Your Customers Are Speaking, But Are You Really Listening?

Your customers are talking. They're telling you what they need, what frustrates them, and what would it would take to win their eternal loyalty . But are you really listening?

After years of conducting in-depth customer interviews on behalf of clients, I've observed a consistent pattern: businesses are drowning in customer data, but starving for real customer understanding.

They might track social media engagement, worry over people unsubscribing from their emails, and forensically analyse campaign performance, yet somehow miss the actual voice of their real life human customer in all the noise.

Here are some of the most common assumptions businesses make that stop them for from truly understanding - and profiting from - their customers:

Assumption #1: "We Are Our Target Market"

This is probably the easiest assumption to fall prey to.

Early in my marketing career, the GM of the home lending team I worked in took the time to spell it out for us. “You are not the target market. The people you know borrowing $250,000 to  buy a house in Wellington are not the target market” he told us. “Our target market is people in Levin stressing about borrowing $50,000”. (Oh for the good old days of 2002 house prices!)

And he was 100% correct. We were in our own bubble and had lost sight of the fact that our customers mostly did not look like us or the people we knew. 

As soon as you are working inside a business, you lose all objectivity about how real customers experience your product in the real world.

Assumption #2: "We already know our customers really well"

It’s not uncommon for me to hear business owners assert that they know their customers well, right before those same customers reveal things in interviews that were never on my clients’ radar.

One client confidently told me the top three reasons their clients chose them over their competitors. When I actually spoke to their customers, none of those three reasons factored into their decision-making whatsoever, but they all stated just one thing - the same thing - that had tipped the balance in favour of my client. All it would take is a simple tweak in messaging to focus on that key point of difference to easily catapult them ahead of their competition.

And I suspect I know what you’re thinking. I’m betting that you think you’re different. You really do know your customers. The reality is your customers’ needs, challenges and behaviors are constantly evolving. Real customer understanding doesn’t have an end point – it's an ongoing journey of discovery.

Assumption #3: "We’ve got plenty of data that tells us everything we need to know"

There’s no getting around it - data is crucial. But without a genuine understanding of the people buying from you, data can lead you to the wrong conclusion.

A high-end tourist venture client thought their YouTube channel was a failure because of low views. They were thinking of giving up on it. But when I talked to their customers, we learned that watching those videos was a crucial step in their decision-making process, and not having videos available would make them significantly less likely to buy. Suddenly 80 views a month doesn’t seem so bad when you understand that it leads to tens of thousands of dollars of sales.

Data tells you the 'what' but rarely reveals the 'why'. It shows you behavior patterns but misses the very human emotions, frustrations, and motivations driving those patterns.

Assumption #4: "AI is good enough at telling us about our target market”

I hold my hands up in defeat at this one. If you’ve ever asked an AI tool about your target market you’ll know why. AI is pretty good at telling you about your target market. In my experience it can get you 70% there, and if you aren’t willing or able to talk to your customers (or hire someone to do it for you, ahem, like me), then using AI to try and better understand your customers is a viable alternative.

But that extra 30% you get from hearing directly from your real customers - that’s where the marketing magic lies. How they describe their challenges in their own words, the unexpected motivations behind their decisions, the things that they can’t stop talking about - that's where you find the insights that transform your marketing from wallpaper to genuinely attention-grabbing.

My favourite example?

A skincare client who described their product as being “all-natural, certified organic, with  hypo-allergenic ingredients.” Sounds OK right? But put it up against “Pure bliss. No nasties. Simple” - direct from a customer interview - I know which better captures attention. 

Kicking your assumption habit.

It’s not complicated. Make sure you, or someone acting on your behalf have regular, in-depth conversations with your customers. Surveys aren’t enough. You’re aiming real, one-on-one conversations where you're listening way more than you’re talking.

Conversations like these reveal gaps between what businesses think they know and what customers actually feel, think and experience. They uncover opportunities that no amount of data analysis could suggest. Most importantly, they keep businesses grounded in evidence and fact rather than lost in the quicksand of comfortable assumptions.

Your customers are speaking to you every day – through their choices, their frustrations, and their aspirations. The question is, are you ready to really listen?