5 ways to understand your customers better

Source: Pete comedy_nose on Flickr Creative Commons

“The station master was shouting back at me, he just wasn’t prepared to listen.”

“The station master was shouting back at me, he just wasn’t prepared to listen.” This was the most telling comment from my wife following a near disastrous customer experience of travelling to York by train, for a pre-University recce with my daughter. The local train they had travelled on arrived two minutes before the connecting mainline train was due to leave. After rushing across to the platform the departing train’s doors closed immediately in front of them; with the train leaving one minute early by the station clock. On approaching the station master in a measured and calm manner they were confronted with a barrage of bluster and mild contempt. He had clearly decided that the best form of defence was attack.

This emotionally charged episode seems to encapsulate many of the misunderstandings that can arise in delivering a great experience to a customer, on many different levels. From the systematic and technical – the website should never have sold the tickets as a valid connecting service, through to the human and inter-personal – not properly engaging in an adult-to-adult conversation.

Humans have a deep-seated desire to be understood; indeed this may even be the second most important need we have after physical survival. Not being understood is therefore a profound unmet need; whether at a given moment, on a station platform perhaps; or over a much more sustained period of time, as a bank’s customer for twenty years maybe. Unmet needs are great motivators to action, which should be well worthy of a brand’s time and attention.

So, how can brands understand their customers better? Well, here a just five ways for starters. Any one of them could make a mutually valuable difference to the brand:customer relationship.

1. Actively listen. Epictetus the Greek Stoic philosopher said “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak”. Great advice then and now. Advice that many brands would do well to follow. Brands need to actively listen on many levels, to: what their customers are saying about them online to others, how they are responding in surveys, what they have said or written directly within a one-to-one communication. Brands need to listen with the intent to understand. Not listen with the intent to reply. Actively listening means seeking out what customers are saying and then interpreting this, drawing upon all that you know about a customer.
2. Ask rewarding questions. Many customers would love to be given the opportunity to open up a bit. They are likely to be flattered that the brand is interested in them, so long as the interest is genuine and viewed as such. Ask your customers questions that they’d like to think about and mull over. Questions that they could get immediate benefit from answering and maybe understanding how fellow customers have answered too. Knowing your customer is about more than ticking some boxes. It requires more thought but is more rewarding for you and for your customers.
3. Be clear on which customers feel well understood and which don’t. You’ll probably have a view on which customers you understand best but would they share it? You may be less clear on which customers feel misunderstood, outside of the letters of complaint writers. The question set used in our Mutual Understanding Measure™ can help identify and profile customers who feel that the brand doesn’t get them, enabling you to act upon this before they do.
4. Test out your understanding but in a self-effacing way that supports further feedback. If you feel that you have built up a good understanding and relevant insights. Test this out in the form of new communications, content or service innovation. Test it live or in research but approach this in a self-effacing way that encourages constructive collaboration with your customers. Their tweaks and refinements to a concept, prototype, draft, beta or first release could make all of the difference.
5. Pair your most empathetic staff with your toughest customers. Whilst the latest research from the University of Virginia suggests that our brains may be hardwired to be empathetic, some of your staff are likely to have better wiring than others. Identify colleagues who are naturally empathetic and make sure that as many of them as possible are in potential customer “flashpoint” roles. Not something the rail network operator seems to have achieved based upon my wife’s experience.

Tellingly, as the conversation with the station master developed he was almost compelled to listen and grudgingly started to show some understanding. Not before he had repeatedly exclaimed “I’m having a bad day!” He was clearly looking for understanding too!