Customer Insights

ELEVATING INTELLIGENCE AND STRATEGY

Customers are the lifeblood of business. Customer insight is the oxygen that keeps it vibrant.

Stout is at the heart of framing, obtaining, and analyzing deep customer insights to power winning strategies. From identification to acquisition and retention, we help our clients understand the lifecycles and experiences of their customers.

Such intimate cognition of customers illuminates vast areas of opportunity and ensuing strategy, including:

• Awareness of all addressable customer segments and guiding purchasing motivators / pain points by segment
• Prioritization of the most profitable customers and targeting of such customers with differentiated value propositions
• Optimization of marketing mix across pricing, promotion, distribution, and placement factors
• Evaluation of customer experience from pre-sale research to aftermarket behavior
• Multiplication of customer value via cross-selling, prize realization, referrals, and advocacy
• Replication of proven go-to-market approaches across a broader portfolio

Grounded in primary research, our proprietary methodology and advanced analytic techniques are elevated by a mix of intelligence and strategy consulting disciplines alongside powerful AI-fueled toolkits. The result is original and creative customer insights to target the right customers and retain them as loyal promoters.

Customer Demand

Customer demand is about mastering the dance, even when the music changes. When the music is playing, it is easy to capture new customers and grow with existing ones. But when the melodies start slowing or changing, it can be hard to pivot and protect share. Either way, being caught surprised and ill-prepared risks unrealized growth and damaging churn. Knowing how to move in times of upturn, downturn, or disruption is critical in keeping customers happy.

Effective customer demand management begins with the proper definition of customer segmentation and corresponding contextualization. It is paramount to identify the customers worth winning, the behaviors that drive them, and under what mega-trends they are evolving. Capitalizing means integrating these demand drivers and socio-economic buying patterns. COVID-19 and its aftermath have thrown a wrench into this stream, muddling short-term shifts versus what could be more permanent shifts. Disentangling the two helps us clarify consumption patterns moving forward.

Ultimately, business judgment and industry expertise must be applied to transform these into actionable imperatives. The result is a data-rich customer pursuit strategy. For corporates, this means more targeted category management, more loyal customers, and greater shareholder value. For private equities, this means validated investment theses and clarity on value creation playbooks during hold periods as well as foresight into exit multiples.

How Stout Can Help

We enable clients to optimize customer demand. We collect and structure the critical data needs, and we make sense of how they relate to your strategic objectives, performance trajectory, and industry structure. We leverage both advanced quantitative and qualitative techniques to forecast customer demand and help you anticipate customer needs before the competition, complementing the insight with recommendations to fully capitalize on. Specifically, we support:

• Customer prioritization: Needs-based segmentation of customers to understand archetype profiles and purchasing lifecycles, subsequently mapping back results to client capabilities to understand lever points, strengths, and gaps
• Economic analysis & demand modeling: Forecast of B2C and B2B industry demand via regression-analysis on custom data sets and deep-dive expert interviews
• Key purchasing criteria (KPC): Definition of KPCs for specific accounts or representative buyers as well as their overall weightings to inform internal positioning and go-to-market approach
• Commercial excellence: Best practice development around salesforce structuring, pricing strategy, account management, and close-the-deal messaging

Voice of the Customer

Strategy rooms are filled with a discord of multiple voices. The customer’s voice should always be the loudest. As companies grow and find success, it is common to see customer management be relegated to autopilot. Functional excellence and bureaucratic preoccupations take over.

Maintaining proximity with end buyers and empowering frontline heroes to shine in customer interactions remains the surest way to win. Companies that embrace customer closeness and configure their business models and organizations around the unifying purpose of customer delight retain their initial, galvanizing mission of delivering the most possible value to customers while cultivating enduring relationships and inspiring employees.

To keep the customer voice magnified, companies need to have open lines of communication while being attentive to indirect sources of expression. Direct dialogue in the form of customer panels, feedback interviews, satisfaction surveys, loyalty programs, and account planning sessions are paramount in understanding the health of a customer base and emerging opportunities or risks. Indirectly, social listening via sentiment mining of digital footprints can provide additional color to appreciate underlying trends.

Inscribing voice of the customer at the center of growth and marketing strategies can clarify ambiguity around which customer segments are vulnerable and which ones are protected to better allocate resources and design intelligible sales plays. Great customers who stay, refer, and advocate surface easily and allow companies to foster brand champions. Less-than-ideal customers who are high-maintenance, unprofitable, and unhappy can also be identified with quicker ease to inform go-forward plans. Nevertheless, real-time discernment of meaningful differences can be difficult to ascertain and disruptive to normal workflows.

How Stout Can Help

For over two decades, we have been helping companies know their customers better. Whether you are a corporate seeking to understand customer willingness to pay for new product development or gauge elements of value for a loyalty program or a private equity investor needing to understand the defensibility of a target’s customer base to underwrite growth, we can support all optimization and validation exercises. We combine sophisticated human intelligence methodology to gather critical intelligence and elevate it to actionable insight through the filters of advanced analytics, tenured industry expertise, and sound business judgment. We work with your team and are highly sensitive to established relationships, conducting all outreach in a discrete and gracious manner. Specifically, we perform:

• Customer satisfaction studies: Assessment of customer status (e.g., promoter, neutral, detractor), key experience and economic drivers, and outlook on future spend opportunities
• Prospective screenings: Advanced sales intelligence to properly qualify leads, prospects, and suspects and the best position for competitive pursuits and conversions
• Customer panels: Creation of bespoke and multivalent forums for survey launches and qualitative discussion to decipher deep customer learnings
• Social listening & analytics: Scan of digital footprints to determine awareness and advocacy tendencies as well as underlying customer sentiment

Customer Analytics

How well do you know your customers? It’s a common question for product managers and executives alike. This understanding drives decision making for marketing campaigns, product development, and CapEx budgets. And at a high-level, most companies know their customers well. They have a general sense as to what their customers like and dislike. They understand their buying patterns. And for the most part, they feel comfortable in how they are perceived by customers relative to the competition.

But, as we dig deeper, it is not atypical to realize that perceptions of customers represent an amalgamated view of your buyers. For a one-size-fits-all marketing campaign, that is an acceptable level of understanding. But for a product manager or corporate strategist, this generic view misses out on the actionable insights generated by evidence-based customer segments and archetypes.

The deeper your understanding of customers, the more refined your strategic decision making. Knowing buyers better than your competitors can be a point of differentiation and inform a winning strategy. However, getting to this level of awareness increasingly requires advanced analytical techniques and expertise in interpreting modellable outputs. Customer analytics is a powerful tool to inform your decision making and guide strategic initiatives. However, having the technical know-how is only part of the equation. Extracting the actionable insights to inform strategic decision making requires both functional and industry expertise. We can help with both.

How Stout Can Help

With years of experience in both analytical modeling and strategy consulting, we can empower your decision making with differentiated intelligence on your customers. This process can include:

• Customer segmentation: We conduct statistical analysis on a combination of demographic and buying data to develop meaningful segments that enable intentional prioritization
• Customer archetypes: We deploy advanced analytical techniques (e.g., clustering) to uncover deep connections between customer groups to inform actionable archetypes of your customers
• Perceptual mapping: We help clarify your competitive position by leveraging statistical techniques to map satisfaction and brand awareness relative to your peers
• Topic-based sentiment analysis: We identify key purchasing criteria and evaluate your performance across these dimensions via sentiment analysis algorithms