Understanding Customer Needs - Video 1
Transcript
Every salesperson will tell you how important it is to understand the customer needs. So, how do you go about doing it? Let’s look at it from three aspects: business goals, decision criteria, and personal goals.
Let's start with business goals. The improvement each person is trying to achieve with the project. Why is this so difficult to understand? Because quite often customers express their goals in terms of the solution they already have in mind. The ability to use you know-how and challenge the customer with good questions is an excellent way to help them define their real needs, and ensure that you are solving the right problem.
Let’s move on to decision criteria. The characteristics of a vendor or solution that each person in the decision-making process uses to select the best one. What you often find is that decision criteria vary widely at different levels, so it’s critical to understand them to ensure that you present relevant strengths.
Last, there are personal goals. What people want from the project, for themselves. This might be motivated by a bonus for on-time project completion, or having the chance to get a desirable assignment or a position. In one of our bids for a sales transformation project, the project leader really wanted to improve his reputation inside the company. His recent project to introduce CRM software had not gone well. People were not using the software and this created a lot of negative press for him. By demonstrating how our solution would dramatically improve CRM utilization and help him recover his reputation he became a very strong supporter. So, understanding customer needs is really about understanding people.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C-2v99paQM
Identifying Customer Needs - Video 2
Transcript
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVCZ-7xSsCw
What are customers needs, wants and demands? -Video 3
Transcript
A: Hello class, let’s review marketing concepts from last week.
B: Profesor Siegfried, can you explain what customer needs once and demands are?
A: Sure, let me explain how these terms relate to marketing. First, human needs are states of felt deprivation. Human needs are complex. These include basic physical needs for food, clothing, warmth, and safety. Social needs relate to belonging and affection and individual needs for knowledge and self-expression. These needs are a basic part of the human makeup, when a need isn’t satisfy the person will look for an objective that will satisfy it.
B: Ok professor, what are wants?
A: Well Susan, once are the forms taken by human needs as they are shaped by culture and individual personality. A hungry person in Australia, Singapore, might want noodles, or a hamburger, and chips, and a cola. A hungry person in the South Pacific might want mangoes, coconuts, and beans. Wants are described in terms of objects that will satisfy needs. As a society evolves, the wants of its members expand as people are exposed to more products that arouse their interest and desire. Producers try to provide more want satisfying products and services. People have unlimited wants but limited resources. When wants are backed by buying power, wants become demands. Consumers view products as bundles of benefits and choose products that give them the best bundle for their money. Thus, a Ford Fiesta satisfies needs for basic transportation at low price with fuel economy. A Mercedes Benz or Lexus satisfies the need for transport status and provides additional comfort, luxury, and prestige. What's important is that marketers go to great lengths to research and understand customer needs, wants, and demands.
B: Thank you professor for this detailed explanation.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yli7O46yuGM
How do you organize customer needs? - Video 4
Transcript
When doing a voice of the customer study it is not at all uncommon to identify a hundred or more individual customer needs. They are of course extremely detailed and that is actually the level of detail that you need to aim for to do a really complete voice of the customer study. However, most people in the field would simply tell you that for engineers and product development teams to deal with a hundred unique needs is just overwhelming and frankly completely impractical. So, what has always been done in the field is the creation of something referred to as affinity diagram, a technique that's actually borrowed from the old quality movement TQM back in the 70s and 80s and it's just a fancy sort of academy sounding word for bucketing the needs, organizing them into groups that somehow logically go together, and you have probably all been through the technique where you put all needs on separate yellow stickies and you put them up on a wall and the group goes through this exercise where they organize them into groups.
Now, when Abby Griffin and John Houser were doing their initial research for the famous voice of the customer paper, Abby asked a very interesting question which is, Ge, since this affinity diagram is almost always created by the internal product development team themselves, wonder if customers will organize the needs the same way that the internal team does? So, she did some parallel experimentation and guess what? They don’t.
So, Abby advocated that we probably ought to go with the customer hierarchy, customer created hierarchy, rather than the internally created hierarchy and her hypothesis is that the reason that the difference emerges is because when people inside the company are doing these sorting. What sort of operating in the back their mind is a reflection of their org chart because they are thinking about how the product was made or created and so they are thinking about departaments, and so they are thinking this is Sue’s department and this Tom's department, and this is John’s department. The customer of course doesn't know or care about the org chart. What's in the back of their mind is how they acquire and then use or experience the product or service. So that's the construct they use when they create them.
An interesting example almost every time I have done some kind of a computer system, I found that people inside the company create separate buckets for what they call hardware problems versus software problems. Well, the customer has no idea, it doesn't care whether it’s a hardware problem or a software problem. It’s some kind of a functional problem to them and so customers almost never make that distinction when they sort the needs, and so, in all of our work we have used one or two techniques to have the customer create this affinity diagram.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXIYREbhhv0
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