If you want to innovate, find out what frustrates your customers
Frustrations are essentially unmet needs. Understand customer frustrations and you have the requirements for successful innovation. Otherwise, you’re operating in the dark. The challenge is how to ask and understand customer frustrations and get the information that will really help.
Most approaches to understanding real customer frustrations fail. The failure rate for corporations, both big and small, after only a few years of operation is high. Long-term sustainability is even harder. In fact, more than half of Fortune 500 companies from 15 years ago no longer exist.
· Market research is only of limited help because asking customers to respond to closed-ended questions only creates answers based on internal biases.
· CRM systems are focused on sales, not uncovering unmet needs.
· Predictive analytics based on algorithms are simply the application of past data using regression models. Frustrations won’t appear.
· Net Promoter Scores (NPS) simply provide a numerical formula that tells you who really is happy or not.
Oomiji is the only system we’ve seen that enables you to ask your customers, “What frustrates you about our product or service?” and “Why do you think that is?” With Oomiji you can accept and analyze unlimited amounts of conversational text that results from open-ended questions. Oomiji appends every bit of closed-ended data or open-ended text to customer files enabling you to segment your customers for ideas, perceptions and, most important, frustations.
You get better information, real understanding of frustrations and the feedback you need to provide winning innovations that help you sustain business growth.
