Customer research, taken out of its appropriate marketplace context, can be extremely misleading. Consider the scenario presented by Lior Arussy of the Strativity Group who in a recent DestinationCRM article where a research firm, after conducting a study to help a client indentify key loyalty factors to build greater customer relationships, came back with a finding that the most important thing the company could to to retain customers was to "excel in invoicing."
Lior argued (and I agree with him) that from the customer’s perspective accurate, on-time invoices — like clean bathrooms or safe rides at a theme park — aren’t reasons that most customers are going to do business with you. Sure, they’re important to maintain and ultimately speak to the gestault of how people perceive your business (nobody wants inaccurate invoices) but nobody is really going to choose you over your competitor if your greatest claim to fame is that you have the most accurate billing system in the business.
Says Lior:
"The goal of customer experience is not simply to stop upsetting people, it is to delight them and maximize revenues and loyalty. It is essential that market research surveys–and the client companies they purport to help–target and measure true experiences that help competitive differentiation."
To derive insight from research takes more than just good methodology and execution — it also requires an understanding of the business that your in and enough knowledge about your customers to be able to interpret the results in such a way leads to meaningful, actionable findings. In other words, you can’t simply leave it up to your research firm to go out, do a survey, and report back with results that you can immediately integrate into your business. You also need to bring to the tables your own experience and your own knowledge of the business at every stage of the research in order to ensure that the results that you get make sense in the context of your work.
Read Lior’s article at DestinationCRM.
