This piece is about customers. What does that have to do with me I hear you ask – I run a business. It is absolutely critical – fundamental: why does any of us run a business? To directly or indirectly, small or large, locally or globally, provide a service or product. And if we get it wrong hugely or often enough, we go under. So, does this article matter to you as a business leader? 100%. So, strap yourself in.

In researching this I came upon a short piece by the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal – “Know your customers’ needs” in which they noted “However good your product or service is, the simple truth is that no-one will buy it if they don’t want it or believe they don’t need it. And you won’t persuade anyone that they want or need to buy what you’re offering unless you clearly understand what it is your customers really want. Knowing and understanding customer needs is at the centre of every successful business, whether it sells directly to individuals or other businesses. Once you have this knowledge, you can use it to persuade potential and existing customers that buying from you is in their best interests.”

Market and competitor analysis, crunch the numbers (never understood why it was called that – it turns out that, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, the term has an electronics & Computer Science entomology as a slang term from the second half of 1900s – well there you go), track your sales and ROI, and so on. Usual suspects. But it made me think: surely these are what you do post-understanding (you hope) your customers. After all, if you assess competitor data, you feel the competitor already understands the customer and market – and you’re assessing it because, without being conscious of it, you believe the same. So perhaps the start is elsewhere. 

Shoppers once relied on a familiar salesperson – the now-fast disappearing high street butcher, baker and so on. The customer knew that the shop owner understood his or her wishes – depending on the size of the town village, actually knew their wishes – “same 5 haddock today Mrs Jones?” Perhaps in less concrete circumstances the shopkeeper could guess: if you took the family on holiday, the person behind the counter would use his powers of deduction that, having two 5-year olds in tow meant you were more likely to want chocolate than that week’s crossword. It’s a quaint scenario.

In 2017’s world of internet shopping, high street retailers at war (the mere battle has long gone – it’s all-out carnage), a plethora of choice, and costs driven down evermore by competition, you would think that customers had it easy. In fact, today’s distracted consumers, bombarded with information and options, often struggle to find the products or services that will best meet their needs. Do I shop online or in the store? What if it’s online and I don’t like it? If it’s in the shop can I use click and collect? In this world of overwhelming choice, back in the “real world” (what actually is that nowadays?), the short-handed, perhaps poorly informed, and, let’s be honest, often disinterested shop floor staff in many shops can’t begin to replicate the personal touch that shoppers once depended on—and consumers are still largely on their own when they shop online. (And that’s not a dig at shop floor staff – I was one for years, I know what customer behaviour and arrogance can sometimes be, and how you often feel very undervalued).

This sorry state of affairs is changing – thought not on any clear path; it’s continuously in flux – to an almost unfathomable degree given the advances in information technology, data gathering, and analytics. It is more than ever possible to deliver something like—or perhaps even better than—the shopkeeper’s advice. Using, increasingly, so-called “Big Data” of demographics, psychographics to consumers’ clickstreams on the web, businesses have started to create highly customised offers that steer consumers to the “right” aisle, product or service—and at the right moment, at the right price, and in the right channel. I have covered the mastery of Facebook in this regard in another piece – if you think you can even imagine how much Big Data “number crunching” goes on in a millisecond (literally), think again.

A good example – and in truth my first for this, brought to mind in a second – that shows you how much choice there is of platforms and shopping avenues is Amazon’s Alexa. “She” – it is often referred to as such and I do this – can increasingly carry out more tasks which relate to the customer topic; and, Amazon tells us, she learns from us all the time. Today I asked her “Alexa (her trigger word / name), call me an Uber”. I had already linked my phone’s Uber app to Alexa so she simply asked where I wanted to go and called it. A month ago, she couldn’t do that though she had heard of Uber. I then asked her to tell me about Amazon “Prime”. She did and then asked if I would like to activate it.

I asked Microsoft’s Cortana on my PC “does John Lewis sell lamps”; she took me to the website in less than a second. I asked Google on my phone, “where can I buy cinema tickets”; she took me to all available sites in less than a second, and in an order, I had set which was by locations. Google also knows, when I enter a shop, café, etc., not only where it is but which one. Interestingly in that regard, I recently upgraded my Samsung S6 to the new Samsung S8+. Previously we needed to turn on “location” in many phones. The default now is to have it on all the time – it needs to be turned off manually.

The scary or fantastic or mind-blowing – depending on your point of view – thing about all of this was pointed out by a presenter on a shopping TV channel recently (yes ok, I need to get out more, I know: shopping anyone?). I ask my gadget for product or service information, she (there I go again) hears me, digitises the command, sends it to internet, has a look round, finds what I need, downloads it, de-digitises it and speaks to me – in less than a second. Personally, as a consumer, I find it utterly marvellous. All the more because I know that these things are still relatively rudimentary. Suddenly Facebook’s billions of computes per second doesn’t seem so impossible.

It has been noted that, in similar vein, a search via Microsoft’s Bing engine, manages, in 200 milliseconds (yes that’s right), using advanced analytics software, to produce offers based on real-time information about you: location, age, gender, online activity (both historical and recent) and the most recent responses of other customers.

