Who does the internet think you are? Apparently, I’m a pensioner who loves ASMR.
You know that feeling when something so wildly off-base pops up in your social feed that you think:
Ahhh. So this is who the algorithm thinks I am?
It happens to me all the time. Just yesterday was vegging out and watching an ASMR video of a lady eating crunchy pickles and whispering some nonsense into a microphone. I’ll give credit where it’s due: the algorithm introduced me to the joys of falling asleep to ASMR. If you’ve never heard of it before - you’re welcome!
Allofasudden I got an email alert from someone very passionately telling me, in some form or another, that Britain really needs to do something about all these immigrants.
Wait, are they talking to me? Cousins, should I hide?
I can see how this happened if you take a handful of perfectly accurate data points about me.
I run a commercial real estate advisory business in central London. I have a PhD in a hard science.
Then take some of my leisure activities. I swim. I can play bridge. I sing in the choir at my Catholic church most Sunday mornings. I set up a seed exchange with some local gardeners - if anyone wants some hollyhock seeds, by the way, I have an abundance. My favourite games on my phone are those little puzzles that I’ve realised, from the in-game pop-ups, are designed to “train your brain” and delay dementia.
These are clearly the hobbies of a pensioner.
I also read an ideologically promiscuous mix of literature from across the political spectrum. I don’t actually remember signing up for Kemi Badenoch’s newsletter, but apparently at some point I did…
So if you feed all of that into a simple model and ask it to build a picture of me, I can see how things might start to go slightly awry. I mean, if those were the only things you knew about me, who would you picture?
But sit down and have a conversation with me for half an hour and you would probably come away with a very different picture. For starters, politically I’m probably more Team Count Binface.
Although I did once read about a fellow Zimbabwean-British woman running as a Reform candidate. So there you go. You can never make assumptions! Ahem.
I'm blown away by the amount of data you can gather on customers these days, often without them even opting in.
Every week a new real estate technology startup emerges that promises a new angle or type of intelligence that I as customer insight practitioner could only dream of a few months ago.
And look, I understand the appeal. Those of us using ChatGPT as our therapists know all too well that the algorithms know some of our most intimate secrets to a creepy level of detail.
I remember getting targeted ads for pregnancy tests when I could have sworn no one knew that I was even trying for a baby yet. My cautious husband banished any Alexa type devices from our house, but I fear it might be pointless because my mole of an iphone still seems to be spying on me. Like, I’ll say casually over dinner “let’s go to Japan” and voila, flights to Japan suddenly appear in my sidebar, on my feed, I see them everywhere. It might just be a coincidence…idk.
That being said, data isn't a like-for-like replacement for simply talking to people
There is something slightly absurd about developing increasingly sophisticated ways of inferring what people think from smashing together a zillion data points while sometimes neglecting one of the simplest ways of finding out.
Talking to them.
One of my favourite things in the world is having a proper, deep, conversation with someone. What interests me isn’t just what happened. It’s why. You don’t usually get those things from asking someone five questions. They emerge in the detours. Someone says something interesting and you ask, “Why?”
They tell you a story you weren’t expecting. That story reminds them of something else. You realise that the answer they gave you ten minutes ago means something completely different now that you understand the context around it.
Sometimes the missing piece isn’t rocket science, it’s a customer conversation
In my work at RealService I advise real estate owners and operators customer experience, and support them to gather customer intelligence. I regularly sit down with a client who wants to start a customer insight programme and hear some variation of:
“Let’s just make a web survey where they can smash a few buttons, put it behind a QR code and send it out! Can we do that?“
Yes. Of course you can. But if satisfaction has fallen from 82% to 65%, it doesn’t necessarily tell you why. And without the why, how do you know what you should actually do next.
If you’ve gathered customer intelligence and nobody has actually had a proper conversation with a customer, I think you are leaving an enormous amount of value on the table, because knowing things about your customers isn’t the same as understanding them.
Ready to launch your real estate customer insight programme?
If you’re looking to launch a customer insight study across your real estate business, that’s what we do. We help real estate owners, investors and property managers understand how their customers experience their buildings and services, what is working, what isn't, and how they compare to the rest of the market.
To learn more, visit: https://www.real-service.com/ or drop me a DM.
For more insights like this, follow me Chenai Gondo, PhD
Topics covered in this article
Tenant satisfaction surveys, occupier satisfaction surveys, occupier insight surveys, tenant experience surveys, occupier experience surveys, real estate customer insight, commercial real estate customer experience, real estate customer satisfaction, tenant feedback, occupier feedback, tenant engagement, occupier engagement, customer insight programmes, customer intelligence, customer conversations, qualitative customer research, customer interviews, voice of the customer, real estate benchmarking, customer satisfaction benchmarking, tenant satisfaction benchmarking, occupier satisfaction benchmarking, customer experience consultancy, real estate customer experience consultancy, commercial property customer experience, property management customer experience, landlord customer experience, customer satisfaction surveys, customer feedback surveys
