Jim Meskauskas reviews "When Customers Talk… Turn What They Tell You into Sales" by T. Scott Gross.
"If you could predict the future, would you do it? If you could know what your customer would want to buy tomorrow or next month or even next year, what would you do with that information?"
This is the question asked at the beginning of a new book, "When Customer Talk… Turn What They Tell You into Sales" by T. Scott Gross, and it sets the stage for what the majority of the book will focus on throughout.
Gross is a recognized expert on managing the customer service experience (and a successful restaurateur in Center Point, Texas) in cooperation with Phil Rist, Gary Drenick, and Joe Pilotta. Together, they are the brains behind BIGresearch, the marketing intelligence firm that has made a name for itself by using the internet to conduct survey-based research on the thoughts, feelings, and actions of consumers.
The thrust of the book is that if you are in a business that relies upon customers (I can't think of any businesses that don't), then it is important that you pay them mind. Just because someone has been willing to exchange currency with you for goods or services in the past doesn't mean that that someone will be willing to make the same exchange again in the future. Looking only at purchase data one will only know something about what the purchaser wants at the time he or she bought their goods.
After all, saying that the future will resemble the past because the future resembled in the past in the past is an infinitely regressive induction. Getting and keeping customers can be done not only by giving them what they want, but by knowing what they want to have before they ask for it. It can be done best not just by looking at the past, but by predicting the future -- a future based on what those customers and potential customers have to say today.
Though there are many things businesses can do to try and predict the future, among the most important actions to take is to talk to your consumer base. Don't talk at them; don't ask them questions that give you only answers you want to hear; a business has to be somewhat like a skilled therapist: it must be both an insightful inquisitor and an active listener.
This might be easy for a small operation, a mom-and-pop shop in a small town with proprietors who know their patrons by name, where customers are seen not only on the other side of the counter but in the pews at church. But what if you are a large company that rarely, if ever, gets to see your customer face to face and interact with on a personal level? One of the projects of Gross's book is to reject the anonymity that customers and the businesses they patronize both sink into when the transactions made between then continue without any sense of real contact. Why? Because by doing so, a business will understand more than just what the customer has done in the past based on a transactional history; a business will know better what the customer is going to want by virtue of who they are in context of the world they live in.
One of the primary ways this can be done, according to the author, is to talk to the customer and listen to what they say. The best tool for doing this is online surveying.
The power of online surveying, as most readers know from experience or intuition, is in its ability to aggregate large volumes of data from a broad swath of people in a short period of time. What once took weeks and months to do with a small sample can now be done in days over a very large one.
BIGresearch has two tools that -- when used in conjunction -- allow businesses to learn a great deal about what they should do about packaging, inventory, style of selling, and myriad other things to address customer wants. One tool is called CIA (Customer Intentions and Actions), which allows for "predictive surveying." Through predictive surveying, what customers are going to do and what they are going to want can be gleaned from responses.
Traditional planning and marketing tools present data that looks backwards, giving businesses a post facto read on the marketplace. Asking customers what they think they will do can reveal to a business a lot about what to prepare for.
The other tool, the "Clusterizer," seems to be a sort of black box that does the gleaning. It aggregates the CIA data. The survey method is not just looking for answers to multiple-choice questions, but taking actual natural language responses and putting them together in clusters to reveal trends that might be actionable in the near- or long-term future. This information the author calls "foreknowledge," an important concept in this book. Foreknowledge is what can serve as the basis for decisions made about how to influence the future of your business. It is knowing what customers want before they act on those wants.
One of the best things about this book is that it seeks to address one of the most important components of what I like to call "adverbial cause." There are lots of ways to determine the how, what, when, and where of customer behavior. For decades, standard forms of market research have gone about answering these kinds of questions. What is often overlooked -- either because we don't care or because it is too hard to know -- is why. Mr. Gross does a good job at demonstrating the importance of why and explaining where why comes from.
Motive and context (not mutually exclusive) are where the why can be found. Finding out why courses of action are taken or certain feelings are had contribute a great deal to the divination of future courses of action because they are closer to what systems analysts often refer to as root cause. Why people do things and the cultural contexts in which they act from are important influencers on how people behave and what they say about it.
Talking to customers and listening to what they say with sensitivity to motive and context can reveal more about what those customers say and how businesses can get them to say it. To learn the most about what customers are going to want requires businesses to become sympathetic with their customers. They have to become part of the dialogue, an active participant in the conversation; they have to be interlocutors, not just passive receptors to statements. Businesses need to see themselves and their customers not just as agents in a play of transactions, but as what one philosopher called being-in-the-world.
To get the best understanding of your customer, you have to see both them and yourself as unitary phenomenon that needs to be seen as a whole. Answering the adverbial cause questions can paint a more complete picture of the marketplace and the constituents that both serve, and are served by, it.
A terrific observation T. Scott Gross makes through the distillation of data in context is one of the primary -- if not the primary -- root cause for consumer behavior:
1. We think the purchase will make us feel good (or better).
2. We are afraid of feeling bad because we did not buy.
This is in line with what I've long suggested are the primary drivers for consumption that can be found close to the reptilian part of our brains: fear and inadequacy. Both compel behaviors that seek to make us feel less bad and thereby feel good.
The author makes some attempt at elucidating the future of discerning the future by pointing out changes in technology, service structures, and brand relationships. Technologies that let us have more freedom, like hand-held product scanners and voice recognition, will affect brand interaction in ways that go far beyond the old price-value ratio. Unbundled services from the products with which they were once linked create efficiencies in the marketplace and reorganize customer behavior. And because the price-value ratio no longer means what it once did, identification with brand (and how that brand will seek to attach itself to the consumer) is likely to gain primacy.
If you are concerned that a book about talking and listening has too much talking and not enough listening, take heart: the book is replete with listening in the form of real world data. There are dozens of tables and charts and graphs that highlight findings from the research done surveying some 100,000 customers. Some readers who market certain categories of product -- in particular, retailers -- will be well-served with the potential power of BIGresearch's tools as demonstrated by the data they yield. Yes, this means that the book is in part an advertisement for BIGresearch, but like good advertising anywhere, you get information about the product you wouldn't have had otherwise.
The book suffers some from a great deal of repetition about the importance of talking to customers and how to do it. Of course, as people working in advertising know, frequency is important when trying to get your point through the distracting mania of the typical day.
Another distraction for the reader might be the excessive use of exclamation points to keep the narrative from becoming too prosaic. Only the works of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko might have more of them. But this does contribute to the folksy tone the prose sometimes takes when the author is discussing personal experiences to highlight his points, which is good in a text that has to thread together so much data. Some of this homespun quality works to make what Mr. Gross is talking about more relevant, like when he tells us that his son used to wear a pair of black-and-white checkered VANS when he was a teenager and suggests that made him a candidate for clown school. The point the author is trying to make is that though the shoes looked silly, the reason for wanting them was to fit in. (For the record, I had a pair of those, too, when I was in junior high. I thought they were pretty cool.)
If you are looking for academic-toned analysis of business climates, like the sort brought to us by Clayton Christensen or Frances Cairncross, you won't find it here (save for a brief bit about hermeneutical analysis). If you want to know more about a physical environment's influence on customers, read Paco Underhill's "Why We Buy." If you want a more metaphysical discussion about the marketplace as conversation, "The Cluetrain Manifesto" still has legs. But if you are looking for something that tries to make the points that both of those books do with a precision made possible only by real data, "When Customers Talk" will satisfy you.
Jim Meskauskas is a longtime interactive marketer, writer and consultant. Read his full bio here.