Developing customer insights

Expertise in behavioural and ethnographic research allows organisations to discover exactly what customers need in order to implement actionable customer insights. These insights are points of view, opinions and ideas held by customers about the organisation.

Customer insights uncover the underlying mindsets, emotions, motivations, desires and aspirations that trigger the ways customers behave and act when interacting with a service.

Insights provide information to solve problems that customers encounter when interacting with an organisation. It negates the need for assumptions and is tailored to meet the customer and business needs.

The ultimate goal is to use the insights to create an experience that customers will love, look forward to and recommend.

Gathering customer information involves gathering qualitative data about your customers and their needs. This is then distilled into a number of understandable and easily digestible customer insights. Our customer research page explains how we gather this information in more detail.

Each insight can then become an action item. They can be used to align services and meet (and exceed) the customer's expectations.

Customer insights are valuable nuggets of knowledge about a customer and their experience which will:

• Reveal the "core customer need" for an organisation in the context of a product/service offering
• Re-align and focus an organisation's customer value proposition so it continues to be valid as the business grows and changes
• Predict change and guide an organisation towards innovation
• Identify specific problems customers are experiencing and suggest ways to solve them
• Allow organisations to develop a solid a customer service strategy

By listening to Virgin Mobile customers, Proto were able to develop the 'ideal customer experience' and map a series of customer-tested service initiatives for Virgin Mobile to implement. A major goal was the optimisation of the 'welcome experience', developed to address real and identified customer wants when they arrive at a Virgin Mobile outlet, balanced against business needs.