Every business is in the business of serving its customers. And in a world full of choices, understanding customer behavior gets more and more important every day. Doing so enables an enterprise to outline how customers think and act and motivate them to prefer choices that benefit it’s brand. It is vital to boosting an organization’s competitiveness and ability to retain and engage more customers through customized products and solutions.

Understanding customer behavior has evolved from being mainly a marketing need to becoming a tool for decision-making at all levels. Customers buy products/services for a variety of reasons, including emotional and logical ones. Thus, it is beneficial for a company to understand the causes, motivations, and needs driving customers in order to create offerings that are better attuned to their customers. Understanding customer needs and motivations can also help improve decisions related to product development and customer services.

Research in understanding and predicting customer behavior has become critical to today’s analytics, AI, and machine learning applications. Organizations worldwide have access to endless sources of structured and unstructured data, including speech, text, and digital footprints.
However, competitive advantage doesn’t come from having access to heaps of data but through carefully aligned and structured approaches based on research that support decision-making.

Here are four reasons to showcase the importance of research in understanding “Customer Behavior” :

1. Keeps it Context-Focused
Information is worthwhile only when a business can draw meaningful insights from it. Research through a structured process keeps the focus on context and hence aids decision-making. Numbers and data should not be considered in a vacuum, – experience and expertise is needed to employ suitable instruments in an unbiased and context-focused way. The key is accurate context setting to understand the relevant scenarios and behaviors, including attitudinal, motivational, and aspirational .

2. Generate a Holistic View of the Customer
World and business scenarios are constantly changing, and so is customer behavior. Tremendous amounts of data from varied resources and multi-channel engagement is collected and produced every day by organizations. However, this raises the level of complexity involved in sound decision-making by executives. Understanding customer behavior demands a process that is more than just evaluating one-on-one interactions. It requires an evaluation of change in customer attitudes, buying behaviors, and expectations. Gaining insight into the customer view via a research-based process necessitates outlining various scenarios and conditions for more personalized outcomes in the present and the future.

3. Enables Unbiased and Science Backed Outcomes
Understanding customer behavior through research follows a scientific process tested in different scenarios and based on various tools. It requires expertise and a deep understanding of the context to explore attitudes, needs, motivations, and behavior related to the business. Thus, observations, asking the right questions and relevant analysis into conclusions are essential to providing insights that generate robust business outcomes.

4. Aids Decision Making
Decision-making at the strategic and tactical level in an organization is dependent on a deep understanding of customer behavior, particularly their buying and advocating decisions, as represented by actions such as social media posts and metrics like NPS (net promoter score). It is complex and depends on internal and external factors that influence the analysis of customers’ decisions.

Decision-making should be focused on enhancing customer retention and loyalty levels and thus needs valid, reliable information. However, the volume and velocity of the pile of unstructured data hinders effective decision-making involving targeting a customer segment or market, optimizing a product/service, or providing the relevant information to customers to enhance the customer decision-making process.

Customer behavior plays a significant role in determining an organization’s success in today’s competitive world. Understanding this behavior enables enterprises to retain and engage more customers. Customer behavior depends on external factors – social, cultural, environmental, and internal – including needs and expectations for products/services. It requires a structured approach through diligent research to understand the underlying factors, including emotional, economic, cognitive, and passive, in order to develop strategies and products/services to retain and engage customers.

Interested in learning more about how Customer Journey Mapping can help your business? Call us at 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Mapping and Research firm with extensive experiences in journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.