Slide the Empty Chair Closer to Understanding Your Customers

A Guide for Gathering Research and Insights

To better understand your customers, you must learn how to gather data and collect information about how they interact with your product or service. Then, you can interpret trends and patterns in customer behaviors. As your organization matures, it will go from gathering to using customer insights to inform direction, sliding the chair closer to creating a customer-centric organization. Below are the distinct phases involved in getting to that point.

Slide That Chair Closer with Research & Insights

How did Amazon evolve to become the world’s leading e-retailer? Part of the reason is the founder’s self-described obsession with customer experience. Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos is known for bringing an empty chair to meetings as a reminder not to forget the voice of your customer. It’s imperative that organizations understand customers to better inform strategy, make decisions and engage effectively. But, to create a customer-centric organization, bringing the empty chair to meetings is just the start. You must slide it closer to your actual customer.

The Empty Chair is Not Enough

Our White Paper Teaches you How

Based on our experience, here are some of the most common challenges organizations face when striving to become customer centric.

Barriers to Becoming Customer-Centric

Don't let challenges prevent you from acquiring, nurturing, keeping and winning back customers.

Gather Research and Insights

Lesson 1:

69%

of B2B customers are ready to take their business elsewhere.

(47%) strongly believe their vendor delivers on its promises.

Less than half

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Close the gap between customer expectations and reality by advancing your research and insights capabilities. There are a variety of research methods available within evaluative, generative and inferred research, but knowing which to use and when can be tough. Use our white paper as your guide to understand the top 10 research methods, examples of when to use each, the steps involved, and tips to get it right.

3 Research Types, 10 Methods for Better Insights

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and overdependence on tribal knowledge or anecdotal evidence in decision-making processes

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Lesson 4.

Lesson 3.

Lesson 2.

Lesson 1.

Determine which data and insights should be used to improve customer outcomes. Monetize new data elements, which in turn creates more new data to leverage.

Activate

Socialize insights across the organization to create a shared vision and information set. Create commonality with the data and information teams use to make decisions and inform each other.

Distribute

Get formal training in insights to make sense of raw data, transforming that into useful pieces of information. Gain actionable information to use every day.

Interpret

Collect raw information to be used as insights for decisions. Gain new data to monetize it.

GATHER

Generative Research

Evaluative Research

This research approach is conducted by mining existing owned and third-party data to better inform a specific problem or challenge, or to further grasp customer influences. Key types of analytics include descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive.

With this approach, researchers seek to gain a deeper understanding of the inner workings and surrounding influences of people regarding market conditions, consumer and customer needs, and products and services. Generative research could include participatory design, contextual inquiry, a market study, or ethnography.

This type of research is a systematic approach to learning about and determining a solution for a specific need, problem, challenge or opportunity. Examples include conducting a usability study, heuristic evaluation, in-depth interviews, customer journey mapping, a cognitive walkthrough and observation as a participant.

Inferred Research

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Lack of data

Lack of Understanding

Lack of data

Lack of Clarity

Lack of Consistency

Lack of Capabilities

Lack of alignment

and integration at the executive level around the voice of the customer (VOC) as an integral part of strategy

Lack of alignment

causes heavy investment of external resources because of limited internal expertise, skill, and competency across preferred methods of research and insights

Lack of capabilities

exists as research and insights are handled on a case-by-case basis with no integration in the business architecture

Lack of Consistency

on how customer centricity fits in with the organization and how to permeate the value across the enterprise

Lack of clarity

about what a research and insights function does and how it works