If I could tell you which customer of yours would be the next to leave, what would you do? What if you knew where your most loyal customers shopped for items that you also sell? And if your customers told you how they wanted to shop and be served and what would cause them to open their wallets, could you use that information to your advantage?

You will know all the above, and more, if you learn how to listen when customers talk. And customers are talking. Big time.

Cutting Through the Clutter
Customer research data has a shelf life. Unfortunately, a lot of it is spoiled the moment it arrives. Spoiled for two reasons. First, in the information age, yesterday’s data is today’s data dump. Markets, products and even customers are changing so fast that research done following yesterday’s protocols takes too long to achieve results.

The second reason traditional research is flawed is in the methodology. Information acquired through old-fashioned transaction data gathering yields plenty on what we buy while telling us too little, if anything, about why or how the purchasing decision was made. A startling fact that proves the point is that nearly 25 percent of all credit card purchases are made by someone other than the individual who pays the bill.

A store manager in Minneapolis may see a customer buying snow tires and logically conclude that the customer lives in Minneapolis and is a customer of that store. Truth be told, the cardholder may be a relative visiting from Arizona who will most likely never pass that way again.

What to do? By surveying online, we can connect with more people, for fewer dollars, cut the data to yield an infinite combination of results, do it all in hours rather than months and then, as if that’s not enough, use the data to accurately peer into the future. It’s like radar for CEOs!

We can, for example, look at customers who live in Minneapolis and shop for automotive parts at Sears and then, just for grins, we can ask if they are more likely to pay by cash, check or credit card. We can even ask what their spending plans are for the next 90 days and marvel while they tell us with deadly accuracy what they are going to buy and where they are going to buy it.

By asking the right questions, we’ll see the future. We’ll uncover customer migration habits — where they will come from and go, and why — and we’ll know which stores are likely to gain or lose customers. It’s powerful stuff, this talking to customers.

What Customers Are Saying
In ongoing research I’m conducting with BIGresearch, a retail research and consulting firm in Worthington, Ohio, we asked customers to tell us how they like to shop, how they want to be served and what makes them open their wallets. To flesh out the raw numbers, we invited our respondents to answer key questions in plain language, and we then used “clusterizing” technology (also used to catch terrorists online) to turn verbatim comments into usable data.

In descending order of importance, here’s what customers want (from a retail experience):

• Knowledgeable, available sales staff
• Friendly, caring sales staff
• A fair price that represents a value
• Merchandise that is easy to find
• Fast checkout

You can extrapolate these criteria to fit your business. Customers seemed bipolar in one respect. They didn’t want to have to search for a salesperson and they wanted that person to know their stuff and to treat them with respect. But they were adamant that sales staff should be seen but not heard, there when needed but otherwise invisible.

Getting Closer
Listening to customers is neither expensive nor difficult, though failing to listen often is. There is always the old-fashioned way. Just walk up to a customer — and ask. In fact, when it comes to customer satisfaction research, the small-business owner has a distinct advantage. For entrepreneurs, the most productive research method is often simply a matter of walking around the counter, asking the right questions and then … listening when customers talk.
– T. Scott Gross, author, with BIGresearch, of When Customers Talk (www.tscottgross.com)

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