Why It’s So Hard To “Understand Customers”
You’d think it would be easy to determine what customers want. Just ask them. Or, better yet, observe their behavior.. There really aren’t any other options. If businesses could get actionable and accurate information this simply, we’d have much better customer service, and companies would get a better return of investment. It is WAY more complicated. In this chapter we’re going to look some of the fundamental problems in the quest for understanding customers.
Marketing Knowledge Vs. Customer Knowledge
Decades Of Research On The Say-Do Relationship
Since we all experience, almost on a daily basis, the gap between what people say, and what they do, or the gap between their professed values, beliefs and attitudes and their behavior, it’s almost superfluous to mention that there’s a huge body of research on just this subject going back at least eighty years. That said, the research findings are both interesting and consistent.
What does that research conclude? In a meta-study (Attitudes Vs. Actions) — a review of other individual studies on the subject, published in Journal the Journal Of Social Issues Volume XXV #4, 1969, researcher Allen W. Wicker describes the relationship of self-reported attitudes and actual behavior as follows:.
The studies cited above have covered a wide range of subject populations, verbal attitude measures, overt behavioral measures and attitude objects. Taken as a whole, these studies suggest that it is considerably more likely that attitudes will be unrelated or only slightly related to overt behaviors than that attitudes will be closely related to actions. Research link here
To give you a flavor of the many studies described, let’s take a look at one, published in 1958:, Students in a sociology course were given a questionnaire asking about their willingness to be photographed with an African American of the opposite sex. Four weeks later subjects were put in a situation that involved being photographed in just that context. On the attitude questionnaire just two of the subjects registered objections to being photographed. In the actual solution, however, twelve of them refused. Clearly there was a huge gap between what the students said, and what they did.
Lest you wonder, decades of research on the say VS do disconnect come to the same conclusion. When you ask people about their attitudes, intentions using some kind of self-report measure, and then you actually look at whether their behavior matches, there’s always a gap. While there have been a lot of explanations of why this gap exists, one thing is for sure. What people say often has little to do with how they behave.
Oddly enough, we know much more about what drives customers purchasing compared to what “works” in of customer service. There’s a huge body of knowledge about merchandizing – where to best place products in stores for higher sales. We know a good deal about advertising, down to what colors work and don’t work, how to word sales pitches in the media, how to construct commercials that sell, how to best package products, and on and on. It’s an incredibly well explored area of research, and while it can be very complex, there ARE answers to marketing questions.
It’s just not the same when it comes to customer service. Why is that?
There’s actually a very good answer. It’s easy to measure the ultimate goal of marketing and advertising. Sales. It’s that simple. Not only is it possible to measure sales, but it’s relatively easy since sales data are automatically collected during the actual customer-company transaction. What that means is that marketers don’t actually have to rely on what customer say. They can zoom in on “buying BEHAVIOR.
Not only that but it’s possible to evaluate the success of any marketing or advertising initiative rather quickly. It IS possible to identify a causal relationship between, let’s say, a marketing campaign, or even a single ad, and sales. It IS possible to do experiments. If a company wants to know whether placing a certain product line in the “impulse buy” area (near a checkout), all they have to do is try it, then track the sales of the items they have placed there. Each item can be tracked individually. The results can be available almost immediately.
It’s a similar situation for advertising. Companies track the direct effect of individual ads, so they know what works and what doesn’t work. Run a full page newspaper ad, and look at sales for that product over the next days, and you have a good idea whether it worked or not.
In marketing, it’s much easier to tie things a company does to increased sales. Companies don’t have to ask customers anything. They don’t have to rely on customers to accurately report what goes on in their heads when they read a company ad, because to be honest, it’s easier to look at buying behavior. Much more direct. That’s not to say never ask customers about marketing. They use interviews, surveys, and focus groups to pick the brains of potential customers, but the really powerful evidence of success or failure lies with the RESULTS. More sales.
This is very different from figuring out what customers “want” in terms of service. That’s because companies don’t have behavioral data they can tie to a specific company action. What’s left? You ask customers about their perceptions of customer service. Since it’s hard to evaluate whether having more staff available at the checkouts CAUSES more sales, companies need to ask customers their opinion, but opinions are not behaviors.
For example, a common question asked of customers is: “Have you ever stopped doing business with a company because of poor customer service? And they tell us. Yes. I have. What we don’t know is whether they did what they said they did, how often they’ve abandoned a business, and a slew of other “customer behaviors”. It’s even tougher to get at the WHY’s of customer behavior. If, for example, we ask customer why they left a store, they’ll certainly give us an answer, or even several answers, but are their verbal responses indicative of the real “why’s”? People aren’t very good at understanding their own decision making processes, and explaining them to others. Yet, we have to assume that their verbal answers accurately reflect what goes on in their heads.
It gets even tougher if you ask what customers say they WILL do, given a particular customer service situation. When customers are asked: “Will you pay more for better customer service?” almost universally, the research, based on self-reports, indicates they SAY they will. But we don’t really know. We don’t know because customers themselves don’t know what they WILL do in the future — only that they intend to act in a particular way. If you’ve ever parented a teenager, you know that there’s many a gap between what is said, what your son or daughter promises to do, and what he or she actually ends up doing. Come to think of it that gap between say and do is often a lot bigger than we’d imagine, even for mature adults. No doubt you can think of examples from your own behavior, or those close to you to confirm the basic, and all too obvious disconnect between what people say and what they do.
Almost the entire body of knowledge we have, or more accurately think we have, about customers and their reactions to various customer service changes are based on self-reports — interviews, survey results, that kind of thing. That is why there is such a gap between what we know about marketing and what we know about the wants of customers, and even the effects of customer service on customer BEHAVIOR.
