By Dean Stier, National Business Furniture, LLC, www.NBF.com
Your company’s next great product idea or marketing initiative could very well come from an under-utilized arm of your business – your own customers. And here’s the kicker, that next great idea might not even be new, just rediscovered.
For over 35 years, National Business Furniture has been a very successful multichannel retailer selling office furniture to businesses across the country through a catalog, website and sales force. Much of that success can be attributed to the countless metrics and reports we run to track sales, response rates, product quality and vendor performance. Our business essentially runs on using data to reveal customer behavior and then adjusting our efforts to reflect those changes in behavior.
But as great as all those metrics are, they leave out a very important component that social media and user-generated content has been able to provide: customer sentiment. It’s the unguarded comments customers leave behind that give you a truly three-dimensional view of how you are doing as a company and how your products are actually perceived in the real world.
As professional marketers, it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of thinking we know what our customers want. At NBF, we’ve seen that our customers’ taste in office chairs has changed significantly over the past few years. The standard office chair began to evolve into a more stylized fashion-item often worthy of projecting status within an office. Chairs made with mesh seats and backs become increasingly popular at the expense of traditional fabric chairs. Our catalog and website reflected these changes in customer taste as our selection of chairs skewed more and more toward these new styles.
But something interesting happened when we implemented product reviews at NBF.com. Our top-rated chair wasn’t one of our newer, designer models (though they got great reviews too). Instead, the top honors belonged to a modest chair that has been in our catalog for more than 8 years. Sure it was a good seller; a fabric task chair with ergonomic adjustments and a great price. But it wasn’t anything to write home about – or so we thought.
It turns out this humble chair’s ergonomic features were doing more than just making the chair comfortable to sit in, it was actually helping customers relieve the back and neck pains they were experiencing at work all day. The number of ratings far outpaced any of our other chairs, and the tone of the reviews ranged from positive to gushing (one reviewer actually said that the chair was “…like putting a pair of slippers on tired feet…” – priceless). As we began to see the reviews come in, we came to realize an important point: As marketers, we often get bored with our products long before our customers ever do.
Our customers were telling us a story that the numbers couldn’t – the need behind the purchase. A successful email campaign that featured the chair being shown with several of its reviews performed so well that we decided to put the chair back on the catalog cover; years after it first made its debut there. A chair nearly forgotten in the changing tide of fashion and design made a comeback on the strength of customer sentiment.
So, do yourself a favor and look to your customers to help you find that next great breakthrough. You never know what gem they’ll come up with – it might even be a diamond in the rough.
