Rethinking Research
PART 1: Customer closeness in the remote era
Living through this global pandemic has heightened, diminished and recalibrated customer needs and motivations, so there’s no doubt a business’s relationship with customers in a post- COVID world will look very different. As customer attitudes shift fast, customer insight is rapidly becoming the beating pulse that businesses are using to health-check their approaches and provide the evidence they need to adapt in the right ways.
We can no longer get physically close to our customers like we did before, yet customer experience drive success. Not only for businesses that are thriving, but those who have retained, or even enhanced the traction of their brand, and the advocacy of their customers. So, if customer experience is at the heart of key business decisions, surely, it’s more important than ever to uncover good customer insight, and stay in touch with customer’s expectations, priorities, needs and behaviours.
The customer isn’t new, they’ve just had a dramatic rethink.
All of our previous assumptions about customers must be questioned. The only thing that is consistent and predictable at the moment is change.
We’ve been monitoring emerging themes and tracking changes in the way people are dealing with the crisis across industries. There have been clear waves of responses throughout the pandemic — at the start was crisis mode as businesses looked to adapt as quickly as possible. A few months in and we started to see signals of a new set of themes and behaviours emerging — consolidation, then action, and often innovation.
Of course demand, or lack thereof, is a key factor in how a business is affected, but it’s not just demand that impacts whether a business can survive and thrive, it’s a business’s ability to adapt which we believe is the most key.
At our Fluxx Exchange breakfast event last month, we chatted to over 50 senior leaders from a cross section of industries to learn from our peers about how businesses are surviving and adapting. We heard from the Head of Strategy at The Very Group talking about a shift in buying demand, that seems obvious now, but would have been hard to accurately predict at first; “Customer behaviour has shifted massively. People want children’s clothes, laptops and hot tubs.” At a subsequent Fluxx Exchange just two weeks later, data insight company Kaiasm told us of another unexpected shift towards tea pots, egg cups and other more decorative household items.
In hindsight, we can easily understand the demand for educational, garden and home, and tech products as our homes turned into the playground, school and home office overnight. Would we have predicted then that this would transition to more ethereal products that would enhance the aesthetic of daily life, and tea with socially distant friends in the front garden?
Businesses are having to rethink way more than their product too, as they review their customer service, legal compliance and even distribution. Sainsburys have put their click and collect operation into static delivery vans in their car parks. That leads us to ask; is this actually better than what went on before? Perhaps this could lead to a new service; a network of micro- local collection hubs based in stationary delivery trucks, saving the environment from hundreds of thousands of road miles a year and increasing convenience for customers. We have to question all of our old ways and explore what ‘new normal’ actually means to customers.
Customer research as we knew it is no longer fit for purpose. It could never have told us any of this in a timely fashion. Now is the time for frequent, deep dive consumer research, coupled with an ongoing closeness to those customers, in order to get ahead of the curve and anticipate changes in consumer needs.
So, where next?
Now is the time to transition from customer research to customer closeness — the art of building a deep understanding of customers’ motivations and a nuanced understanding of how they might react to change, and why.
To be honest, we’ve always tried to do it this way. It’s been a highly effective way to help our clients invest, to grow, try new things and to retain a competitive edge. It’s about asking the right questions — the uncomfortable ones, and rubbing shoulders with real customers — often the people who would never show up for a focus group. It’s led us to some interesting places; we’ve gamed with cosplayers at a convention, shopped for groceries with parents and screaming toddlers, worked behind the counter in Argos, served customers in a Shanghai flagship store and even pretended to be an AI chatbot for expats in Dubai. All of these examples led us to some rich insights that helped develop winning products and services.
While we can’t physically rub shoulders at the moment, there’s still an opportunity to get close to customers, whilst keeping everyone safe. With one current client, we’re mixing remote research, and online polling, with in- venue research, fully kitted out with PPE and a camera on a stick. It’s less weird than you’d imagine and the conversations are very valuable.
We know COVID-19 has dramatically shaped customers’ behaviours
and we’re more than curious as to what’s next. Will consumers cut back spending to bare bones, or splurge on indulgences? Will they forgo their fast-fashion and impulse buys for solar panels, and upcycling furniture — or will they flip back to ‘normal’ behaviours established before lockdown?
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.
