Customers are now well accustomed to interacting with brands across a variety of channels and devices. This makes their lives easier, and creates opportunities for the brands in question to engage customers in different ways. However, it can present huge challenges to marketers who struggle to ‘connect the dots’, and bring all of that information together cohesively
It can feel overwhelming, but to unlock actionable insight, strip things back, and ask four very pertinent questions at the start, to support vital analysis:
- What are your observations on how people behave?
- How do people take in your message? (identified through sensory processing, eye tracking, or simple web tracking)
- How do people feel about the decision they are making? (is it rational, or emotional?)
- And how do people ‘think’ about the choice they’re making?
Answering these opens up a wealth of insight for any customer facing brand, but this alone isn’t the only data analysis you need to do.
Speak to your customers
Real-world customer feedback on products and experiences is among your most valuable. It’s very easy to, as I put it ‘boil the ocean’, or get lost in reports about what a target audience likes to eat for breakfast. What you really want to know is how to make a product or service work better, and the best way to find that out is to speak to your customers.
Gathering data this way needn’t be expensive. Nielsen ran a study in the US, and found that after just five in depth interviews, they were able to identify 80% of the problems with a product or service, that were identified by a much larger, (and therefore more expensive from a research perspective) group of people.
Validate ideas at an early stage
This could be transformative for brands, as it allows them to make cheap and fast progress in refining concepts before investing in new apps, websites etc.
We use a similar approach, called a ‘sprint’; moving from ideas and assumptions to real customer feedback as quickly as possible. We can validate approaches at a low level quickly, rather than get far down the track to find out the ideas we’ve invested in do nothing to motivate or engage our customers. This is the holy grail of human centered design, with data as the driver.
Don’t overcomplicate the process
Persona modelling is a useful tool when building a picture of your customers. However, it’s important not to get bogged down in modelling or processes and to keep a sharp focus on understanding what jobs the customer needs to do, what pains they tend to experience in completing those jobs, and what gains/advantages or efficiencies they would value the most.
In my view, this is much more useful than knowing what percentage of your customers use one channel over another, especially as so much channel targeting is going to be AI automated over the next 18 months. Frankly, there is little point in trying to compete with a sophisticated algorithm which is getting more powerful and useful by the day!
There are some impressive consultancies that promise to deliver unprecedented levels of accuracy when it comes to customer profiling, accessing anonymised data from retailers across the globe and making it their life’s work to track consumers’ every move online. Many brands may already take advantage of their services, but with this level of analysis, are we heading for a ‘data soup’ where brands can literally find out ANYTHING about a person? I would rather focus on helping businesses build better products and experiences. AI can help find the people to introduce it to.
It’s not all about analytics and charts
Persona modelling in any form needs to be based on data, but drawing human insights from a myriad of charts and numbers does not inspire many people to create or do things differently. Similarly, conducting customer interviews as we do during our Sprint process is all about presenting an audience with a prototype and trying to gauge which features make them smile, frown, get frustrated, excited etc. You simply don’t get this level of directional insight from reading reports or getting lost in analytics segments.
Building a connected picture of your customers in practice
The Bank of America followed working mums around for months and observed two things; they all wanted to save (but never had any spare cash to do so), and they were also, and rather peculiarly rounding up bills to the nearest dollar when writing cheques to pay them. The insight here was that these working mums wanted to make sure the bill was covered, but the innovation it unlocked was a brand-new service called ‘Keep the Change’. They created a special card that rounded up every transaction to the nearest dollar and deposited the change into a savings account. The project led to thousands of new savings accounts being created, and helped mums finally achieve their savings goals. You don’t get this kind of human insight from Google Analytics or trend reports.
The approach outlined in this article might seem quite analogue, especially coming from a digital agency, but I recommend staying connected to the reality of trying to make things work better for real people. We are not here to think about people as consumers or users, or indeed an abstract or anonymous data set. The Bank of America knew this, and many other brands are waking up to the realisation that amassing a wealth of data is futile if you’re not able to gather the human insights from it, particularly in the customer age where the fight to retain loyalty and engagement is tougher than ever.
To read the full report, click here.
By Luke Battye, strategy director at CAB Studios
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