Understanding Your Customers Through Their Own Stories

Many organizations could be wasting scarce resources on unnecessary customer research when there are cheaper and far more effective solutions. There is a danger of using research as a safety net, validating common-sense decisions and supplying relatively obvious information about what customers think and feel.

Some marketers now seem to delegate responsibility for thinking and decision-making to research companies. Yet much of the customer intelligence in these research debriefs already exists within organizations—and in a format that is easier to understand and remember, and is far more engaging, than PowerPoint presentations or documents. It also encourages innovative solutions.

Such customer intelligence exists in the form of customer stories, which can replace the safety net of customer research. They can be a springboard for customer-based innovation.

Stories about your customers are everywhere in your organization, in the chitchat in the lunchroom, in emails, at the coffee machine. Such stories are easy to tap into, and collectively they can increase the levels of customer understanding, insight and creativity in the organization, without expensive research.

Tapping Into the Power of Customer Stories

So how can you collect these customer stories? Just listen, listen, listen. Here are a few tips:

• Employees that interact directly with customers can use notebooks to write down interesting customer stories as they happen. These can be collected and collated regularly. (At first, you may have to offer rewards to motivate them to do this, but they'll soon see the benefits of this work.)
  
  
• Listen in to call center calls. They are a rich source of customer stories.
  
  
• Try cheap and easy ways to get stories from your customers, such as surveys and questionnaires. Don't worry about the expense of statistically significant approaches or expensive questionnaire design.
  
  
• Leverage the Web. There is far more talk about your organization on the web than you could ever imagine. It's happening now, in chat rooms, special interest groups, consumer Web sites and competitive Web sites.

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Neil Davidson is a marketing and communications consultant and writer. Reach him via www.silverdarlings.typepad.com or neildavidson65@gmail.com.