6 Tips for Researching Your Customers

Several major corporations release information on their own market research tactics to help customers and potential customers learn how to create a better business. Recently Microsoft released their own basic market research article entitled “Researching your customers: 6 tips on what to find out.” Although the information they uncovered isn’t new to seasoned market researchers, those that are looking to break into the field may find the following six tips useful.

Where Are They Coming From? Background information on your customers is shockingly important. There are little bits of information everywhere.

For example, if you found that 100% of all individuals that collected dolls as children bought one of your high priced automobiles, that would be interesting information that you could exploit. Customer background often plays a role in purchasing. Learn Customer Motives Another thing you will want to understand is the answer to “why.” Are your customers coming to you because of an emergency or are they coming to you because you have the best prices? Which ones are leading to sales? Many different questions can be answered by recognizing customer motives.

Many or Few Options Microsoft suggests that it is always a good idea to understand what the customer prefers. Do they prefer one product that provides everything they need? Do they prefer choices? Customer buying preferences may play a role in how you market and sell your products.

What Does the Customer Need as a Whole I’m not fond of the way Microsoft explains this section, since it relates fairly strongly to the first point, but in general what the article suggests is that you should take the time to learn about everything you customer needs and wants in life so that you can better create a relationship with that customer. Continue Gathering Data What a customer needs at any given time is not always as relevant as how those needs change, whether they change, etc. By continuing to gather data you can compare baselines, learn about changes, and stop problems before they happen.

Be Ethical While collecting information is great, exploiting information in a less-than-ethical way is not. When you collect your data, DON’T collect any information that can be thoroughly abused. You don’t want the temptation to exploit a particular private weakness of an individual.

You want the data as a whole to drive your business decisions and the individual lives of each of your customers to remain private.

As you can see from the article, Microsoft suggests that you should thoroughly and continually research your customers in order to make the best business decisions for your company. Snarky comments about Microsoft’s own business practices aside, they are correct – more data is always better, provided you understand how to work with that data correctly.