Customer foresight: how to understand future customer needs?

A rapidly changing operating environment reshapes the needs and behaviours of both consumers and business customers. To ensure that a company’s products and services remain relevant over a longer horizon, organisations need foresight into the needs, expectations and pain points that future customers may have.

The union of customer insight and foresight

The roots of strategic foresight lie in the wars of the 20th century, especially the Cold War, which created the need to anticipate the future as the world changed: scenarios are a tool for this. Customer insight meanwhile, evolved around the same time as American universities introduced human sciences into business education alongside traditional process and management studies. Yet only in recent years have these two essential approaches to business development truly come together.

Customer foresight for future-proof services

Customer foresight aims to understand customers’ future behaviour and preferences related to tomorrow’s products and services. It combines two disciplines that have often been separate: researching and interpreting customer needs through everyday behaviour and choices, and anticipating change and emerging trends.

Understanding evolving customer needs calls for a diverse toolbox, from which the most suitable methods are chosen for the specific industry, business and challenge. Typically, insight is gathered using both qualitative (e.g. customer interviews) and quantitative (e.g. surveys) methods. It’s especially important to identify whose views are being gathered: future customers are not necessarily the same as current ones. Still, the first step in identifying future needs is to understand today’s customers’ purchase motives, journeys and the underlying reason behind each purchase.

From the field of futures studies, customer foresight draws on trend analysis, scenario work, timeline analysis and even science fiction. It places alternative futures in perspective against business objectives. For example, the aging population affects all business, but its impact is especially significant for health services.

Get started with customer foresight

Before anticipating future customer needs, an organisation must first understand the needs of its current customers. It’s common that when organisations discuss future customers and potential new solutions, the conversation is based on limited information. Through customer foresight, the knowledge base expands, and strategic choices can increasingly rest on evidence.

Successful customer foresight requires five key steps:

Why? Define the business objectives of customer foresight and clarify why future needs are being explored.

What? Understand changes in the operating environment and in customer behaviour. Explore a range of alternative futures and scenarios.

Who? Identify which internal and external stakeholders should take part in the discussion.

How? Gather insight using the most suitable method, for example, by interviewing people who match a hypothetical future customer profile.

Next steps? Identify concrete actions for bringing this insight into the company’s strategy and objectives.