Going Deep into Customer Data

At Sylver Consulting we’ve always been committed to extracting deep insight from the research data that we collect. To do this, we leverage a number of analytic models and frameworks, in addition to putting considerable time into the up-front planning processes associated with any project. But recently, we’ve surprised even ourselves with how much deeper it’s possible to go with understanding who your customer is–their wants, needs, challenges, and motivations.

We’ve started doing linguistics analysis on qualitative data collected from audio diaries or interviews. Each sentence of customer commentary is analyzed individually for the need being expressed within it. Through multiple iterations of synthesis, we ladder up the insights gained to create Need States Frameworks, providing transparency into all the varied reasons why someone may engage in the activity being studied.

It’s the granularity of this approach that is empowering us to find new ways to categorize customer behavior. Instead of developing categorizations around the activities or environments for instance, the groups are based on the needs being fulfilled by the experience the customer is having, independent of the activity being engaged. By leveraging this technique we’ve been able to help our clients to reframe how they think of their categories in the marketplace. And it’s the Need States Framework that helps to convey this new frame of understanding to others within their organization.

The Need State Frameworks that we produce are highly visual, offering an executive summary of the research findings in a diagram that can fit on one page. The diagrams differ by project but the visual below gives an indication of their general fidelity. This graphic was created to define how different personas understand and interact with power (i.e. electric, gas).

We’re finding that these frameworks are great tools for new product development ideation and brand positioning efforts. The need categories are helping our clients to be more targeted when defining which characteristics or qualities of an experience they need to address in their new offerings.

If you’d like to learn more about this methodology and/ or its applicability on any projects that you’re thinking about for your organization, please reach out to us at info@sylverconsulting.com. We’d love to talk with you.

Categories: Customer experience, Innovation, Market research, User-centered approach