How well do you know your customers? Who is you best customer? Are there more potential customers in the market? How can you serve them better? What is their customer journey and purchase cycle?
Talisman Insights offers you the opportunity to gain a better understanding your customers’ needs and delve into your audience to find your best customers.
We offer insights across a variety of audience research options that will help you gain insights into how they make decisions in your category and the levers to pull to guide them to choosing you.
Customer Experience
General Learning Objectives:
- Gain insights into why your best customers keep coming back to you
- Target your innovation pipeline to deliver value where customers will reward you
- Track where problems are or may arise
Learn what “job” you have been hired to do
- Our qualitative approaches focus on the lived experiences of your customers and how your brand/products fit into the lives.
- Our quantitative approaches focus on understanding the key drivers of both business performance and customer satisfaction
- Depending on your precise objectives and learning plans, we have a variety of approaches to serve your needs
- Online Communities for when you need to go really deep into understanding your customer base
- Focus groups, in-depth interviews, or roundtables
- Online surveys for ad hoc or long-term measurement initiatives
Win-Loss Research
Your lost prospects and former customers represent the second-best source of information about your brand, products, and services. They represent some investment in marketing and sales on your part, so rather than let that money be a sunk cost, we recommend win/loss research to help find ways you can bring a lost customer back into the fold or encourage a lost prospect to reconsider.
We can also pair our customer experience research with your data to give you the opportunity to create 360Ჿ view that links their perceived experiences directly with revenue on an individual basis. When a business or brand is in turnaround, insights from this research can be paired with win/loss research to address gaps in the customer experience more precisely.
General Learning Objectives:
- Address gaps in product performance or perception among key customers
- Re-align marketing and sales to communicate properly with desired audiences
- Develop an understanding of the buying/decision process to address barriers to purchase you create
How We Do It:
- As a critical piece of strategic research, we strongly recommend a qualitative approach in order to ask questions explore a variety of areas of the customer experience and ladder down into critical areas as needed.
- We recommend pairing win/loss with customer experience research to assess if your customers see the same issues but de-emphasize them as part of their experience.
Segmentation / Audience Definition
To paraphrase P.T. Barnum, you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time. It’s important for you to separate out audience from non-audience and find the audience members who will be your best customers. And then, design your brand and products around the needs of your best customers (i.e., your target segment).
General Learning Objectives:
- Learn how the audience for your industry splits in groups by psychological needs and attitudes
- Understand who your best customers should be based on their psychology
- Gain more understanding of the various buyer personas
How We Do It:
- We recommend exploring the psychology of people in your audience and adjacent spaces with IDIs, focus groups, or ad hoc community via an online interactive discussion board. This helps us develop an understanding of what people value and the needs that exist.
- We follow this up with a survey to measure the prevalence of various psychologies and assess statistical grouping
- This service is often paired with light purchase process and brand awareness/reputation assessments along with a customer study to assess the match the total audience segments to the customer base.
- We also recommend a creative workshop or ethnographic research to develop fully articulated personas that humanize your segments and make them relatable as people to your team.
Purchase Process / Decision Cycle
A decision to buy can be as simple as an impulse purchase from a rack in the check-out line or as complex as an in-depth review of all available options with a request from social media for input and then ultimately proceeding to look at product reviews. The motivations, barriers to purchase, and selection criteria can vary by individual or on a group basis. By outlining the pathways to purchase and assessing their prevalence, you can align your marketing and sales to have conversations with your audience in ways that promote engagement with you.
General Learning Objectives:
- Gain insights into the pathways to purchase
- Assess barriers to engagement with brands and products in your category
Test assumptions about the buyers’ journeys - Understand which offerings and the features/attributes within those offerings drive value in the marketplace
How We Do It:
- We build the initial purchase pathways using exploratory methods that include IDIs, focus groups, and online interactive discussion boards
- We recommend following up with a quantitative survey to measure more precisely the prevalence of those pathways as well as the importance (stated and derived) of purchase criteria.
- We find that many clients want some assessment of purchase process in segmentation work but is usually a secondary objective. A deeper evaluation of the decision cycle and purchase process can take place subsequently.
Employee Engagement / Experience
The fullest implementation of your brand requires that your staff and leadership be onboard with the missions and objectives of it. Employees need to be engaged with their work and feel supported by their leadership in order to do so. Talisman Insights helps companies by bringing insights to help leadership identify gaps in the employee experience so your teams can feel fulfilled and help bring the brand to life.
General Learning Objectives:
- Learn more what brings your employees to work every day
- Understand how they live the experience of your brand and values
- Gain insights into how to strengthen your brand via by engaging employees
How We Do It:
- Discreet and confidential qualitative interviews that allow for frank discussion of opportunities and challenges your teams face
- Confidential online surveys where engagement is analyzed and the drivers delineated and assessed so you can shore up what works and improve what doesn’t