Peppers & Rogers: They get it!

Just finished reading an article from Inside 1to1, the weekly newsletter from the Peppers & Rogers Group and I have to say these folks sure know what they are talking about.

Many marketers rely on expensive behavioral solutions to help them better understand their customer's experience when, as the Peppers & Rogers team discovered, simply asking customers about their experiences can lead to unexpected insights. Case in point - at Armani, for example, management personally conducted in-store customer interviews and found the stores to be intimidating to new customers. The staff treated these customers differently because they didn't yet know them. Management then took action to improve the store experience for new customers. There was no extensive customer tracking, mapping and analysis undertaken. Armani management just listened to what their customers had to say as took appropriate action. Let me tell you, the web is no different. If you think your behavioral analytics can replace good old customer feedback you are 100% wrong.

Having just completed the Ad-Tech Impact ten-city road show, I can personally attest to the fact that majority of the attendees were interested in learning about behavioral analytics at the expense of attitudinal analytics. For those of us who recognize that watching how people behave at your site is not nearly as important as understanding why they are acting that way, this misguided interest is a challenge we must address NOW.