Customer Insights

Customer insights guide your choices

A truly customer-driven approach means your decisions should be based on insights about your customers. That might sound obvious, but plenty of organizations have no procedure for obtaining customer insights and making everyone in the organization aware of them. 

With a full understanding of your customer’s total experience of a service or product, you’ll be able to prioritize future development based on actual need – not just on gut feeling. You’ll be able to deliver competitive customer experiences – and lower your risk of spending time and money on services and products that fall short of your customers’ expectations.

We aren’t asking what customers want

Insight work starts with taking stock of what you already know about your customers, which could mean previous qualitative research and pure data. Then we’ll add to your insights. The process may differ from one project to the next, but tends to include different kinds of analyses, interviews and observations.

We aren’t asking what customers want. Rather, we’re developing a deeper understanding of their underlying needs and motivations, which can be used as the basis for innovation. Some common research methods include in-depth interviews, focus groups, user tests and contextual interviews.

We refine these insights using target-group descriptions (personas) categorized by need and behavior and we illustrate them through experience maps and customer journeys. The process provides a great foundation for internal consensus, innovation and prioritizing your service development.

Common insight pitfalls

• You start from your own sales processes or obsolete facts – resulting in an inadequate, sometimes misleading image of your customers’ needs.

• You have several different segmentation models, none of which are coordinated with the people/behavior profiles you’ve produced.

• The person in charge of customer insights can’t get management’s support or disseminate what they know throughout the organization.

• Several people are working separately to produce customer insights, with no coordination or transparency – there is no solid collaboration among qualitative methods, quantitative insights and key financial figures. 

If any of the points above feel familiar to you, then you’re in good company. But it’s an important sign that you need to review how you work with customer insights. If your business is about to undergo a change, then now might be the perfect time to get started.

Strategy for structured customer insight work

A customer insight plan will help you gather information and turn it into actionable insights, all the way to your services, partnerships and work processes. You’ll have qualitative and quantitative information. No matter the size or business, all companies need a customer insight plan to develop better customer experiences, disruptive offers and a stronger brand.

The customer insight plan is based on three main areas, and the strategy is the most beneficial if you tackle all three:

1. Get the right information

Get a complete understanding of how, when and why your customers turn to you. Use customer journeys and behavior types for help, and collect the right kind of data. We’ll help you make the right selection, take advantage of existing insights, and use a balanced blend of qualitative and quantitative methods. This will result in deeper insights and better cost-effectiveness.

2. Turn information into actionable insights

Maybe you have lots of insights, but you also have trouble finding the right path, reusing, or building upon them. Put together a situational, fit-for-purpose structure – choose the right analysis methods, and save, share and illustrate data wisely.

3. Collaboration, organization and processes

Once your structure is in place, you know the right information will be collected, how it will be analyzed and distributed, and how those working on customer insights will collaborate. The goal is to work with insights in a way that produces more benefits, better cost-efficiency, less vulnerability and improved internal collaboration.

Learn more

• Service design
• Digital design
• Customer-driven organization
• Design system
• Content strategy
• Usability tests
• Innovation
• Customer journey
• Behavioral design
• UX design
• Policy design
• Sustainable design