It’s time to rethink customer research. And here’s how.
PART 3: Rethinking Research
When designing customer research, most decision makers look for a range of quantitative and qualitative findings and data triangulation. This is a solid way to make logical decisions that are hard to argue with, for ideas you already have. It’s not a great way to uncover new products, or services, especially when they might be radically different from our ‘old normal’.
Customer closeness focuses on getting to the ‘why’ — the underlying customer motivation, and seeks to get into the psyche of that customer so that we can start to better predict what they need and how they will react to new things. This is the gold dust for innovation. It’s also much more adaptable, and more wide-ranging.
So, what do we need to add to research in order to turn it into customer closeness? First is to pay as much attention to actual customer behaviours as to what they say. That’s because there’s often a huge gap between what people say they do and what they actually do.
Here are some of our favourites from recent work:
When we asked a focus group of customers from a well known retail bank, whether they’d share spending data with the bank, 67% said no, never. Some even got quite angry by the idea. When we ran a live experiment at the same time, 95% of the same customers (over 10,000 people) knowingly opted in to share that very same data when they could see the value they’d get from doing so.
The result? The bank went on to create an entire business unit dedicated to creating value for customers through responsible use of their spending data.
Office workers told us they knew their way around the local shops really well — but when asked which new food outlets they’d like to see come to the area, 63% suggested one that was already within an 8 minute walking distance.
The result? We needed to enhance ‘discoverability’ in the area, so we started an ‘offers and hidden treasures’ board at the office exit, to help people be more aware of what’s around them and encourage them to discover new places.
A health club owner told us that pretty much everyone they sign up as a member cites the swimming pool as a key reason to join — yet, only 20% of members ever use it.
The result? In new clubs, they’re now building smaller swimming
pools as a result. These also have higher consistent water quality and a significantly reduced carbon footprint.
Customer closeness looks beyond the rational parts of people’s brains that ‘do the talking’, to the deeper parts — the ones that influence behaviour. And while it’s harder to observe when you’re not face to face with participants, it’s certainly not impossible.
Before COVID-19, we’d already realised that remote research needed to be a tool in our arsenal. It allowed us to cover a lot more geography, meet a lot more customers, and not to mention the tonnes and tonnes of CO2 emissions we saved by not having to travel around the globe. So now, we’re combining that ‘talking research’ with other approaches we’ve also used before, but adapted in order to get to those ‘moments of truth’ remotely. Here are some of the ones we’re finding most useful right now.
Longitudinal studies
Most commonly referred to as a ‘diary study’ — where you ask people to record their experiences over time. We’ve recently used Whatsapp, Google Docs, email, Miro, Trello, video and even a voicemail box to allow people to report quickly, regularly and often, their experiences and behaviours over time.
Shadow data
Like any good missing persons investigator knows, you can find the truth about anyone through the digital and transactional footprints (shadow data) they leave. If customers will allow us to, we can use those data to inform a complete picture of someone’s actual behaviours. We’ve had customers willing to send us photos of their shopping receipts, wear a fitness tracker, have their locations tracked, and even have their dogs GPS tagged. This also mitigates for people having to remember their behaviour, which is difficult and allows you to discuss any contradictions from their data, and ask that all important question: why?
The pandemic has accelerated us packaging this all up. But whilst we have carried on, we’ve seen that other areas of the customer research industry stall, or even stop, when they were unable to get out and speak to, or observe people in the real world.
As we write this, we are in week three of customer closeness with a property investment company. We’re checking in through online surveys with over 3,000 people a week on their attitudes and predictions for what they intend to do with regard to shopping. Then we’re out and about observing behaviours in shoppingcentres, and then talking remotely to both those customers who went to the shops, and those who never made it particularly if they said they were going to.
The new customer research has to be able to answer questions that we didn’t even know we needed to ask. It’s also got to be adaptable to the constant context changes, and be resilient enough to cope with the unexpected.
Paul Dawson is a Partner at Fluxx. Special thanks to Gemma Stafford and Gemma Slater for their contribution to this series.
Fluxx is the UK’s leading independent Innovation Company. For the last 9 years, we’ve been supporting clients to accelerate growth and sustain change; helping big companies be purposeful, build internal innovation capability and develop new products and services at pace. Got an idea you want to get off the ground? Get in touch Paul@Fluxx.uk.com. For more thoughts worth sharing, sign up to What the Fluxx or follow us on LinkedIn.
