Customer Insight is the first step when designing interactions with customers that create remarkable experiences. The challenge is not to capture the explicit customer requirements but to understand the implicit requirements and latent needs of your customers.

The article “Deeper customer insights - Understanding today’s complex shoppers” published by IBM Business Consulting Services provides some valuable insights into customers in the retail industry.

Here are some excerpts of the report:

Five “megatrends” for 2010
[…] we identified five deep-seated trends that are reshaping the business environment […] :

• Customer value drivers fragment
• Gatekeepers become more guarded
• Information exposes all
• Megaretailers break the boundaries
• Partnering becomes pervasive

These megatrends are driving the industry to a “world of extremes” where customer diversity and individualism are pervasive, and traditional segmentation is rendered inadequate. Customers demand low prices for basic goods, but pay premiums for products that matter more to them personally. Consequently, those best positioned to grow and succeed will be huge megaretailers on one end of the spectrum and targeted retailers on the other, while undifferentiated companies, lost in the middle,
risk fading into irrelevance.

Corporate thinking thus needs to switch from “bell curves,” where firms try to serve a generic mass market but do not meet anyone’s needs particularly well, to “well curves,” where companies drive growth by applying distinct models in each part of their business to deliver the greatest value to explicitly defined groups of customers.

A customer value cube is used to describe the value expectations of retail shoppers.

Another interesting chart are very/extremely important shopping services and features.

Groceries

Apparel

Download the full report.

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