Underestimate and exclude customers at your peril. They know everything.
Insight - helen blake
In our last Insight, Relationship Hotspots for Customer Journeys https://futurecurve.com/insights/relationshiphotspots we talked about the benefits AI can deliver if balanced with a real understanding of your customer’s buying journey and identifying the sticking points where human intervention is needed.
For 21 years, Futurecurve has put a spotlight on the world of the B2B customer, and we know one thing for sure and that is our customers know everything about us. They see and know so much, it’s scary.
They experience our businesses in multiple ways. That makes them the perfect judges on how well we respond to shared business challenges. Our customers can often draw surprisingly accurate conclusions about what might be wrong with our processes, our teams, our technology, our business model, our alignment, and so on.
Why aren’t your customers really being heard?
Most businesses have a range of customer analytics; customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT), NPS and KPI measures. Why is it, then, that the real, dynamic voice of the customer gets lost - the social, emotional voice that conveys their wants, needs, drivers? In part, this is due to the complex nature of B2B customer relationships. It’s a specialist skill to reveal behavioural and emotional drivers and patterns when each B2B customer has a unique set of decision makers and influencers.
Monitoring customer sentiment as broad numerical trends for a set of customers with differing contextual drivers means you risk losing sight of how they really experience, feel and value working with you. Deeper, more granular insights, such as their changing expectations because of their own business challenges, aren’t uncovered and explored. Tracking KPI trends is important, but only part of the picture. Absolute numbers can mask the fact that a 0.1% drop in CSAT may represent hundreds of customers and, if teams lose sight of this, dissatisfaction can build.
Major B2B customers can involve as many as 10 key decision-makers and influencers spread across a number of functional areas. These people are constantly benchmarking businesses against a range of providers (not necessarily direct competitors) to assess our company’s ability to add value to them. This complexity means it is easy to miss some key stakeholders. They may not respond to CSAT or NPS surveys, so you don’t really know how they feel about your business, product or service.
Understanding the dynamics of a multi-contact customer account needs more than an online survey to understand sentiment. A great NPS score from your direct user customer may mask a senior executive who really doesn’t see the value you deliver. Conversely, the senior team might love your offering but the direct users find you difficult to work with. Either way, you may be missing opportunities and risk losing the customer despite seeing positive scores.
B2B customers are increasingly intolerant of those providers that do not meet their expectation. The reputational risks involved at both the personal and corporate level are simply too high.
Now is the time to really listen to your customers
At Futurecurve, the difference we make for our clients is by bringing their customers into the centre of our collaborative approach:
Customer value experiences anchor strategic and operational recommendations
Qualitative in-depth business conversations deliver insights across all key customers, including each decision maker and influencer
Application of business, psychological and social science research techniques enables deeper, granular understanding
Analysis using our three-dimensional RES process focuses on the Rational, Emotional and Social aspects of value for a holistic view:
Rational aspects feed directly into product, service and operational design
Emotional and Social aspects are the relationship and human elements in those important moments of customer value experience. These are frequently the ones that truly matter and so are actively uncovered and harnessed into the outcomes of our work.
Deep, holistic customer insights allow everyone across the business to hear what customers really have to say about their experiences of working with your business and their expectations of working with you going forward. These will overturn any outdated assumptions about what customers want and give laser-sharp precision to your customer focus.
In summary
Customers change and so do their expectations. Increased use of AI is accelerating that change. Understanding how these changes impact your business is imperative, especially before considering or planning the introduction of GenAI.
Customers know everything. We need to include them, collaborate with them, make them an active and integral part of our go-to-market strategies and at the heart of our GenAI. We underestimate and exclude them at our peril.
An offer from Futurecurve
We are passionate about the power of customer insights. If insights delivered by qualitative research using business and psychology analysis is new to you or your business, we have created a specific pilot offer.
To find out more, test the approach, experience the value it delivers, and the dynamic difference it will make in your business, let’s have a conversation. Contact me on helen.blake@futurecurve.com