Why do your customers hire you?
If only we knew why our customers were buying our products or hiring our services for!!!
Some of you might have come across this profound tool called Jobs-to-be-done. For those who haven’t, this is a crash course. The fact is that our customers or users are using our product to accomplish some job of theirs. For instance, I am buying a book at the airport to keep me entertained during the waiting time in the lounge and during my travel in the flight. So the jobs in themselves are divided into two types,
The functional job: Everything under functional jobs is driven by logic, objectivity and practicality. For instance, I want the book to be easy enough to carry in my hand luggage; I want it to have big fonts to read in low light, and so on.
The emotional job: Everything under emotional jobs is quite subjective, driven by emotions, feelings and perception. The emotional job then again is divided into two types of jobs, personal jobs and social jobs.
#1 Personal jobs: This is to do with how the user feels about the solution, and how they feel about themselves before, while or after, using the solution. For instance, I feel really good reading a book, I am learning something new, and I am keeping up my reading habit and not wasting time watching screens during my flight.
#2 Social Jobs: This is to do with how the user would like others to perceive them while using the solution. In a way, it is to feel social recognition or acknowledgement for our choices. For instance, I want others to think that I am a well-read person; I want people to see that I am up to date.
But here is the catch, I am a pretty old school person — hey only when it comes to booking reading. I chose to buy a book while waiting in the airport. If the job to get done is to keep myself entertained while I wait — especially at old and boring airports — there are so many other products or services I could have hired to get the job done. My personal favourite to do include — Playing mobile games, get a foot spa, drink a (lot of) hot chocolate, window shopping in hyper-expensive shops, popping a packet of nuts, chatting up a friendly face, counting the stars, you get it. It is just n-number of things that could keep me entertained, and depending on the airport there are just too many options to get the job done.
My best friend has had his fair share of travel experiences across India and across the globe. Guess that schema came to question when he landed in China after midnight. Lights were off, only the conveyor belt was on, and for a non-Chinese speaker who had to get a Taxi where Uber isn’t the go-to — sounds like big trouble. So his job to be done was to have a safe uneventful travel to China. To make that happen he can’t hire just one product, right? That is where jobs to be done for services tend to become complicated. Many people, many touchpoints, many products and many services have to come together in a seamless way to make his (customer) journey a smooth one. He had to have clear instructions and know how on,
1) Where to buy or pre-book a SIM card to be mobile once he lands there
2) What or who can get him from the airport to his destination
3) Who will help him get accommodated once he reached the bread and breakfast
4) How can he take the local transport or cab services to reach the office the next day
5) Once at the office how does the order and pay for his food and the list goes on
Mind you, the above requirements brings together at least three to four different vendors, and an external partner like government-run public transportation to make his journey feel comfortable. That is when jobs to be done take a little more complicated turn. It isn’t as easy as hiring a book to give me company during my travel.
Still, jobs to be done are the founding base for a set of choices your customer makes and how you can make it easy for them, before, while and after getting a job done. As jobs are nothing but a collection of tasks that happen in a sequence. Like going to the bookstore, browsing the shelves, asking for suggestion, hitting Goodreads for a review, then finalizing, billing, coming out, finding a nice spot that shows me the announcement board, then sitting to get on the exciting journey of reading the book.
So many times the customer doesn’t care what can come to aid — product, service or even a person depending on the situation — when they want the job done, and sometimes they do. In our next blog, we will talk about that in much more detail.
Meanwhile, I am going to leave you with a puzzle. What were the jobs to be done when EL James decided to have the below cover design for her book trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey?
PS: I don’t follow EL James as an author, haven’t read the books, or watched the movies. But I like to share the story behind the story. Nothing against the followers and non-followers of EL James or Genre of erotic romance. 🙂
