When you look at the hands on the clock, they look like they are not moving. And so it may be in the day-to-day view of your business and the markets that you serve. If you keep staring at the same thing, change is not apparent. The status quo seems like a good strategy. But of course, things are always changing. And it depends more on how you look at things, in order to be able to garner new insights.
One of the keys to garnering those insights is to ensure that you soak up information from multiple channels. Your customers live across multiple channels or touch points and so should you. What you will pick up in each of them will always vary. And it is only by aggregating what you learn from each of them that you will be able to connect the dots of how your market is behaving.
Nate Silver predicted the results of the 2012 presidential election in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Quite a feat. He accomplished this by aggregating hundreds of polls, at both the state level and the national level. There was no point in trying to pick a subset of polls as the source. Rather, he aggregated them and established a baseline based on historical performance of the individual polls. With a starting point for the weighting assigned to each individual poll, he applied a model of conditions which would adjust the weightings. The results of the prediction cannot be argued with. He got them all right. And this is amongst a whole lot of professionals claiming the presidential race was too close to call.
There is a lot of insight here in how to read your own market. Identifying all the channels through which information about your market and customers can be gleaned is important. Having an aggregate model which you adjust will keep you headed in the right direction, more so than any single source. Voters and customers are a lot alike. With customer research data and customer surveys, the same type of decision making occurs. Customers, the same as voters, think that they will do one thing, and then can change their minds. So it is only by using the equivalent of multiple polls that you can get a better picture of what is happening.
Within the business context, multiple polls translates into collecting input from multiple channels: multiple types of customers, multiple suppliers and multiple advisors too. You will benefit by aggregating those multiple perspectives. I myself have looked at multiple research reports which vary in their conclusions, sometimes quite diametrically opposed, even in surveying the same customer base. The key is not to try to pick the winner. Rather the larger insight will be gleaned if you can derive a superset model where all results hold their spot.
Even if the status quo is serving you well, it will be important for you to understand what is impacting your status quo. The internet tools today offer up so much in enabling you to build your own model. From A/B testing to Google Analytics, techniques and tools abound. Be sure that you are tapping the information resources that will enable you to see how your market is moving. Don’t be fooled, the hands on the clock are always moving.