This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Customer Is Not Always Right
Data alone rarely tells the full story; most of the time, data tells the story you want to hear based on the questions you ask and manipulated the way you want. When you start seeing data that does not quite make sense, you need to get out and see what is happening.
Some organizations hold “voice of the customer” sessions in which customers express what they need the product to do that it does not do today. With these sessions, the problem is that the needs are often expressed in terms of solutions, such as, “I need the product to do this,” rather than expressions of, “Here is what I would like to achieve; can you help me?” Consider the story that follows on how these kinds of sessions can be blinding.
Agile For Robots (AFR), a leading training and consulting firm, was trying to stay ahead of its biggest competitors. Along with surveying existing customers, the firm formed a customer focus group to identify what satisfaction gaps might exist that it needed to fulfill today.
As AFR studied that data and spoke with the focus group, a theme began to emerge around engagement. Current and new customers were yearning for a way to engage with AFR and other like-minded people in their industry. There were options present but nothing like what customers were describing.
Increasing engagement of AFR and like-minded people led to a few hypotheses of things AFR could do. The focus group felt strongly that a new online forum driven by AFR was the best way of creating new conversations and increasing engagement.
AFR created a community forum with all the bells and whistles customers could desire. Over a year later, having spent a lot of time, effort, and money, AFR decided to pull the plug on the product. There were a lot of signups to the platform, but engagement was low. It became quite cumbersome to maintain and was losing revenue. The product had failed.
All the signals of success were there for the community forum AFR decided to develop. Through surveys and focus, new and existing customers this is what they wanted. Yet, when the forum was delivered, nobody used it. AFR blindly followed its customers and built a solution no one used or wanted.
AFR’s lesson was expensive but valuable to the rest of us: Customer feedback can provide valuable insights, but it can also add noise to decision-making. Stakeholders may have different priorities, and their feedback only sometimes aligns with the organization’s goals or values.
In addition to the blinding voice of the customer sessions, organizations selling products or services into enterprises often have their executives meet with peer executives at client companies. The executives from the product or service companies often come back from these meetings with new customer needs, sometimes adamantly insisting that new capabilities must be added in the next release because the executive promised them to customers. In executive meetings, these needs are usually filtered and interpreted through several layers of an organization, which is a problem.
The only way to understand customer needs is to interface directly with them through a variety of methods, such as observing people directly, using customer-driven prototyping, going into the field, or directly speaking with them. Even when applying any of these methods, the needs may be filtered by a customer’s presumptions about how the product works. Everything is a hypothesis of value even if all signals from a customer indicate it will be valuable.
All this is critical to understanding the customer’s satisfaction gap. What you usually get is an expression of what they think you can do to your product or service to solve their problem. Sometimes they are right, and you just need to give them what they ask for. But sometimes, when you understand what they are trying to achieve, you can figure out something far, far better.