How to Know What Customers Really Want

By Bill Fonvielle

The increase in customer power over the last few years will have escaped the attention of few businesses and service providers. This exalted status for customers comes from hard-headed financial reality: when all is said and done, the customer pays the bills.

We have also seen the rise of the destructive side of customer power. Social media can turn a disgruntled customer into an instant crusader, able to enlist hundreds or even thousands of bystanders in a virtual war against a hapless supplier.

How, then, can we make our customers into evangelists instead of crusaders?

The answer appears simple: by offering exceptional value and a superior customer experience.

But that just raises a bigger question: how do you do that?

Finding the answer to that question is the holy grail for companies today. Larger organizations use market research, customer surveys, collaborative forums, big data – all in the hope that they can hit the sweet spot before it moves again. For others, that workload and level of complexity, when combined with the lack of certain outcomes, is just too much to deal with, so they rely instead upon educated guesswork, gut feeling and some customer satisfaction feedback to guide their journey.

Whichever route they take, though, many organizations are still stepping over what should be their fundamental starting point – knowing and understanding their customers’ expectations. After all, how can you begin to meet and exceed customer expectations if you don’t know with any precision what they are?

The reason for this apparent oversight may be that knowing what your customers expect of you is not as simple as it sounds. One must first understand what an expectation really is, and then understand the implications involved in gathering information about customer expectations and using it to good effect.

What do we really mean when we talk about customer expectations? Here I discuss two possible meanings, and which you should be focusing on: