How close can you get to your customers?

Know your customer. This has been the challenge of marketers since the beginning of, well … marketing.

Things have changed

The ability to truly understanding your customer is more difficult than now that it used to be. Almost regardless of what market you are looking at, in the past there was a relatively knowable and stable number of options and competitors because the cost of production, distribution and knowledge created significant barriers to entry.

Consumers now have almost infinite choice. They don’t have to buy their food from a major supermarket, they can get it delivered from artisan makers and growers if they so choose. They don’t have to believe what they told by advertisers about the product, they can find out themselves with YouTube and review sites offering endless options.

Let’s be honest, in the past the balance of power sat with the marketer and it was easy for them to measure the needs of the customer using robust and rigorous forms of traditional research. They could understand their buying decision process because it was a linear one that started with a motivation, followed by a trigger, then a search of a handful of alternatives using a one or two information sources, a visit to one or two shops to compare prices and talk it over with the salesperson and boom, a decision! All you needed was a Usage & Attitude study and you had a useful foundation by which to know your customer.

Businesses lack a clear and up to date view of their customer – the decisions they make in the moment across multiple touchpoints.

The modern consumer

Fast forward to 2020 and the customer holds the power. They have an almost infinite number of alternative products or services to fulfil the same need, countless information sources, delivery methods, fractured media and the ability share their experience back to the business (via weaponised social media).

A recent study by Google concluded that people utilise as many as 125 touchpoints before making a make-up purchase and 500 touchpoints before buying a pair of headphones!

I hope we can agree that each time a consumer interacts with a brand it’s an opportunity to delight them or equally to lose them.

Why do we want research in the moment?

Why does ‘in the moment’ matter?

Take this example from a Cornell study

'Mindless autopilot drives people to dramatically underestimate how many food decisions they make.’

This study found that people estimate that they make about 15 food- and beverage-related decisions each day. But give people a clicker and ask them to press it each time they make such a decision and it reveals that the truth is, they make 200 decisions!

This is the problem with relying on recall – you risk missing out on a lot of insight and opportunity. Understanding the minutia of consumer decision-making is incredibly important to informing marketing decision-making, but it is difficult for the subjects of the research to accurately recall details days or weeks after the moment has passed.

Which touchpoints are you missing?

Consumers may interact with a touchpoint fleetingly. Scrolling through their social media they may see something tantalising. At the point of purchase, they are bombarded with messages, floor stickers, shelf talkers, price tickets, posters, A-frames. Amongst this an image or offer or message could cut through.

Or perhaps it doesn’t and they end up buying exactly as they intended, having made the decision before they even arrived. They may have an interaction with a team member which is so positive or negative that it impacts on this or a future purchase. An ad they have seen made them smile and puts a new brand on their radar. Whilst visiting a website they could have been frustrated with an inability to find what they were after. And of course, whilst experiencing a product or service there are infinite ways that things could work for or against making the same choice next time.

The point is, as marketers, if you don’t know what  your customer is experiencing in the moment,  you are almost certainly missing opportunities  to respond in a timely way.

But from the consumer’s perspective, these interactions are not that important or memorable. It’s unrealistic to expect that they could recall and describe after the fact what they did and what impact it had, even if they were conscious of it at the time.

But despite all the ways that business and brands are challenged by a more demanding, distracted and spoiled-for-choice customer, they also have more ways of interacting with them directly than ever imaginable in the past. Loyalty programs, websites, social media channels, permission marketing, apps, click and collect, delivery, contact centres, custom panels. These are not just important touchpoints, but a potential bridge to the customer from which to conduct in the moment research.

Businesses is moving at a faster pace than ever before so data that is siloed is lost. They are often swimming in data: sales, trend, category, clicks, likes, comments. There is data everywhere you look, but how do you find valid current data about your customer? Not just clues - but the actual what and why of their behaviours. When it comes to strategic decision making, the large planned research studies are the gold standard. But what about when the information you need right now, are the questions and answers that simply don’t exist in those bigger studies?

Wouldn’t it be good if you could open a dashboard and see a snapshot of your customer’s attitudes and behaviours for yourself. And what if you could also see, with a few clicks, how segments are different – like men and women, or different locations, or this week vs last week, or any other behaviour metric of your choosing – all connected? What if you wanted to go beyond the metrics to actually get a richer sense of what they had to say in the moment about their experiences by being able to click through to some relevant verbatims

There are three reasons to capitalise on this new type of research to provide greater business opportunity.

1. It’s faster. Rather than having to retrospectively understand what your customer did through ad hoc research, in the moment, always on research gives you something you can access and monitor in almost real time. You can spot changes and trends emerging whilst you have time to react to them
2. It brings you closer to your customer. A well-designed but short survey that is simple and relevant to your customer is more likely to engage more customers. The ability to incorporate qualitative questions brings even greater understanding
3. Integrating insights into the businesses. By delivering this research as a sort of live stream into your business it really does have the power to inform the decision makers across the organisation.

How to get insight from customers in the moment

The key is to make it easy for respondents to participate in the moment by removing as many barriers as possible so that we can get greater and more representative participation. Chat-based research does this because it is familiar and easy. Your phone is never far away - it’s an appendage for many people. It has a camera and microphone and a pretty good screen from which you are highly likely to consume a lot of media.

And what about voice-powered research? Consider these scenarios:

• Would you be more inclined to tell a researcher about whether or not you shaved this morning and why if you had to remember to write it into a diary of some kind or if you could tell your phone or smart speaker about it while you made your morning coffee?
• What about what sort of hair day you’re are having or if you washed it this morning?
• What about what your nine-year-old had for breakfast and why.
• And that website you visited – what were you looking for? Did you find it? What did you end up buying?
• And your council recycling bin, just two quick questions…

The fact is bots can go where humans can’t. That’s not to say they can do what humans can do. Bots are not better than human researchers, not even close. And humans on their own aren’t as capable as humans with machines. But together, humans plus machines, that combination is more powerful than either on their own. That’s why Research by Bot was created.

It’s a proprietary platform, developed by Lewers, that we can use to find truth in the moment. It brings together the best of research know-how and machine capability.

It is a platform on which we can practice the craft and science of carefully designed and executed research, that can be baked into business’ touchpoints and set up to empower businesses to directly access the data. It brings businesses closer to their customer because it takes short, conversation surveys and uses artificial intelligence to pump the survey results directly into secure dashboards designed by us and accessed by your team. It brings the customer alive in your businesses which means that businesses don’t miss any opportunities that could give them a competitive advantage.

If you would like to know more, I’d love to show you how this could make a difference in your business.