Why most companies fail at putting the (potential) customer at the center of everything they do.
Too often I come across companies, that claim to be customer-centric but make product decisions, that are business-led. E.g.:
❌ Google is prioritizing its own products in SERPs over other competitors. An extreme example to me is Google Books (see picture): On mobile devices not usable at all, since it’s not responsive. Value-add products with meaningful summaries or user experience are de-prioritized.
❌ Passwords and Logins. Everyone hates sign-up processes, still many products force users to create a login before the user can experience any 𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘤 𝘮𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 or at least has a chance to discover the product’s core value prop. Instead, businesses want to gather data in order to have a contact point with the user, to bring them back. There’s no 2nd chance for a great first product impression.
💡But why is that an issue?
- A steady decline in product acceptance and usage. As soon as the perceived gained value of a competitor’s product is bigger than the switching costs, your users are gone.
- Revenues follow the value being generated. Short-term hacks will harm your brand value and trustworthiness in the long run.
- Most of these kinds of top-down decisions don’t make it through a proper framework, which prevents the org to learn in data- and testing-driven manner.
What can you do to bring customer-centricity to your org?
✔️ Introduce a Hotjar morning: Everyone who’s working with the product is checking 5 recordings and adding improvement stories to the backlog.
✔️ Give cross-functional growth or product teams the autonomy to make (really) autonomous decisions to achieve their pre-defined OKRs or North Star metric.
✔️ When Facebook was building out its Free Basic product for countries with low connectivity, they limited the internal wifi speed to 56k one day per week. Think about how you can put yourself in the shoes of your personas to discover their problems firsthand.
✔️ Make customer service part of your employee onboarding process: A few days on the front line will come with a high learning curve and identifying pain points as direct as it can.
❓How do you apply customer-centricity systematically to your organization?
