Are You Hearing Everything Your Customer Says?

"There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." – Sam Walton

Certainly, knowing what your customers are thinking is critical to the success of any business, regardless of whether it specializes in straight-to-consumer or business-to-business products and services. We’ve written extensively about the importance of customer satisfaction here, here, and here; the synergy between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction; and how one company, in particular, has been using its customer satisfaction research to improve service.

A recent article by Gerry Katz in Quirk’s Marketing Research (“Hijacked again!” December 2013, pp. 38-42) caught our eye, as it describes three of the more popular viewpoints relative to the “voice of the customer.” VOC, as it’s colloquially known, can be made to mean just about anything, according to those Katz calls “the stretchers”:

The Stretchers take VOC well beyond its original definition. For many, VOC has become a euphemism – it sounds better than “market research” or what we once called customer satisfaction measurement (and its more recent incarnation, the Net Promoter Score) and customer relationship management (CRM).

Katz notes that some, but not all, of those who use VOC to mean customer satisfaction and CRM interchangeably often downplay the synergy between the two methods. They use them as a sort of report card, a tool to indicate where they’ve been or how well they’ve done. They view it as a snapshot of the past rather than a springboard into the pool of discussion on future planning. Katz uses the image of a child who brings home a failing grade in reading: some families automatically blame the teacher or the methods used to grade the child rather than asking the more fundamental question, “Why [emphasis ours] can’t Johnny read?”

As these two methods are necessarily symbiotic, any customer research that focuses on just one of them is deficient. Yes, knowing that your customers rate their collective satisfaction with your services as a 3.7 on a 1-to-5 scale is valuable, but knowing exactly why that is the case (and why you were not rated a 4 or 5) is infinitely more useful and actionable.

Learning why is a hallmark of Tweed-Weber’s research capabilities. This sort of cohesion yields the deepest, richest, and most action-oriented results, speaking truth to numbers and backing up customers’ perceptions with data. Seeing the full picture reveals emotional connections and underlying motivations to the data, helping in validating and confirming insight on an emotional level and, ultimately, in providing confident recommendations.

If you’re wondering if customer research is right for you, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). As winter (hopefully) winds down and spring arrives, new growth begins. Now is the time to notice the changes within your industry and within your customer base, and remember that with every change comes a new beginning. No one can guarantee certainty, but market research can guarantee clarity. You will Know More, so you can Do More.