Customer Insights Quotes

Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive.

The digitally-native vertical brand drives a lot more customer intimacy than its competition. The data is better because every transaction and interaction is captured.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

Social media listening tools make it easy to track brand references and mentions, and these functions can still be handled ably by a small, dedicated team.

The closer you get to your ultimate customer, the more you learn about your business.

I listen to [customers] and we make adjustments because we pretty much average a collection every six weeks. We're constantly taking everything in and taking notes.

Listen to your customers, but don't always build exactly what they're telling you. This is a really key distinction around building enterprise software.

Google has you at a very specific mental state that is, looking for something. And what they've always been able to say is, we deliver your message at the exact time someone is, say, looking for fishing hooks or looking for marriage counseling or looking for a lawyer for a particular problem. And here we have our customers telling you what is in their heart and soul. It's something that, you know, advertisers have wanted for decades.

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores.

When you know who your customers are, that can give you an edge on the competition.

Listening to other companies' customers is the best way to gain market share, while listening to the visionaries is the best way to create new markets.

We don't believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.

Never stop listening to your audience.

We've found that customers are very open. They'll tell you what's going on, what's working and what's not. They're looking for help.

The goal of listening to customers is not to please every one of them. It's to figure out which customer segments serve your needs - both short and long term.

The fact that used cars is our largest category is a good example. We would not have sat in a conference room and said, "Hey, how about used cars?" So what can be learned that is extensible to other companies is to ask what are your customers doing with your products that maybe you didn't anticipate that they would do? How do you think of your customers as your research and development lab, as opposed to having an R&D lab at headquarters?

Customers can't always tell you what they want, but they can always tell you what's wrong.

Forget 'branding' and 'positioning.' Once you understand customer behavior, everything else falls into place.

We sent our user research team out to sit with customers for periods of time and get some insight into how Slack is working. We also get tens of thousands of points of contact via Twitter and our customer support ticketing system every month and can synthesize those results.

Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.

Do your own market research; ask your last ten customers exactly why they bought from you.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

You can keep 'consumer' DNA at the center of your product. That will always mean that adoption is easier.

Knowing your customer inside and out is mission-critical, and it takes time. It's impossible to hit on the insights that will ultimately decide your company's fate without putting them to the test - literally - even if that takes longer than you'd have liked.

There are only two sources of competitive advantage: the ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition and the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition.