FlexMR CEO, Paul Hudson, published an article on Insight Platforms exploring the Customer Gap, the significant moves yet to be made towards closing it, and how the right technological infrastructure in place might help us succeed in this goal. The article, entitled Challenging the Customer Gap and Business Status Quo, is a follow-up to Paul’s previous speaking engagement guest lecturing at Lancaster University Management School, where he introduced business students to the concept of Customer Salience.

Challenging the Customer Gap and Business Status Quo

The article starts with Paul asking, why do any significant moves towards closing the Customer Gap seem to fail, when ‘customer needs’ is one of the four stated pillars of marketing and when insight, marketing and analytics professionals also believe that businesses should focus on customers?

Paul continues by noticing that all the discussions he have seen throughout his academic and business career have focussed solely on furthering the understanding of consumer behaviour, not organisational decision-making. So a thorough understanding of the current situation is needed before we can rectify anything.

Understanding The Customer Gap

Consumers and businesses are both complex but whilst there has been considerable effort to understand the differing roles of rational and irrational purchase intent, there has been very little study or understanding of the complexity of business decisions.

The reality is that businesses are human systems, and decision-making is never linear or straightforward. That creates a problem, because if we do great research into what our customers want but don’t understand how that insight is used, then it may never inform the decisions it was intended for. Unless we can truly understand how businesses harness customer data in their decision-making, it is likely that most organisations will make suboptimal decisions, create inefficiency and not succeed in orientating themselves to be truly focussed on their customers.

The Need for Networking Data and Insights

This is a challenge for technology and SaaS firms in the Martech and Restech industries because their aim is to empower us with more data and tools to execute more efficient and effective marketing strategies. Yet whilst it might be more efficient, it isn’t likely to reduce The Customer Gap nor better orientate an organisation to its customers and market. Creating informed decisions is not necessarily one of data availability, access, or technology. The problem was never the lack of data.

The problem is understanding how businesses can best make use of that data in their decision-making, and there are three ways in particular that Paul believes will help us realise our true Customer Salience potential:

• Move away from only using data in a task-orientated way
• Develop a wider perspective of ‘multi-lateral exchange’
• Increasing collaboration within business networks to improve sense-making

Read the full article on Insight Platforms to learn more now. 

About Insight Platforms

Insight Platforms is the leading online resource for learning about digital research tools. The company has their own directory of over 700 market research suppliers in over 30 categories from A/B Testing to Visual Analytics; and also boasts a myriad of blogs, guides, independent reviews from experts in product research, consumer insights, social intelligence, customer experience and digital analytics.