SME Customer Interviews –
Our Analysis
By Gearóid McKendrick
This week we met as a team on Monday (13th
of October) to take stock of where we are with the project. We took this
opportunity to compare notes and to analyse the customer interviews we have done
so far, hoping to spot some trends and insights along the way!
For this meeting we focused on discussing
the results of our SME interviews. While doing this we noticed some themes that
were popping up. In particular independent café/restaurant owner were slightly
anti-branding/marketing. They want to keep their independent feel and personal
service and are cautious about upsetting or annoying their customers. However,
they did seem to have a strong interest in the data analysis side of the
business but would want to gather data in a way that wouldn’t annoy customers.
We noticed that those of whom we
interviewed could be roughly placed in 4 different categories (below). This was
interesting for us, as it allowed it to identify our SME customers even more
specifically and eliminate those who we don’t think would be interested:
1.
SME’s that don’t want to expand
We found that some small business do not
want to expand – they are passionate about what they are doing and that’s
enough for them. They have built a personal relationship with customers over
the years and are happy to continue as they are. For them, this is a passion and
they have no real need or desire to expand their business. Therefore the people
in this segment may not be interested in a product that helps them make more
effective business decisions.
2.
SME’s that want to grow
This will be a key segment for our business.
These are SME owners who are in the process of expanding or who want to expand their
business. They want to bring their passion and love for what they do to more
and more people. They are savvier about things like data analysis and
marketing, but are still cautious about marketing. Above all, they want to keep
their customers happy and would not like to do anything that is likely to upset
them.
Some are too busy to look at data solutions
but are tech savvy. They would like to implement a loyalty scheme for
customers, but simple don’t have the time. For many, the only data they have is
from the till system but they have little time to do analysis on this.
Others currently use digital loyalty cards
and use this data to make business decisions. However this data is being used
to bring in new customers rather than developing and retaining current
customers. One of the biggest gains for these people would be making data analysis
less time consuming and finding a way to dig deeper into data.
The people we spoke to in this category had
strong opinions on data. They do not like the idea of gathering data as they
have a close relationships with their customers and don’t want to jeopardise
that. They are wary or losing their personal level of customer service. A pain
for this category is finding a way to collect customer information in a way
that doesn’t feel impersonal or too ‘corporate’.
3. Different
Industries
We interviewed businesses from a range
different sectors other than the service industry and found that they have
different issues. Included in these interviews were travel, web and
construction businesses. One of their
issues was pricing. They would like to find more trends and insights about
their customer base and what their average spend is on similar services and
products. This would allow them to price their product more effectively. They
have made mistakes on pricing because of lack of information about how much
customers are willing to pay. A gain for them would be replacing hindsight with
insight!
Another pain for them is lack of
qualitative customer feedback. However, some (specifically web based) find the
information received from Google analytics is sufficient. Most of those
interviewed would be interested in some sort of a corporate loyalty scheme to
reward their corporate customers.
4. B2B’s
For B2B’s loyalty cards wouldn’t work for
them but would be interested in customer and market insights Again this
category would like information and insights to help them ensure that they are
not making mistakes when making business decisions.
We found that a lot of decisions and information
they have about customers are based on assumptions and observations rather than
actual data.
So,
what next?
We all agreed that we are finding it
difficult to get people to interview, especially for the SME segment of the
business. Although we have managed to gain some insights through interviews, we
are concentrating our efforts for the next two weeks on tracking down more
people. Aisling has put together a list of SME owner from LinkedIn. We are
going to divide this list and get in touch with as many people as possible.
The insights we get from talking to people
will be key to building our business successfully, so this is a priority for
the new two weeks.
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