Who are you, dear customer ?
How to better know your customer and give him something he really needs.
Now that we have a team, we needed to find a product or a service that will be useful to our customer segment. But, where to start ? By better knowing our customers and their worries ! Easy… wait… how can we do that ?
To start better understanding our customers we were trained to design thinking. Design thinking is a methodology designed to develop creative ways to solve a specific issue. In our case, we first needed to find the issue to solve. Design thinking tells us that the best solution is not only technically feasible and financially viable but also desirable from a user point of view.
Get a first overview
We had the chance that our support team booked meetings for us with semiologists and sociologist. They gave us the first and most important information about our customer segment : everyone is different and the segments are not due to ages anymore but to the way they use a service.
We also learn a lot about the change in society that could impact our customers and on how the other companies address our customers. It permits us to understand when and why they use humour or seriousness for example.
Once we had this first overview, we needed to become “experts” on our customers needs, to better understand them and to find what we may be building for them.
If you do not have a semiologist or a sociologist in your contacts, I will recommend reading the most recent studies about your customer segment and try to contact someone in a university to answer the questions you may have about the studies you read.
Build a survey
We then started to build a survey to collect information about customers. As we had no constraints on the product to build, we decided to start by asking very general questions and then focusing on one subject we identified as very important to the person or, on the contrary, on one subject he seems not to be interested in at all.
The objective of interviews is to make them tell anecdote not tell the average story. To achieve that, you need to have very open questions. You will then be more able to understand motivation and worries.
You don’t need to prepare too much questions because most of the interview time will be used to understand not the answer itself but why the customer answered that. So, after each answer, you will have to:
- rephrase what was said, to make sure you understood well and
- ask why, to understand the real motivation.
In problem solving, we use to say you need 5 why to find a root cause to a problem. This image explains easily that you could provide the wrong solution if you don’t find the real root cause of a problem.
You can also ask people to show you how they do something and to explain it to you meanwhile. It can help understand issues they can even tell because they are not seeing them.
Interview people
With our survey well defined, we tried to find people to interview. We were not trying to have a representative sample but to find different customers, from one extreme to the other and also people working with our customers to understand what they learned from an outside perspective.
We had planned interviews with some people we knew, with some people our support team know but we also started to interview people in public places like libraries or exhibitions.
The most incredible thing when you start interviewing people like that is not that you ask them for 15 to 20 minutes of their time and most of them agree very easily to give you that time, but that they are still talking with you an hour later. Some of them even give us their smartphone for us to see what pictures and apps they use the most.
During the interview, it is very important to write verbatim of what people are saying (and not interpretation). You can even record the interview if the person agreed. Do not be afraid of silence during the interview, some time it will help the person to better explain ideas and it will permits you to note everything.
Extract insights
After each interview, you can start extracting insights. Insights are information about user expectations you could not have find easily elsewhere and that will help you find the issue you want to solve.
Once you have extracted insights from your interviews verbatim, you will need to group them to find the ones that are shared between several customers. That will help you find the better insight on which you can build a product.
IPSOS, a french market research and consulting firm, define 9 golden rules to identify good insights :
- Revelation — Insight is a new aspiration, unknown from customers
- Tension — Insight shows a conflict from a dissatisfied aspiration
- Importance — Insight is about a topic that really matters the customer
- Implication — The customer feels directly affected by the insight
- Familiar — Insight exists in everyday life
- Frequency — Insight is about a recurring situation
- Credibility — The customer is confident about the fact that a solution may exist for this insight
- Inspiration — Insight can modify the mindset and the behavior of the customer
- Coherence — Insight is aligned with the brand strategy
