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It’s been said that in the knowledge economy, it’s now everyone’s responsibility to innovate with the customer in mind.
When developing a new product or service, does your organization get feedback from customers? And, do you seek, find, and use customer-driven insights to shape your products or services?
Here are 4 ways to let the customer lead you to new ideas.
1. Get ‘obsessed’ with the customer
“ To innovate, you must obsess about what your customer is doing, thinking, and feeling at every step of their journey. It’s not good enough to just focus on how they interact with your product or service,” says Chad Reynolds, Founder of Batterii, a platform to help teams collaborate with customers. Chad has worked with brands including Adidas, GE Healthcare, Nike, and Procter & Gamble to re-imagine the experiences they offer customers.
“ Obsession in delighting customers is a team sport ,” explains Chad. “Employees at every level within the company need to own the directive. If they don’t, it’s difficult to make lasting change.” Chad says once you’ve aligned the organization around a customer-first strategy, look to practices including design thinking for a repeatable process, and for methods and tools to build mastery around understanding your customers’ needs.
“Empathy holds the keys to a treasure chest of innovation opportunities. But first, your culture needs to be motivated to make customer-first decisions on what they discover,” says Chad.
2. Get deeper insights using contextual inquiry
“The stickiness of a new product or service today often depends on how it supports the daily routines of your customers,” explains Chad. Because every customer uses different terms or language to describe what they do—or what they may want—watching or seeing how they behave in their environment can drive new insights.
Having a clear idea of what your customers are currently experiencing is also one of the quickest ways to see new areas of opportunity. For example, “Day-in-the-Life” research methods give your team access to observe customers and their environment. This can be accomplished by conducting interviews, shadowing your stakeholders, and even inviting them into co-creation sessions to share their experiences, explains Chad.
Whatever your customer may experience in a given day, the goal is to encourage them to share real, authentic stories that otherwise would not be disclosed in face-to-face interactions with you. As your document these conversations, capture their actions (what they did), their framing (what they were thinking) and emotions (how that made them feel) through every step of their journey.
Whether it’s notes, audio, photos, or videos, capture all observations. Chad recommends creating a list of approved questions, as a team, before you engage customers. Questions should inquire, be open in nature, and not lead to certain answers you may be looking for. Encourage storytelling, and if needed, introduce visuals to spark discussion.
3. Discover your customers’ pain points
Promotional Spring, a company that designs and creates innovative print and retail experiences, intentionally uncovers customers’ pain points as part of their service process.
Dennis Riggs, Promotional Spring’s President and CEO, says there are three factors that help the company reveal and prioritize these pain points: working closely with customers over a long period of time, effective listening skills, and practicing empathy.
When customers come to Dennis and his team with specific requests—such as a direct mail campaign or a point of purchase campaign—Promotional Spring will often reframe the conversation around the larger, more strategic goals. “We are trying to answer those larger pain points, and customer needs, which may not at first be articulated by our customer. We find that more and more, customers want one partner to go handle multiple facets of their marketing campaign, and that's why we do what we do.”
Instead of narrowing in on a specific idea or solution immediately, this process allows them to find more innovative solutions. “We'll try and focus on what we can do, not what we can't do.”
Using pain points to identify solutions requires suspending judgement and asking open-ended questions. It helps to stay curious along the way. “We aim to be intentional about trying to get to these pain points [in our interactions with customers]. Instead of leading with what we think they want, we try and listen more than we lead,” says Dennis.
Several years ago, a customer came to Promotional Spring asking for point of purchase signage. After further conversation, Promotional Spring realized the customer had 4 pain points:
- Inability to know information about the company’s leftover signage
- Inability to seamlessly ship new signs to stores when needed
- Difficulty in creating an organized list to ship all signs (and related materials) to various stores
- The cost of shipping hurting the company’s overall and campaign-specific budget
It turns out much of the problem for the customer didn’t have to do with printing at all—which is what they thought and said they needed. Knowing more about the real problem, Promotional Spring was able to come up with an entirely different solution—not just printing or signage alone.
While this project’s execution required bringing in another company, now that capability is in-house.
Over the past 3 years, at least 80 percent of Promotional Spring’s growth has come from the ability to uncover a business problem—a problem that isn’t printing, but that Promotional Spring could help solve. “We are a printing company, but the pain isn’t always the printing,” says Dennis.
4. Show your customers prototypes
Dennis’ team also takes advantage of prototyping to accelerate the conversation with customers and to show solutions to customers. “Sometimes we do prototyping in the physical world, and sometimes we do it in the digital world,” adds Dennis.
This early build-out, design, sketch or sample helps customers envision a solution. It can also be used to help build confidence or validate ideas or concepts.
“ Prototypes are a perfect way to quickly, and cost-effectively gather feedback. Not only does it allow for iterative improvement, it demonstrates how important customer obsession is to every person, even your customer. That creates a kind of loyalty that is hard to put a price on,” says Chad. Experiment, fail fast, and cultivate a learning environment where you can quickly adapt to your customers.
