Solving the Customer Enigma

Have you been listening to your customers properly lately?

What do your customers really want to know?

What products, services or experiences will entrance them?

What services might competitors bring to the industry - and can you get there first?

Where are the best opportunities for innovation?

In my experience, the best way to answer these questions comes down to a pretty simple concept: truly understand each customer’s needs, and see where and how your business, your competition and your entire industry is or isn’t meeting them.

Simply put, customer understanding is the engine for driving better, more innovative customer experiences.

If you think about it, innovation is really about differentiation. It’s about business growth. It’s one way to get closer to your customers than your competition!

This way, you can serve them better and keep them longer – and increase their value to you in the process.

The ones that are most successful at driving customer-facing innovation are those that actually look at their companies from the “outside-in” or through the eyes of their customers.

This is one reason customer experience tools such as customer journey maps and research have been thrust from customer experience consulting firms to the front lines of corporate strategy in many companies around the globe.

Of course, virtually all companies today have an even more powerful tool at their disposal, though most don’t bother to use it…

This is the ability to gather, store, and analyse the massive volumes of data generated by your customers as they interact with you, your systems, your services and your products!

These tools and others like them are proven to help companies look at their company from the outside-in, driving a better understanding of their customers and their needs.

By truly understanding your customer’s and their needs you can do things like:

Anticipate their needs.

Save them money and time.

Provide them with better products and better information.

Make their lives easier.

Give them insights that make them smarter. Or healthier. Or better informed.

Connect them with other people, organizations, and events of interest to them.

Design experiences that no competitor can match.

I am sure you get the idea.

And the good news is, if you’re not doing so today it really doesn’t have to be a science project. It can start modestly. But start it must.

The definition of a quality customer experience is easy to define, and equally clear: Seamless, easy, enjoyable, and intuitive.

To differentiate and compete in the years ahead, your company needs to find new ways to mix and match across journeys, segments, and technologies to provide these kinds of experiences, to get you closer to your customers and generate greater engagement and loyalty while leading, of course, to sustainable profits.

Today, your customers want products and services to be so easy and intuitive to use that they don’t require instructions or a support hotline, much less the need to change the ways they think, work or interact with technology already.

By truly understanding them, you’ll learn what they want in the future, too.

For many of us, the future of customer experience is already here!