Needs Based Research Market Research

It has long been recognised that it costs less to retain existing customers than to attract new ones.  It would seem to be obvious that if you fully understand what customers want from you, and are then able to provide it, you cannot lose – customers will be happy, buy more and be profitable.

In essence, effective customer relationship management ensures that the customer or service user feels that they are important, valued and that their needs are at the heart of your organisation.  Through much of the customer satisfaction research that we have conducted, we have found the reality is often very different (as shown in the chart below).

Whilst in reality it is impossible to tailor your product and service for every single customer separately, it is vital that customers at least feel that they are important and that their needs are being met.  We find that a successful customer satisfaction or customer needs project can help to re-address this balance and ensure that customers feel that their needs have been met.

To fully understand customer needs, we feel that there are 5 key stages (and we work with clients in all of these areas if needed):

• Get key process owners involved upfront. 
• Ensure you know what is important to the customer before you measure customer needs.
• Ensure that data is actionable.
• Measure both tangible and intangible aspects of customer needs.   
• Putting actions into place and measuring performance over time. 

Ensuring that data is actionable is a very important step in the process. At DJS Research we do not have any off the shelf techniques that drive our methodological suggestions. However, broadly speaking there are a number of different approaches that we can use:

• Numerical Rating Scales
• Word Based Rating Scales
• Servqual