Focus on Your Customers- Featuring wisdom from Nancy MacCreery, from PrODUCT CAMP-RTP

Today at ProductCamp-RTP a great break-out session was held titled, "Focus on Your Customers" presented by Nancy MacCreery, Founder, Broad Reach Marketing Services, LLC. One of her favorite Pragmatic Marketing sayings is "The answers you seek are not in the building". The point raised is, where do you get customer insights, especially if your organization doesn't have a marketing research department? Her talk helped by illustrating why customer insights are important and 5 practical ways to obtain them. Here is wisdom from talk to support your journey!

• ​Today at ProductCamp-RTP a great break-out session was held titled, "Focus on Your Customers" presented by Nancy MacCreery, Founder, Broad Reach Marketing Services, LLC. One of her favorite Pragmatic Marketing sayings is "The answers you seek are not in the building". The point raised is, where do you get customer insights, especially if your organization doesn't have a marketing research department? Nancys' talk helped by illustrating why customer insights are important and 5 practical ways to obtain them. Here is wisdom from talk to support your journey!
  
• Word of mouth is super important and be careful because a good experience people may share with 9 people, but a very bad experience people tell 22! Approx 43% of people feel less inhibited about complaining online.
• 6-7x more expensive to win a new customer then to keep an existing customer. 5% increase in retention can lead to 25% increase in profits.
• Learn what customers value and are saying about your product or service! Then use what they are saying they love into your marketing messaging, product naming, and development! Stop talking and start listening. Be close to your customer and hear the pulse on how they feel and what they say about your product.
• Always seek how customer insights can help you and what information you need to learn from your customers to improve your offering and better serve them. Engage with your customers to learn more and have them part of your company product development process.
• 5 methods to Gather Insights: Observations, Interviews, Focus Groups, Social Media, and surveys!
• Observational methods are key as you learn a lot from watching people. Even subtle clues like facial experiences during your customer experience or click-through flow and fall offs online.
• Interviews are important as interactive and one-on-one so useful for probing questions and gaining insights from current customers, past customers, and lost prospects.
• Focus Groups are great from interactive with group for directional feedback and getting product feedback on concepts, new products, and issues. Can be done on location or online groups. The key is to have a skilled facilitator and know very clearly what you need to gain out of focus group.
• Social Media listening is useful for monitoring keywords/comments, asking questions, and providing support. Helps you get close to your customer. #1 choice for customer service was people wanting to use social media for support at 34% over the 2nd means via website at 32%
• Surveys are critical to reaching many people at once to get a lot of data points, quantitative gathering of information, and allows you to ask specific questions to many to learn from patterns in data to guide your decisions.
• Keys For Successful Implementation: Respect peoples time, be ready to take action on feedback, reflect your brand and tone. Thank and update participants plus reward them.
• Key Survey Metrics: Measure NPS (Net Promoter Score) to see how likely your customers are to recommend your product
• Other great sources to gain customer insights is from a customer advisory board, customer appreciation events, and educational forums.
• Thank you Nancy MacCreery for great talk and everyone at ProductCampRTP for the wonderful conference.
  
  ​Thank you Nancy MacCreery for great talk and everyone at ProductCampRTP for the wonderful conference.