggle with what to do with important customer insights whether it's coming from direct feedback from the customer on a phone call or from expensive market research projects. Insights come from all avenues. The golden nugget is, do you have a process to capture it and are you doing something with it. If you don't, you're not focused on improving your customer's experience. You're missing out on leveraging the most important asset in your company - your customer.
Market research studies such as needs-based segmentation, conjoint analysis, or competitive intelligence all can be tied to improving your customer's experience.
Let's examine how a needs-based segmentation study can help your customer's experience
A needs-based segmentation study helps determine what the key purchase drivers or behaviors your customer's show when determining whether to purchase your product or not. This type of study can then put behaviors and purchase drivers into categories.
This can help you determine what kind of customers you have, how many customers you have in each category, which category of customers are your most profitable, and help develop value propositions and targeted marketing to entice and sell more to them.
If you know you have a group of customers who purchase solely based on safety of your product and you have found they are your most profitable category of customer, these insights can help drive your marketing efforts and also sales tactics in acquiring or retaining more like customers.
After you know who they are, why they buy, and what kind of behavior they exhibit, let's find out what they expect out of a provider of service or supplier of product. Expectations like "how many days/ hours/ minutes do they expect an issue to be resolved on the phone" or "what does on-time delivery mean to them". Expectations can also range from ease of doing business, to what a customer expect regarding condition of delivery of the product.
Once you know and understand what a customer is expecting, you can develop internal benchmark business metrics that are customer facing rather than company facing. If studies show your customer expects a one day turnaround on an issue from the time and date they sent you an email, are you measuring it this way?
Next, once you understand why customers buy, what their needs are, what they are expecting, and you are measuring to these needs, you can start driving business process improvements to meet or exceed the customer's expectations.
For example, if quality of the product is one of their highest need or purchase driver, they expect no less than a perfect product and you measure quality defects (from the customer's point of view), and you are not 100%, what process improvements can you drive to ensure an excellent customer experience? Utilizing customer facing metrics can help drive business priorities and focus areas of improvement.
In conclusion, don't disregard your traditional research methods to help you determine what your customer even wants. Leverage these studies and methods to help you determine what the right course your business is headed and is it going in the direction that your customers will follow. Understanding who your customers are and why they buy from you, based on feedback directly from your customers, is the largest asset any company can have.
Why You Should Do Internet Market Research
The reason why you should do internet market research is so that you can find out about your competitors. This is great because you will know how to go against them. If you have an online business this should be very critical as your business success is based on your research.
Doing research can be very hard but doing research online for your online business can take 20 minutes. You see doing internet market research consists of only three elements: finding your market, choosing the keywords and getting your products and or services in front of potential customers.
You should do internet market research also to find information on the hottest trends on the market. This is very effective because you can determine your selling techniques based on the current trends. Furthermore you will be aware about what competitors are doing now, and perhaps come up with new, unique plans to beat them.
Research is the first place to start if you are considering starting a business online. All businesses need to do research, otherwise you they will not know who their customers are, what they want and why they buy certain products.
This research is very simple it can be obtained through questionnaires and other forms of feedback. Thus why it is very good to do internet market research. At the end of the day it is you that determines the future of your business.
The only business that does not need market research is that which is not of this world. This means that all businesses need to do research even though not all of them succeed.
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