Customer empathy drives sustainable business innovation
Customer empathy can drive innovation.
"I've encountered few people in my career who have the customer orientation that Jonathan has. He brings big picture insights and vision to his business partners, which leads to better products and services for his customers."
— Jason Goldberg (Financial Services Executive)
Knowing customers buy more blue shirts than red ones is good business intelligence. Knowing that customers love the red top is good market research. Understanding that they are more likely to buy the blue top because they feel they can use them with more outfits is customer empathy.
Knowing the customer doesn’t shop around before taking a loan is a valuable customer insight. Knowing that they rely on “trust markers” to determine whether to apply for a loan is powerful market research. Understanding that they feel stressed because they have a limited time to solve a financial problem before it metastasizes into other parts of their life is customer empathy.
Good business intelligence can tell you how to allocate business resources to improve your company’s results. Good market research can help you understand the value of new opportunities. Customer empathy can drive innovation. It can help you find hidden opportunities. Using empathy to hone the customers’ journey created loyalty.
There's a clear path from finding a market to driving business Innovation through customer empathy. The levels can be clearly delineated and a company Falls somewhere on five different levels of advancement.
Level 1: Find a market
Level 2: Understand what drives sales Operational analysis
Level 3: Market research
Level 4: Customer insights
Level 5: Customer empathy
It takes more than just an understanding of market research to move from one level to another. It takes a deep understanding of industry and business economics. And it takes nonjudgmental curiosity: the desire to truly understand the experience of other people. It takes a bit of creativity to synthesize all of those skills to be able to project into the unknown ideas and possibilities. And then it takes humility to test those ideas against the pressure of business models, operational capabilities, and customer demand.
If you would like an assessment on where your company stands on the customer empathy continuum or would like a plan to move to the next step, contact me.