Understanding Customers Beyond What They Tell You

There is a point in almost every piece of customer research where someone says something that sounds very useful.

Customers tell us what matters to them. They explain what they like and dislike, what they currently do and what they would change. Sometimes they even tell us what they would be prepared to buy. We record the answers, look for patterns and start to build a picture of the customer.

But people are often very good at telling us what they think they should do, what they believe is important, or what they think the person asking the question wants to hear. That does not necessarily make their answer untrue. It means the answer is being given in a particular context, by a particular person, at a particular point in time.

We have seen this repeatedly in customer listening where people can become remarkably adept at producing the answer that sounds right rather than necessarily answering the question asked. Reported behaviour has not always matched what was subsequently observed. The point is not that people were lying. Often, they were describing the behaviour they believed they followed, or knew they were supposed to follow, rather than accurately recalling what happened in the moment.

There is substantial research behind this observation. Social desirability bias describes the tendency for people to present themselves in ways they believe are socially acceptable, while research into motivated behaviour identifies recall error and the tendency to provide reasonable explanations for actions as limitations of interviews (Bergen & Labonté 2020).

The distinction matters commercially because the answer we get from a customer is not necessarily the same thing as the behaviour we need to understand.

The customer is answering from somewhere

Let’s imagine asking a customer how they choose a supplier. They might tell us that quality is the most important factor. It would be easy to conclude that our marketing should emphasise quality and our sales team should build the conversation around it.

But what happens when they actually buy?

Perhaps they choose the supplier they have used for ten years because changing feels risky. Perhaps their budget has been cut. Perhaps they need implementation completed quickly. Perhaps procurement has a preferred supplier list that was never mentioned in the interview.

This is particularly important in B2B markets because customers rarely make decisions in isolation. The person we interview may be a user, advocate, technical expert, budget holder or the person responsible for implementation. Each has a different job to do and therefore different pressures.

The customer is therefore not simply telling us about our product or service. They are telling us about it from within their own role and circumstances.

Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality is useful here. People making decisions within organisations do not have unlimited information, time or cognitive capacity. They make decisions within the constraints of the situation in front of them, often seeking a satisfactory rather than theoretically perfect solution.

Understanding customers therefore requires more than asking what they want. It requires understanding what they are trying to achieve, what they are responsible for, what pressures they face and what might make a decision easier or harder.

Reported and observed behaviour tell us different things

Reported behaviour is useful. Customers can tell us things we cannot observe directly. They can explain frustrations, perceptions, motivations and aspirations, and what they believe prevents them from changing.

Observation gives us another form of evidence. In healthcare, the difference can be stark. Research comparing self-reported and observed hand hygiene behaviour among healthcare professionals found no meaningful relationship between what participants reported doing and what was observed.

More recent research (Jenner et al. 2006) has also identified significant limitations in how hand hygiene behaviour is measured through observation. Direct observation can itself influence behaviour, and systematic reviews have identified methodological limitations in how it is conducted.

Neither reported behaviour nor observed behaviour gives us the whole answer. One tells us what people say, remember, believe or want us to understand. The other tells us what happened in a particular context. Neither necessarily tells us why it happened.

The useful insight comes from bringing the three together: what people report, what they actually do and the circumstances in which the behaviour takes place.

Rather than simply asking whether a customer would buy something, we might understand what they bought previously, how that decision was made, who was involved, what happened when it was delayed and what they did instead.

Rather than asking whether implementation is important, we might look at where opportunities slow down and what happens inside the buying organisation at that point.

Rather than accepting that customers want a particular feature because they say they do, we might look at which features are actually used, which problems they continue to solve in other ways and what they are prepared to pay to change.

The objective is not to catch the customer out. It is to understand the conditions under which their stated intention becomes actual behaviour.

We do not need all the answers

Once we recognise the limitations of interviews and surveys, there is a temptation to compensate by collecting more information. But more information is not necessarily more insight. Customer research should help the business make better decisions. That means starting with a strong hypothesis.

Suppose we believe that a particular group of customers has a significant problem, but adoption is slow because the person experiencing it cannot make a sufficiently strong case for change internally.

That gives us something to test.

We can talk to customers about how the problem affects them, look at what they currently do, examine where opportunities stall and compare successful and unsuccessful purchases. We can look for evidence that supports the hypothesis and, just as importantly, evidence that challenges it.

Perhaps the problem is not the internal business case. Perhaps the customer does not see the problem as sufficiently important. Perhaps they do, but the cost of changing is greater than we assumed. Perhaps our understanding of who owns the problem is wrong.

Each piece of evidence should make the hypothesis better.

This is where sales dialogue becomes particularly valuable. Sales conversations are not simply a mechanism for progressing an opportunity; they are an ongoing source of customer evidence. A lost opportunity, a delayed decision, a procurement objection or a customer who suddenly changes direction can tell us something about the assumptions we have made.

The opportunity for marketing is to connect that learning rather than treat each conversation as isolated. CRM data, customer interviews, sales conversations, proposals, lost opportunities and observed behaviour can all contribute to a progressively better understanding of the customer.

That does not mean every piece of information deserves equal weight. It means being deliberate about the evidence needed to answer the question in front of us. The result should not be a perfect description of the customer. It should be a strong, testable understanding of what is happening and why we think it is happening.

Then we test it, and keep refining it.

This takes us back to the Adoption Gap we explored in the previous article. A customer can recognise a problem, like the solution and still fail to act. If we want to improve adoption, we need to understand not just what the customer says about the problem, but what they actually do, what they are accountable for, what pressures they face and what they need to believe before they can make the decision.

Customer understanding is more than asking better questions. It is about forming better hypotheses, testing them against different kinds of evidence and being prepared to change our minds when the evidence does not fit.

Insight gives the business something more valuable than a better description of its customers: a better basis for deciding what to change, what to communicate and what might make it easier for customers to act.