Understanding customer needs
Learning the customer’s underlying sensitivities:Obvious customer needs for things such as functional products, affordable prices and reliable service readily appear in survey results and focus-group highlights, and most companies do a good job of satisfying them.
What doesn’t show up? The needs below the surface—we call them sensitivities—that dictate a customer’s actual choice of brand or vendor. These are harder to discover, and many companies struggle to acquire the depth of understanding needed to gain a true competitive advantage. For this, they come to Epley.
The Epley difference:
Our methodology provides access to a refined interviewing approach, highly trained interviewers and engaging dialogue. We typically sample from groups whose recent experiences should place them in a particularly good position to speak to needs, such as customers who have recently completed a decision cycle or left your company. Finding the needs that lie beneath the surface requires active listening and keen insight into areas that are often taken for granted:
- What makes your company or method of operation different from others in its class?
- Things that come up only under certain circumstances or at certain points in their relationship with your company
- Seemingly small things that make a customer happy or even delighted with a company
- Problems that are so common that they are not even talked about—it’s just the way things are
