Curtis Bingham.com

Category: Customer Insight

  • No More Doom & Gloom!

    It seems that everywhere you turn, you hear more doom and gloom!  Is there any hope?  There sure is! This quarter is shaping up to be my best quarter ever, and December is probably going to be my best month ever.  A number of my clients initially decided to put things on hold when they…

  • Why Customer Satisfaction Surveys Can’t Help You Understand Your Customers

    I am amazed at how often I run into companies that don’t understand their customers. In my previous post, I discussed the issue of a Fortune 20 company that completely missed the mark in their marketing & sales, and was paying the price in terms of severe downward price pressure, hugely dissatisfied customers, and appalling…

  • Why don’t you understand your customers?

    The Fortune 20 company I was working with couldn’t understand why a segment of their customers were defecting in droves, and those that stayed were hammering them on price, causing their margins to spiral downwards faster and faster with each quarter’s results. The company had focused their marketing around three primary themes: Inventory control Cost…

  • Comcast Uses Twitter?

    C.C. Chapman shared his quite interesting experience of Comcast monitoring Twitter for negative comments and scheduling a technician visit in response to his post about his lackluster HD picture during a Celtics game. I must say that I’m rather impressed. This is the first time that I’ve ever heard of monolithic brands effectively using social…

  • 5 Mistakes in Measuring Loyalty

    Are you measuring customer loyalty because it is “the right thing to do”? I spoke with a company this last week that was doing exactly that, except that because there was no unifying strategy to their efforts to do so they weren’t able to make any sense out of their data.  Their data had been…

  • How Can Customers Provide Competitive Advantage?

    Someone recently asked me, “How can customer research provide competitive advantage?” There are far too many ways! Here are a couple: Let your customers tell you what your competitive advantage really is. When FedEx gathered a group of executives to show them a video of their new planes, the huge capacity they have as described…

  • Are You Too Losing $100M?

    I was speaking with a major market research firm that in the not too-distant past had scuttled an eagerly anticipated new practice area, claiming that there wasn’t a market for the new practice and associated research. Yet, a few years later, their biggest competitor has a huge, booming practice in the same area! The competitor’s…

  • An Extraordinarily Deep Customer Understanding

    It isn’t too hard to find out what customers need, want, and are willing to pay for. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Customers are demanding to be heard. If you search the web for aberrations of many company’s names you’ll invariably find sites that customers have set up to voice their opinions (ie.…

  • Innovation Doesn’t Come From the Top. Or the Bottom. It Comes From Your Customers

    I was reading this week a brilliant essay by Dave Pollard entitled, “A prescription for business innovation: Creating technologies that solve basic human needs.” Pollard writes, Innovation Starts with the Customer: If successful innovations must address an urgent human need, then the front-end of the innovation process should be situated at the point of contact…