I have worked in many organizations where the customer was at the center of our business strategy. We segmented them by things like, “white, male, 35”. We sometimes went a step further and gave them a name – Sally the Soccer Mom was my favorite. But all of our analysis came from within our organization. It was our view of the customer, not the customer’s view of us. Our customer was a thing to be grouped and categorized. We thought of them as users of our products, not as real people with real lives trying to navigate through their days with ease. Ultimately, though we thought we were customer centered, our discussions were really all about us.
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So what? We were in business to provide and sell solutions. Why shouldn’t we look at things from our perspective? McKinsey calls this a “recipe for obsolescence in today’s economy.” Beyond revenue growth, providing more value to customers and having them love us just feels good. Employees want to work in businesses that deliver value, so if you want engaged, happy talent, pay attention to delivering what the customer needs.
Developing the Customer Point-of-View is Hard Work!
With this competitive reality, why are so many organizations resistant to looking at their business and their solutions from the customer’s point of view? Well, one reason is they might not like what they see. Often the customers who want to talk to us are those that want to complain, and that can be hard to listen to. Customers never seem to be using our solutions the way they were designed to be used. We are passionate about our solutions so it is hard to observe a user fumbling without wanting to “fix” what they are doing wrong. This applies to business processes as well – the customer often wants to buy from us differently than how we want to sell to them.
Also, customers will ask us to do things that we just don’t want to do, because it is not the business we are in and it is not something we can make money doing. I’ll tell you a secret – just because a customer asks for it, doesn’t mean you have to do it! Don’t let fear of saying, “No” keep you from listening openly to what your customers have to say. As a new employee in a software business, I was the token engineer sent to talk to one of our partners who had been demanding (rather loudly) that we provide some functionality that did not fit with our offering. I listened to what they needed, the problem they were trying to solve, and together we devised a solution that met both our needs. When I returned to the office, my boss greeted me saying incredulously, “they’re happy – what did you do to them?” Well, I listened and I focused on seeing the problem from their point of view.
Design Thinking – looking from the outside in – creates a culture of Problem Solvers
A customer point of view looks something like this:
-My customer (described by what they say or do)
-needs a way to complete a task (described by what successful completion means for them)
-but they are inhibited by a problem (described by something they need to start or stop doing)
When you incorporate design thinking into your business practices you engage your entire team to become problem solvers. Here’s how it works:
- Get your entire organization to capture these customer point of views with each interaction.
- Encourage them to become detectives, searching out problems that your business can solve better than anyone else.
- Find common tasks with different problems and problems that exist across tasks.
- Use this exercise to go big, exploring all the problems you could solve and the ways others in your ecosystem (including your competitors) are doing a poor job of meeting those customer’s needs.
Note that I focus on the task/problem pairs. The description of your customer is important but only in the context of what they are saying and doing. I don’t care how tall or old or educated they are … unless it helps me understand the problems they are facing, the problems I want to solve. (If I am selling to tall retired professors, maybe I care).
Now comes the fun part…
- Gather your team and select a few problems that you are best suited to solve. Perhaps it is a new solution for an established customer or leveraging your operational capabilities to build a slightly nuanced solution for a different customer. Or perhaps it is improving the experience of your current solution for your customers, increasing their loyalty and inspiring more word-of-mouth recommendations.
- Use the collaborative brain power of your team to select a problem they can pursue, then design a prototype that meets those customer needs. This is design thinking in action.
One last thought: experimentation and iteration are key to design thinking. Your team of problem solvers need to be actively engaged with your customers, seeing whether their ideas actually solve anything. You may find that the problem you selected is not the right one for you to solve after all, but that’s ok – you have a list of other customer task/problems to solve and you have continued to grow your arsenal of customer point-of-views, right?