Acquiring the right kind of customer understanding

    

Companies often have tons of data on current customers interacting with their own products and services, as well as data about customer satisfaction, perceptions and preferences within the industry category. This is really useful in learning how to do the same things better.

However, it's not so useful for learning what different things to do to serve current or new customers. For this you need to:

  • Know customer's goals and activities that surround and incorporate your offering - from their perspective
  • Spot latent needs that consumers haven't ever thought to complain about.
  • Gain nuanced qualitative customer understanding to frame new and different things to measure
  • Understand the needs and desires of people who are not currently -- but could become -- your customer
  • Have the ability to convert insights into innovation concepts
   (photo goes here)
 Studying leisure travel customers
for Alamo, Doblin discovered a variety of needs beyond quick car rentals, many of which presented new revenue opportunities at their large leisure travel destinations.
These included storage of winter clothes, parcel mailing, self-guided audio tours leveraging global positioning technology and on-site convenience store shopping.
How Doblin can help

For 17 years, Doblin has been a pioneer in customer research for innovation and in helping our clients translate customer insights into innovations.

We can:

  • Deliver a presentation on customer research for innovation
  • Run workshops to teach customer research for innovation methods
  • Do customer research for innovation in the context of an innovation project
  
If you want to know more

View the Doblin Insights for Innovation presentation

See a list of Doblin customer research methods

See a list of Doblin customer insights for innovation clients

See the Alamo and SAS case studies