Quirks 2022 – Customer Closeness Top of the Agenda

The QuMind Team found Quirks to be a refreshing focus for the future of Market Research. Here are Mark Ursell’s (QuMind CEO) thoughts and observations from the event.

“Whilst attending Quirks this year, it struck me the amount of conversations and presentations that were focused on the idea of customer closeness. I have been sensing this for a while, that we are moving into a new phase of customer-centric approaches, where it was formally customer satisfaction, then customer experience and now customer closeness. But what does this really mean in practice?

At a very topline level, most approaches I have seen involve customer videos, bringing the feedback to life for internal stakeholders. One client commented that one video can speak louder to Senior stakeholders than 8,000 surveys in data format. However, many of the largest corporates are starting to articulate and bring to life customer closeness in more formal approaches – certainly this seems the case with Unilever and John Lewis. I am sure they are not alone, but Insight teams are leading the way in pooling multiple data sources into central hubs and libraries for internal teams to tap into and get closer to their customers. They are also formulating processes to follow and fitting together multiple methods to give some structure and efficient ways to go about it.

This approach of bringing together multiple datasets is now accelerating, as well as bringing together primary research with internal behaviour data. Many of the methods are not new but due to Covid, respondents are now much more comfortable with a wider set of technologies and this opens up many more doors for the Insight professional and internal teams to get much closer to the consumer.
The thinking now stretches beyond understanding how consumers use and ‘fit’ in with your brand to being more about understanding the ‘life journey’ of your consumer and where your brand fits in to this journey. Customer journey mapping and research has often been around usage or path to purchase, but understanding the wider ‘life’ or the ‘human being’ behind the consumer is now the most important thing to understand, beyond these current narrow approaches.

The tools available are now numerous to see into homes, lives and experiences and bringing this together (with consent of course) will be at the heart of all ongoing insight programs. The ability to build relationships, empathise and understand where you as a brand fit in will be the most important for Insight professionals to get to the nub of on a ongoing basis. So it is understandable that developing an efficient process to do this will be critical to lay the right foundations for any customer closeness program going forward.”

Mark Ursell, CEO, QuMind