First of all, these non-transactional customers often have a big influence on the decision about which product to use or which supplier to specify. Architects, for example, often have more influence over the choice of product than contractors or distributors, even though it’s distributors that manufacturers have a transactional relationship with. If a manufacturer wants to understand, first hand, what customer needs are and how they’re making decisions, then they have to speak to specifiers and contractors direct as well as their distributors.

Once non-transactional customers are on the table alongside transactional customers, you need to make sure you think about the best way to segment the entire customer base that has now been revealed. Depending on who you are and what you do it may make sense to segment based on your product lines, based on the type of project or the sector in which it sits, or by the size of the project or the value of the customer.

All of those are important to think about, as we’ll see later on when we talk about the practicalities of research, but probably less important in the end than thinking about the different roles that exist within each customer, and how the needs of those individuals vary.

We have a relationship, transactional or non-transactional, with an organisation, and that organisation will have a collective goal of some sort. But the journeys we create are experienced by people, and it’s at the level of individual people that customer insight often needs to operate. Sometimes it’s just one person, but more often it’s a group of people with different roles, who experience different parts of the journey and, most important of all, have different individual goals.

Understanding those individual goals, and the way they interact, is incredibly important in business to business customer research. We’ll look at how to capture it in the research later on, but in many ways what we’re describing here is something that sales people and account managers think about every day. To succeed, yes you need to deliver against your client’s organisational goals, but you also have to help your individual contacts reach their personal goals, which are often unstated. Those individual goals should become clear as you do your research, as long as you do the work to map out what the different roles you need to include are.

What we’re usually trying to do with customer research is to understand how decisions are made, and that means we need to come back to the idea that within every organisation you deal with are likely be a number of individuals that it’s important for us to understand.

We often call this the “DMU” or decision making unit and, very broadly, it normally consists of three types of customer: one or more decision makers (i.e. the person with ultimate sign-off on a decision), a number of influencers who have a direct input into the decision, and often many users who have a diffuse influence, but a lot of experience with the product or service itself.

The detail of what customer needs are depends on the customer, which is why you need to do your research, but they can usefully be divided up into groups like this: functional needs, relating to things like product performance and attributes; needs that relate to the ease of doing business with a supplier; relationship needs, reflecting customers' desire to form a mutually beneficial relationship of trust over time; and individual needs that each customer has to feel understood and able to meet their own personal goals.

With customer research, you need to understand what it is you’re measuring, and why it matters. We can divide what we do with customer research into two camps: tactical feedback about particular transactions or events, and strategic research about the overall relationship that a customer has with you.

Tactical research lets you measure how what you do feeds through to how customers feel. It is about the causes of customer attitudes such as relationship satisfaction and Net Promoter Score or NPS.

Strategic research measures how customers in general feel about you, and good strategic research will show you how this links to their behaviour. Strategic research is about the consequences of customer attitudes such as satisfaction and NPS. It’s at that relationship level that attitudes drive behaviour.

Customers don’t make purchasing decisions based on their last experience, they make them based on how they feel about their relationship with you, so the strategic level is vital to understanding the consequences of high or low satisfaction. But strategic surveys can be frustratingly nebulous, and it’s tactical research which is actionable because it allows you to understand the causes of high or low satisfaction and loyalty.

Using customer insight effectively is partly about  “closing the loop” by getting it quickly back to the frontline teams it relates to, but it’s a mistake to rely only on this.

There is a trap that this closed loop approach can lead to a negative attitude amongst staff, as feedback becomes something to be feared rather than something to learn from. It can also become very reactive and focused purely on the tactical level.

Good customer research programmes are built to look for opportunities to make systemic improvements: changes to products, processes, supply chains, and ways of working that will improve the experience for all customers.

There’s a concept from architecture that I really like, known as “shearing layers”, which provides a good analogy. The idea is that a building is a system of components that change over different timescales, so the Site is eternal, the Structure might last for hundreds of years, the Skin will be renovated every couple of decades, Services such as electrical wiring or lifts  will need to be replaced every 10 or 15 years, and the Stuff within the building might be moved around from month to month or even day to day.

I think this is an enormously valuable concept, and one that is almost directly applicable to the way in which an organisation creates its customer experience.

So to inform decisions at every level, you need to take a step back to review your entire customer research and insight plan, combining strategic and tactical research. To build a balanced programme of customer experience improvement, we can start with the 4 headings that we use to organise our thinking about customer experience improvement – explore and understand, or qualitative research; measure and track, or quantitative research; plan & act; and storytelling communication and culture change. Over this we need to layer both a tactical and a strategic level of insight and activity.

At both levels you should have qualitative insight that gives you a deeper understanding of customers, quantitative research to measure performance and prioritise improvement, deliberate activity to plan and take action, and storytelling communication to drive through behavioural change and ultimately shape culture. These specific entries are just examples, but I believe every organisation needs something in all of these boxes.

The power of detailed qualitative insight is often underused in the construction sector, and we think that’s an enormous pity. Qualitative research should be about more than just asking open-ended questions and reporting what customers say. Your aim should be to create a mental model for the way customers see the world, and therefore how they go about making decisions.

" …too much of qualitative research acts as soundbites to support management decisions.” - Wendy Gordon

That means reading beyond the verbatim responses, which are often used as Wendy Gordon observes as little more than supportive soundbites. We need to get deeper, to understand the unspoken thoughts and motivations that underpin decisions.

That depends on you to do some interpretation, which is why qualitative research is inherently subjective, but it’s also what makes it so powerful.