What Do Customers Want?

A key element in any strategic plan is understanding the market—in particular, the customers. Knowing what those people and organizations want is critical to planning for services, systems, and staffing. With changing technology, customer feedback has become more real-time. It can be the automated text to the consumer after delivering a service that asks about their experience and recommendations, or the web site pop-up that asks about the online experience. Increasingly, there is a steady stream of customer information about current services. 

But while that transactional quantitative data is useful in developing strategy, executive teams often want . . .