3.1 Customer and Market Knowledge

Purpose

This Item examines your organization’s key processes for gaining knowledge about your current and future customers and markets, with the aim of offering relevant products and services, understanding emerging customer requirements and expectations, and keeping pace with marketplace changes and changing ways of doing business.

 

Comments

- In a rapidly changing competitive environment, many factors may affect customer preference and loyalty and your interface with customers in the marketplace. This makes it necessary to continually listen and learn. To be effective, listening and learning need to be closely linked with your organization’s overall business strategy.

- Knowledge of customer groups and market segments allows your organization to tailor listening and learning strategies and marketplace offerings, to support and tailor your marketing strategies, to develop new business, and to ensure marketplace sustainability.

- A relationship strategy may be possible with some customers but not with others. Differing relationships may require distinctly different listening and learning strategies.

- Selection of listening and learning strategies depends on your organization’s key business factors. Increasingly, organizations interact with customers via multiple modes. Some frequently used modes include focus groups with key customers; close integration with key customers; interviews with lost and potential customers about their purchase decisions; use of the customer complaint process to understand key product and service attributes; win/loss analysis relative to competitors; and survey or feedback information, including information collected on the Internet.