The Elliott Group Vision - a framework for understanding your new customer

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With customers ability to access information anywhere and anytime, there has been a fundamental change in their attitudes, thinking and behavior about companies.

These customers base their success on how efficient they are at accomplishing their goals as researchers and information users. They truly feel that they are the creators of a new world that they control within which your company’s products are evaluated. This ‘new’ customer through their actions in pursuit of information or knowledge to make a decision transform a company’s products into uniquely personal solutions that become a part of their lives.

This customer now evaluates companies as much on the information they provide as the products they provide. In order for companies to succeed in meeting this new customer’s needs they must now start to think of themselves as information providers. To become successful information providers, The Elliott Group believes that what companies need is a Customer Information Strategy (CIS) in addition to their existing marketing strategies.

A Customer Information Strategy creates a plan for providing information and features that support the user’s decision-making and purchasing process in the short-term and builds customer relationships over the long-term. A Customer Information Strategy helps define a company’s positioning as an information provider and as an online “transactor” that joins online and offline “customer touch points” to the website as the information hub in the customer’s process.

Important steps in developing a Customer Information Strategy include:

1. Understanding the role information and website features play in customers’ purchase decision-making process including the identification of:
	Process start points and pathways
	To Key information sources including user generated content
	Online and offline integration issues for the customer
2. Understanding the unmet information needs of customers and how to best address those needs
3. Understanding your company’s positioning as an information provider and online transactor including:
	How you and your competitors are currently satisfying or not satisfying customer information needs
	What customers need and expect from specific companies as well as generic sources (e.g. OEMs, retailers, third-party information providers) as information providers
	How well your current approach is working for the customer
4. Identifying opportunities to change your information positioning and increase your value to the customer

To help understand the “new” customer and create successful customer information strategies, The Elliott Group has developed the User Rules™ framework. The User Rules™ framework is based on over 20 years of qualitative research conducted with many types of customers using a wide range of information products, services and interfaces. The framework explains the customer transformation and provides guidelines and insights into the requirements for web-centric customer relationships. The framework can be used to assess and develop your website and other e-services to build successful relationships with the “new” customer. Some of the framework’s guiding principles include:

	To reach your customer you must first satisfy them as an information user
	Treating the Internet as a personal information and communication tool and not a media
	Meeting the demands of a new ‘give and take’ information environment in order to establish and grow customer relationships
	Building brand value and revenue starts with creating useful websites and other e-services for the self-directed customer
	An integrated customer experience requires a consistent information “story” across all company touch points and a seamless infrastructure to deliver it

In conjunction with the User Rules™ framework, The Elliott Group offers a set of services to help clients address the new customer at the strategic and tactical level. At the strategic level, we offer services that help clients evaluate the competitive landscape and develop an appropriate customer information strategy. At the tactical level, our services help clients successfully translate and implement their customer information strategy at the website level by assessing and providing directives for content, features, information architecture and interface design. Based on user-focused research our services use the most appropriate and latest methodologies whether it is in-depth customer interviews, remote usability testing, eye-tracking, focus groups or surveys to accomplish the task at hand.