Hit the ground running
INSIGHT - HELEN BLAKE
It’s the back-to-work season. Time to hit the ground running.
September is always the pedal to the metal time for businesses. Whether it’s business planning, budgeting rounds, or pushing for a successful quarter, most of us are driving ahead this month.
So much has changed in these turbulent times, testing resilience and adaptability. Customers and their ideas of value have changed too. So, the chances are your value-led approaches may well be a little off target.
Gaining deep, rich insights from your customers can best be achieved through qualitative research techniques. While annual surveys, net promoter scores, and satisfaction metrics are useful for monitoring progress, they don't provide insights into the challenges your customers face or the issues they grapple with. To gain such understanding, you need to immerse yourself in the world of your key customers.
AI can certainly perform sentiment analysis across large volumes of customer data, but what it can’t do is provide context. Different customers use terminology in different ways—words like ‘reliability’ and ‘flexibility’ can have a range of meanings, from basic expectations to deepest needs. Understanding context when learning from customers is critical.
I've frequently found myself in conversations where the Executive I'm speaking to says "yes” as part of an answer to a question, but the tone or delivery clearly means "no". This human trait - saying one thing but meaning another - is something we at Futurecurve use as a starting point for insight. We draw from our experience around what to ask and how to continue the conversation, uncovering both the reality of customer truth and key elements of tacit customer value that can be harnessed into a business-winning value proposition.
This kind of nuanced understanding - capturing the rational, emotional, and socio-political aspects of customer experience within context - requires a level of immersion that goes beyond transcript analysis. It is something that questionnaires, survey scripts, KPIs, ratings, or AI algorithms simply cannot deliver, as it is the ability to connect context and coded language, digging for truth and insight, that makes the real difference.
Our September Customer Value Experience Research Offer
If you are looking for an approach that lets you hit the ground running, we have created a special September offer to get your action plans off to a flying start.
We have designed a useful short, sharp way of calibrating your customer value, including uncovering what your customers want to experience from you going forward.
We will:
Run our Value Experience Insight Interviews with 6 to 8 of your key customers. These in-depth qualitative interviews are carried out via Teams or Zoom with your senior customers who make business decisions
Generate business-winning insights for you from the interviews, using our combined business, psychology and social science analysis techniques
Have a discussion session with you and your other senior colleagues
Reveal your compelling value to customers and focus on your business winning strategies and tactics.
The way we work is to guide you through every step of the customer contact process (from invitation to completion) and for a competitive, fixed fee you can expect the following results:
Business winning insights into where and how customers’ expectations of you are changing
Ability to align with your customers’ wants, needs and anticipated value – right now
Understanding the challenges your customers are experiencing and how these impact their decision-making
Confidence around what to focus on when engaging with customers
Insights into competitors
If you’d like to know more, do get in touch and we can get things started. There’s no time like the present.