Changing Waste Standards
The importance of recognising customers’ evolving needs
By Rosemary Black
The challenge of changing waste standards is not so much the change itself, but more so recognising customers’ evolving needs as these standards change. Customers are often unsure of their own needs, which play an important role in defining the outcome of a product or service. Therefore, it’s critical to recognise these needs, inform your customers of them, and then reflect them in your product or service offering.
The real question is how do you recognise your customers’ needs? Customer needs are influenced by their behaviours (and vice versa), and the best way to understand a customer’s behaviours is through conducting comprehensive market research, which can be time-consuming and inaccurate depending on your chosen method. Fortunately, we live in an era where data functions as a primary tool in our society and conveniently makes for an efficient, effective, and reliable way to identify the behavioural patterns we need to know in order to better understand our customers.
Data around waste generation and destination is a good indicator of whether these behaviours are positive or negative; and unfortunately, Australia is currently producing more waste than average, and recycling less than average compared with a number of other developed countries. This data could suggest that more education around waste generation and disposal is needed, and that not enough information about our changing waste standards is being distributed within our communities.
Ensuring accurate and reliable collection of data is crucial to being able to identify customers’ behavioural patterns, as is creating and maintaining healthy relationships with them. These relationships can be formed by consistently engaging with and listening to your customers and are likely to improve and deepen your ability to understand their behaviours and needs.
Customers’ behaviours influence the success of waste standards and waste standards influence customers’ needs. Likewise, your ability to recognise these evolving needs as waste standards change has the power to significantly impact the waste industry as a whole.
About Rosemary
Rosemary Black
Head of Customer
Mandalay Technologies
Rosemary’s area of expertise includes strategic business development, management and operations, performance management, sales and marketing, client and stakeholder engagement, financial and administrative governance including the management of special projects. Rosemary has extensive experience across corporate and government sales, where she draws upon her expert relationship building techniques.
