How well do you really know your customers?

5 steps towards being honest with yourself about what you don’t know and what you do.

It’s a mistake I’ve fallen into more times than I’d care to remember: making assumptions about a customers’ needs, preferences and buying behaviours.

Even though I’ve worked in user experience and digital marketing for over two decades, its still easy to slip into making assumptions based on what I like, in the absence of evidence (or even by ignoring evidence), of what the customer likes. Even when I’ve got evidence from actual customers, there is a temptation to fill in the gaps, jump to conclusions and overlook what customers aren’t telling me.

It’s no secret that the better you understand your customers, the more successful you will be developing products and services which serve their needs. In addition it will help you appreciate how to package them in a way that appeals and communicating your offers with messages that lead to a sale. It’s simple to understand this concept, but so much harder to put it into practice.

Almost all the companies I have ever worked for or with have struggled with:

• Understanding the reasons for people not becoming customers

• Being over reliant on anecdote and patchy feedback from customers

• Having big gaps in their data and knowledge of customers

• Bias - looking for evidence to support prevailing opinions or pet theories.

• Having lots of data about customers, but lacking the resource or time to interpret it correctly

So what quick fixes are available to solve these challenges? None and even if you did find the perfect solution, the problem will instantly disappear only to be replaced by something even more complex and difficult to fix.

Fortunately there are plenty of ways to make significant progress in tackling these challenges and here are a few ideas on how to get started:

1. Seek lots of opinions but acknowledge their limitations

Positive feedback from customers is not to be sneezed at. Aside from providing great testimonials for your website and those positive ‘proof points’ it also motivates and rewards. But for every customer who signs up, chances are there are many more who didn’t. When it comes to evidence, positive customer feedback is often a subset of a subset and should be treated with caution

2. Guess if you have to, but don’t pretend its not guess work

Sometimes you don’t have the data and don’t have an easy way of getting the data ahead of a decision. In this situation you have to make an educated guess and go with ‘gut feel’ or ‘experience tells me’. Fine, but recognise these imposters for what they are and strive to ensure that you have the acquisition of real customer data as a key objective of this new project and other future projects

3. Put yourselves in your customer’s position every time

Bias is the enemy of any successful digital sales, marketing or customer engagement efforts. White is my favourite colour and my the favourite colour of everyone in my team. Who doesn’t like White? ‘White cars are the most popular’ so white must be the right colour for our product... But your selling sofas, your audience is predominantly thirty somethings with young children. White sofas and toddlers? Customer feedback, surveys and demographic data

4. Match your decisions to the data not the data to your decision

Confirmation bias - We all do it, especially when it comes to our views and politics, seeking evidence to support our pre-existing opinion or values. If you look hard enough you will always find the evidence you need to support your opinion. Equally we dismiss an argument out of hand from a politician you don’t like, even though evidence is firmly on their side. If you’ve expended time and money on a new service or product or invested heavily in a marketing campaign, it is almost impossible to dispassionately examining the data and evidence, but failing to do so could mean pouring more resources into something which the evidence should tell you won’t succeed, or not making critical changes which could turn failure into success.

5. Put the customer at the most senior level in your company

It’s fairly common practice amongst B2B companies, especially larger ones, to include a client on their board which can have significant benefits although conflict of interest is something which needs to be carefully considered, but even if its not practical to have a customer on the board it is perfectly possible to appoint a customer ‘champion’ on the board. Indeed the title of chief customer officer is becoming increasingly common amongst more customer orientated businesses. It’s worth remembering however, that to be effective a customer champion needs to be prepared and able to dispense uncomfortable truths.