The best way to understand people is to listen to them.

RG Ralph said:

The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them.

I believe this is something that many companies are currently failing to address, do you truly know and understand your customers?

When one truly understands they are able to make informed and intelligent decisions, decisions that will typically produce much better results.

Current methods for engaging customers are stuck horribly in the past and do not provide the deep level understanding required in today's hyper competitive customer centric ecosystem. These legacy tools simply aggregate the opinions of the masses into uninspired pie charts or worse a 50 page report, that is not true understanding.

The market research world claims to have innovated and gone mobile, and to be fair in some areas they have, but more often than not they have simply taken the same 50 question survey and made it work on a smartphone - way to go guys!

When I launched VoxPopMe last year my aim was to build a platform the enabled companies to easily gain a much deeper understanding of customers. An agile tool that used mobile and video to take companies inside the world of the people who matter most to them, to truly understand what motivates, inspires, annoys, upsets, delights, frustrates and more.

Video is a medium like no other. It is Honest, Emotive and Visual. Whilst providing verbatim comment it also provides non verbal clues, you see surroundings and context whilst also picking up on irony, sarcasm and other nuances. It allows you to tell a story and share rich insights throughout your organisation. The question is does your CEO want to see another boring pie chart? Or would they rather see a showreel of customers talking passionately about their experiences of your brand?

Mobile has been a game changer; it now allows you to capture this reaction in the moment, the opinion of a customer who has just experienced your brand will be so much more insightful when captured right after the point of engagement.

I truly believe that to begin to really understand customers at scale, pace and 'in the moment' video and mobile are the key enablers and more companies should be adopting technology like VoxPopMe because ultimately better understanding means better decisions.

To see some examples of how video has enabled a much deeper understanding take a look at the VoxPopMe blog.