"Through your research, we found much needed data on buyer and consumer preferences, likes and dislikes, and purchase intent, as well as feedback on the pricing of “unique” Georgia Shrimp product offerings.
And your report skillfully packaged the results of this research in a way that made it easy for us to quickly understand and apply this information in our decision-making… "
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Customer Understanding
Voice of the Customer
Observational Studies
Customer Profiles
Perception & Awareness
Who are your customers? Can you identify and describe all of the people who will come in contact with your offerings? In addition to the people who directly use your product or service, you should also consider the needs of all of the people who influence the decision to purchase the product, those who install, support and maintain the product, as well those who indirectly benefit from the use of the product though they may never use the product themselves.
Voice of the Customer"Voice of the Customer" or "VOC" involves the collection and analysis of quotes and comments from all of the people involved with the product to uncover basic needs and wants within a market segment. There are many potential sources of customer verbatims including site visits, focus groups, customer satisfaction survey comments, customer meetings, discussions with sales representatives, and customer requests for new product features or problem fixes, to name a few. By studying these comments within the context in which they were said, one can identify basic needs and wants, perceived benefits, and how the customer would assess whether the need has been satisfied by the proposed product or service. If organized properly, this information can provide a clear and rich description and map of what needs to be comprehended in the new product or service.
Observational StudiesSometimes customers can not articulate what they need. In these cases, other qualitative research methods are deployed to observe and study the customer in their own environment. By watching customers do what they do and seeing first hand what they actually do versus what they say they do, how they do it, and why they do it that way, we can often uncover latent needs that even the customer did not know that they had.
Customer ProfilesOnce this descriptive customer information has been collected and organized, patterns often emerge that help describe or characterize the customer or consumer segments. Particularly in business-to-business markets, there are often multiple people involved in the decision to acquire products or services. The ability to identify all of the decision influencers, their role in the decision making process, their level of influence, their interests and priorities is important when designing products and services that meet their collective needs.
Perception & AwarenessPerception does not always match reality. Customers are not always rational and may perceive a product to be advantaged or disadvantaged over another when in actuality both products perform identically or the converse is true. You need to know how aware customers are of your brand, products and services, and how they perceive them rightly or wrongly against your competitors.
Measuring awareness determines the percentage of your target audience that recognizes your organization or brands, and provides insight on what these people think about your organization’s products and services. So, not only should you measure that they know about you, you should also measure what it is about you that they know.
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