Grant Leboff: One of the things, obviously, that all companies want to do, is make sure they're retaining their customers and then being able to grow their customer base as well. How can they use 'insight' to help them on that journey?
Susannah Schofield: I think one of the key things is listening. We have so many access points now where we can communicate with customers and genuinely take real feedback that, that's absolutely vital to do. And I think some of the time, with assumptions, is as businesses we think we know what we want, we think we see where the sector's going and then we just drive down. And I think before we get to that blind alley and think, gosh, it's not. You have to remember that technology's moving so quickly, but actually the reality of life is we never really know what our customers want unless we ask them.
And interesting... I think if you take the renaissance of Click and Collect. Nobody in their right mind would have said, right, Click and Collect is here. It suddenly disappeared because it was very... just wasn't needed, was it. And all of a sudden you could get your parcel delivered to your front door. Now nobody with all the strategic mapping in the world would have seen that actually having your parcel delivered to your front door, no longer became convenient. Because we left the house so much actually, having it delivered to a neighbour wasn't as good as being able to drive home and pick it up on our way back when we wanted it at the right time. So the renaissance of Click and Collect is back again. But if you mapped that from a consumer strategy piece, you'd think there's no way we're going to have closed down our Click and Collects, be able to deliver it literally out of the sky, almost by drone now, that to being inconvenient, to going back to Click and Collect.
So I think listening, understanding what your customers want and mapping out what are the trends that are happening within your organisation... Are less and less people starting to ask for delivery? Are more and more people having returns? What are those patterns that are happening that starts you to be able to map the trend to say let's stay ahead of the game, let's offer what our customers want, and I think when we do Dice Matrix it's always about going out and asking and then sitting back and listening to what's really being said. Not the, are you happy at the moment? But what could we do to improve? How could we make you a happier customer? How can we please you slightly more and those golden nuggets are the things that drives your business and then you can achieve your growth in sales because you get recommendations and to no attrition.
Grant Leboff: So how do you interpret some of that? Because one of the things that always strikes me is; customers often don't know what they want. They know their behaviour and they know why they've stopped doing certain things. They might be - using your scenario, they might know what, I don't get it delivered at home anymore because...so they'll know - it's quite a big leap from a customer saying, 'home delivery's not convenient anymore' which they would know, to 'Actually, I want more Click and Collect' which they won't necessarily tell you, because they won't know themselves. So how do you start to use that insight to then interpret and utilise that to introduce the right offering?
Susannah Schofield: I think you're right, it's a great leap, but I think at least if you start to understand what your customers want and how they feel, and try to embed that into where you need to make that journey to go... I think that sometimes, it's really worth stepping back and not looking at what you know now, but looking at what you need to do and also how you behave as an individual. We forget we're all customers, we all do this as well. So what are the touch points that you go along and why are you not doing that? So, as long as you listen and then you take that data - but I think then it's important to overlay that with other stuff. What are the things that aren't being ordered more and more, what are the things that are doing very well? So if you can take different statistics and different levels and piece it in, and it's not always easy to do internally and sometimes you do need to employ people - and thank heavens people like me - to come in and do it, but actually by stripping back and really looking, you can start to see what's required.
And for me, I think the most important thing is to build any business strategic decision on solid foundations and those must be based on facts. I've seen so many people draw a SWOT on the wall. It's a Strength. It's a Weakness and the loudest voice in the room drives those decisions. Well it shouldn't be driven like that. It should be driven by your customers, should be driven by your competitors, should be driven by your market segment and by your employees and if you take all of that in and look at it from a really cold face and see what's moving where and what looks like it's growing, then that's the place to really start focusing.
Grant Leboff: And do you have any mechanisms that you use, or you can advise companies to use, where - in order to start seeing those patterns or interpret data - because it's not always obvious unless you know what you're looking at...
Susannah Schofield: It's not. I'm obviously going to say this, but a great place to start is our Dice Matrix because we just go in and do an absolute snapshot of what that company looks like at that moment in time. So we'll get a total feel of the employees, a total feel of customers, measure the gap between the two and start to give the dynamic. We can then take in datasets from external sources, piece it all together to actually say, this is what your business looks like now.
These are your risks, these are your weaknesses, these are your opportunities and all of that is based on fact. It's a 360 degree look at your business, but based 100 percent or fact. It's not down to gut intuition. There's a place for that, once you start to develop out of those facts, but at least when you get to doing that strategy piece, you're doing it from something that is absolutely factually based at that moment in time.