So, all of this begs the questions: do shopkeepers understand us at all or are they no longer required to – or even incapable of doing so, in the face of an onslaught of mined data? And do we either need or even want them to?

A Google search of “key traits of a shopkeeper” produces, in May 2017, “about 8,920,000 results (1.47 seconds)” – even Google knows it’s “about” – so my picking any one is probably as valid as any other. The UK’s My World of Work (https://www.myworldofwork.co.uk/my-career-options/shopkeeper) notes that “You would need to keep up to date with your competitors’ prices and products, take payments, give change and wrap items, give advice about products to customers, listen to customers’ needs and recognise new sales opportunities”. It’s safe to say the computer has that covered and some.

The technologies and strategies for honing evermore refined offers are evolving rapidly but businesses that wait to exploit them will see their customers defect to competitors that take the lead. Of course, that applies both online and in the high street but also across the two. If you don’t like X grocer or shoe shop, you’ll leave and go to another. And if you like neither or even just the trudge, you’ll abandon them and go online. The same also applies to products – when Samsung’s phones decided to explode in 2016 – oh look there’s a fire in your pants – customers could defect to other brands, and did so both on and offline.

So, we have established that customer is king and that we must know them and their requirements inside out. What next? In 2017, customers have never had more choice nor freedom to move cross-platform – businesses need to develop strategies to capture their custom. Of course, these differ in the detail between online and a shop but the principles are identical I think – if you get the strategy wrong, you lose the business. And, as an aside, they do say the devil is in the detail – hope that’s not a hidden warning about Big Data’s influence in 2027!

Our strategies need to achieve specific goals such as attracting new customers or increasing sales, loyalty, or spend. Company chiefs and executives should be ready to modify your objectives to exploit changing circumstances. This applies equally to a global corporate or a one-man band. Apple has had to ever-“improve” the iPhone to maintain sales. Lloyds Bank has introduced a video conference interview for mortgage applications.

• Know your client type – easy really: a bed store wants everyone but usually adults. A high-class restaurant wants adults with disposable income. A home-owner with an overgrown garden wants a gardener – and the homeowner is an adult or has hugely wealthy parents. You get the idea.
• Know your product or service – if you don’t, how do you know which offerings might appeal most to a customer? My experience is that, in the saturated world of online content, I needed to work out specifically what I could offer and the details of all areas of it, and only then know my customers: was my likely market CEOs or shop floor, families or singles, youth or older people, and so on. And believe me, I got it wrong for a while. I didn’t realise it then but when I started to have more success I was able to look back at what I had and hadn’t done, and much of that was failing to establish my ideal and probable client, and how my service linked, or could be fed to, them.
• Gather data – collect detailed data about customers (demographics; purchase history; social, mobile, and location information), offerings (product attributes, profitability, availability), and purchase context (customer’s contact channel – app or desktop, proximity, the time of day or week). I have also worked for retailers, banks, hospitality outlets, been a guest at hotels or bought a car – on every single occasion I was asked to take a store card, fill in my details, complete a leaflet which would win me a £3 million trip to Russia – never happened. All so they could know about me and later target services.
• Analyse the data – use statistical analysis, predictive modelling and other tools to match customers and offers. Precisely what computers do but also small bookshop owners who know their customer (the bookshop is small, not the owner. Well maybe). Carefully match offers and channels. Make offers sparingly, time them deliberately, and monitor contact frequency.
• Assess outcomes based on the shopping trend – purchases, footfall, average spend, items bought
• Follow up for repeat business – know every customer’s idea channel. If you always use leaflets, how do you know your customer is happy with that? How often have all of us filled in an online form for something only to be asked – or forced – to divulge what related – as they see it – interests we have? This is all very well but if assumptions are made – probably based on cost to ourselves or a misguided notion that this is ideal because everyone does it – it won’t work. You need to very quickly pick up on how customers make contact – face-to-face, by phone, by mail, on an app. Someone who calls customer service with a complaint is unlikely to respond to a product offer, though he or she might welcome it by e-mail at another time.
• Do it all repeatedly – if you don’t continuously fine-tune your model and offering, if you’re not “on it” as the Americans might say, you’re out of it. Nobody is suggesting we humans can operate 24/7 like behemoths’ mainframes but we do need to be infinitely more flexible and rapidly responsive than ever before. And that applies to all business types offering any product or service – remember, that’s all of us; even if you’re the customer, your “service” is paying the cash whilst elsewhere in your life, you’re the provider. Work in a bank selling mortgages and then need a mortgage? Exactly. You run HSBC or Jenny Jones’ £3.50 Ebay item sale? You’re the customer and the service-provider. We all are.

It’s cyclical – always will be. Know them from the start; follow who they are and what they buy; assess what else they might buy based on what they just bought (someone who just bought a horse may be in the market to buy a bridle); use their payment details to establish where they live and how quickly you can get product to them; Facebook them and find where they went on holiday and if they own a dog. And it goes on and on and on.

Business leader? Conglomerate CEO so it doesn’t apply to me? Remind yourself of the Talk Talk 2016 debacle when they lost, they said, 101,000 customers and a lot more besides (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/02/talktalk_hack_cost_60m_lost_100k_customers/). It all applies to all of us – we’re all suppliers and consumers.