The Correlation Trap
How much does your organization know about your customers? … and what does your organization do with that information?
Businesses today know more about their customers than they have at any time in history… they know where their customers live, where they work, every last phone number or email address they use, social media handles, birthday, cars they drive, … maybe even their shoe size.
And yet … their innovation process … building products or services that their customers will actually use … remains as uncertain as ever.
Why?
The more you know about your customers, the easier it should be to satisfy them … isn’t it?
So, why isn’t that happening?
Because the data that is being gathered is not necessarily relevant … it does not necessarily cause the behavior/action that we think it does.
Take the case of Marc Jones.
He is 62 years old.
Lives with his wife in the suburbs of California.
He drives a Toyota minivan.
His birthday is 12 October.
His shoe size is 13.
But none of these are the reason why he chose to buy a burger from McDonalds today.
Maybe he was tired of eating healthy all week and wanted a change in taste.
Maybe he was in a hurry and McDonald’s was on the way home.
Maybe he just wanted to chill in front of the TV and he picked the easiest dinner option he could think of.
Point is, companies who collect demographic or psychographic information about him are not going to be able to capture those reasons from the data points they collect.
Knowing more and more about customers … collecting volumes and volumes of data about them … and trying to force a correlation between the collected data points and customer behavior … can take companies in the wrong direction … and can even hamper innovation.
What organizations really need to know when a customer takes a specific action, is what that customer is trying to accomplish in that specific situation.
And that kind of insight can come only when organizations have deep conversations with real customers.
Think about it 😊
If you would like to know more about how ConvergeHub can help you drive Digital Transformation in your company by helping you stay in close touch with your customers, talk to us.
Or, if you like to check it out yourself, go ahead and create a free ConvergeHub account here.