Yesterday I talked about asking your customer what they want to get ideas for new products or service. The problem with asking people what they want is that sometimes we aren’t exactly sure and, furthermore, what we think we want and how we behave can be totally different. A key piece to improving your knowledge about customer behavior is to observe what they are doing.
When you want to know how your customer’s behave, don’t assume you know what they want. This leads us to creating things based really on what we want since we always think that what we want and what the customer wants are the same. Standing Out From the Crowd Blog has excellent insight on this very issue. It talks about reacting to what a customer says when they call us with a complaint. How often have we as business owners had a knee jerk reaction to what someone said to us via a complaint. The post goes on to say that:
“Real behavioral knowledge comes from observing your customers and understanding their basic fears and motivations. Without a sincere effort to understand Customer Behavior, what you think would be a solution for their grumble might exacerbate the exact problem you are trying to solve.”
Well said.
So what are some things that we can do to better observe our customer’s behavior? Marketing Profs recently had a post on reading buyer’s digital body language which is a must in the digital world. The article presented 4 steps: communication, sales alignment, data management and marketing analytics. It’s basically all about how you interact with your client base, how your clients interact with you, being able to capture information and analyze effectively.
How can you better manage the process from an analytical standpoint? What other tools can be used to effectively observe customer behavior?
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