According to McKinsey research, “organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin. Customer data must be seen as strategic.”
At enlight, we couldn’t agree more. As we discussed in our market insights overview blog, customers are the only people who are consistently putting money into your business. Understanding how they use your products and services to create value for their businesses is fundamental to your company’s growth and prosperity.
You Already Capture Customer Satisfaction And Net Promoter Scores®, So You’ve Got It Covered? Right? Wrong!
From our experience, you can find some data about customers floating around most companies – customer satisfaction, purchase history, etc. But there are some common problems:
- At best, it’s just a collection of facts and has no mechanism to link them together to make them actionable. More commonly, it’s actually distributed throughout the company in the various silos – sales maintains purchase history, customer service or marketing maintains customer satisfaction, engineering has info about product specs, etc. – and nobody even thinks to try to connect them.
- Survey design and analysis are complex. There’s an entire field of study about it. With experts and everything. How you ask the questions matters. What survey method you use matters. How you recruit respondents matters. How you analyze the results matters. How you use the findings to guide decision-making matters. One mistake in the chain can be amplified to way over (or under) state results – and drive misguided decisions. Most customer surveys we’ve seen were designed in-house without the benefit of expertise in one (or more) of these areas.
- Many companies maintain a set of shared beliefs about individual customers and their relationship with them. This narrative is often based solely on the salesperson’s perceptions and misinterpretation or misremembering of the past. These perspectives are largely myths, but they can have a huge impact on how the customer is viewed and treated.
At best, this information is more like blind men touching an elephant than actual insight that can drive strategic action. (Remember the fable of the blind men and the elephant?) Insight requires you obtain a deeper understanding of your customer through information, helping you understand their motivations and needs. This understanding guides you to serve them today while helping predict their future needs. And sometimes, you need information from sources other than your customers – because you need to put them into the context of how they operate day to day in their market. That’s why we focus on market insight at enlight.
Here’s How We Do Insight Right
At enlight, we are committed to helping companies improve performance – and a crucial step is to understand your entire value chain. Not just your product. Not just how you close the sale. Not just customer satisfaction. We want to understand it all – especially the parts between your customers and the final end-user, because ultimately, the end-user drives all upstream product-related decisions. Ultimately, your customers’ customers drive the success of your business.
I’m going to write that again because it bears repeating and it’s often overlooked:
Developing quality and actionable market insight doesn’t happen overnight. Our approach involves three main pillars of work:
Discovery Interviews
Exploratory conversations with individuals throughout the value chain to obtain insider industry input, map challenges and opportunities – and widen the conversation beyond what’s always been done.
Quantitative Research
Anonymous phone or web surveys of customers, potential customers and potential stakeholders that drives custom market segmentation.
Ethnographic Research
Field observation of customers, potential customers and targeted stakeholders to provide context and clarity for the work.
While each pillar is strong on its own, the combination of all three data sets is what’s really powerful – creating insights beyond typical customer satisfaction and financial tracking. Understanding how each type of data adds value to strategic decisions is what we do best.
Look for more details about each pillar in upcoming posts, starting with a deeper dive into enlight’s Discovery Interview methodology, and how it can transform your company’s customer relations, marketing, strategy and business performance.
