Drive profitability with customer insight: where to start?

The operating environment and customer needs are changing faster than ever. Ongoing, up-to-date customer insight is essential for success, as profitability depends on understanding the customers’ real needs. Deloitte's research shows that customer-centric companies are 60 % more profitable than those that don’t focus on customers.

Current customer insight is built from three perspectives:

1. Internal understanding of assumptions, tacit knowledge and experiences related to customers.

2. Qualitative insight into customer needs and their root causes.

3. Understanding the operating environment and customer data.

Combining the information allows strategic choices and priorities to be based on actual needs.

How do you start developing customer insight?

Start with a clear focus: what, who and why do you want to understand about your customers?

The next step is to bring together your internal understanding:

• What do we know about customers’ goals and challenges in sales, business development, and across the organisation? How have these changed?
• What strategic direction are we aiming for? What are our key business goals?
• How is our operating environment changing?

Once the focus and internal perspective are in place, move on to qualitative customer interviews. Often, just 8-12 discussions will provide significant depth and reveal recurring themes, weak signals and practical pain points not visible in surveys or numeric data.

The aim is to identify explicit needs and understand customers’ behaviour, decision-making and expectations in depth. Why is something important right now, and what is the customer truly aiming for? 

In interviews, you might explore, for example:

• What is important in the customer’s business right now, and why?
• How have the customer’s expectations, ways of working, and processes changed? What about their own customers?
• What do customers want from partners, and why do they choose certain providers?
• What are the critical pain points in current solutions?
• What future goals do customers have, and what do they need to reach them?

Qualitative customer insight provides a foundation for developing services and operating models based on customer value. This is combined with changes in the operating environment and quantitative data such as sales and customer satisfaction metrics. This way, development efforts support strategic objectives.

Insight clarifies the way forward

Build a clear synthesis to create shared understanding across the organisation:

• What are the customers’ most important needs and areas for development?
• Where can we stand out and build a competitive edge?
• What does this require from us; what should we develop and prioritise? 

Typically, the work takes 2–3 weeks and ends with a joint workshop to turn insight into action with the key stakeholders