Your Customer Facing Activities Have to Change – Right?

Your Customer Facing Activities Have to Change – Right?

We built our business helping clients understand market behavior. Generally, firms know their good customers (customer segments) well. They know what products/services they need and what role they, the distributors, dealers, and competitors, play in the customer journey. Clients usually have reached out for help in understanding the groups they don’t know well – those underserved, or new, customers or segments.

But now the behavior of the customers our clients have known well has changed. The unrelenting drive of technology coupled with the crushing impact of Covid-19 has forced unimaginable changes on our client’s markets.

Everyone is hoping things will stabilize and business will go back to normal. But will it? What have customers, channels and competitors learned during this time that will change their behavior going forward and what should you prepare to do about it?

I recently had a conversation with an old friend about his recent experience of ZOOM Parent Teacher Conferences. For all of you who have been through the traditional model, you remember an evening at your child’s school, rushing from room to room throughout the school, along with hundreds of other parents, to get short meetings with your child’s teacher. My friend said that he prefers the Zoom conferences. There was a lot less stress and as good, if not a better, one-on-one conversation with his child’s teachers, including building a stronger connection with the teacher. From his perspective, he would like to see this type of parent teacher conferences continue.

Another example is my wife’s experience in curbside pick-up and delivery grocery services. While these have been life-savers during the pandemic, they have not been the type of positive experiences that would ensure that she will continue this behavior. The ordering interfaces are difficult to navigate and don’t seem to have the products in the store sales guides. In addition, it’s not uncommon to end up with products that are different from what she ordered – getting 16-ounce cans of beans when she ordered 8-ounce, etc. This experience has to improve dramatically to keep her out of the stores once she feels safe to re-enter. Will any of this shopping behavior remain? Will it get better and evolve to something that delights customers?

These changes are impacting the B2B world as well as the consumer space. We have a client who is successfully merging the best of virtual trade shows to reach the audience and ZOOM demonstrations that couldn’t be done on a tradeshow floor. Attendees are seeing the product in action with the convenience of being remote – but we have yet to prove it outperforms what the competition is doing.

In the B2B space, there’s a lot to learn from your customers about what they like and don’t like about their interactions with your company, your distributors/dealers, and competitors. Now is the time to turn these insights into products and services that will delight your customers and separate you from the competition.

If you want help in this effort, reach out and QDI Strategies will be there. (We are finding that our potential new clients like the speed and convenience of an initial ZOOM meeting over the traditional process.)

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