How to Get Your Customers to Participate in Design Thinking
I recently conducted three workshops with customers to help improve their products. They had all gone to market, had customers using their products, and all three had the same question about customer research. “How do we convince customers to spend time with us?”
If you’re a product leader trying to gather customer insights to make decisions around your product or service, the data you need may be more readily available than you think.
Involving customers in your design process may feel overwhelming when you’re trying to get them to share insights. Here are three simple lessons we’ve learned the hard way.
Here are some tips on getting started on your journey. Soon enough you’ll be on a path to maturing to having customer advisory boards and sophisticated product analytics to inform product decisions.
Cross-functional context sharing and problem-solving
The product development team should work closely with sales, account management, and customer service to prioritize feature development. Conduct open discussions about which customer profile you’re serving. Articulating the problem, in their words, helps your account and customer service team communicate customer sentiment.
- It will help your product development team build more customer-centric solutions.
- It will help your sales teams communicate the value proposition to new customers.
- These customer-facing teams can also identify which customers you’re likely to delight with a new feature, and which ones will be annoyed. Now you can prioritize which segment of the market you’re targeting.
Current customers are a key source of truth
While it’s tempting to conduct focus groups with prospects, you can benefit greatly by leveraging the trust and influence you have with your customers. Enduring technical support calls while servicing your existing customers can be daunting. They often make teams defensive, rather than curious about why the customer’s problem really is important. Have your customer spend five or ten minutes describing the problem they were trying to solve instead of talking about the problem they had with the product. This will help you identify common trends among your customers, especially when they communicate the same problem using different language. This also helps establish trust by helping them feel heard during a difficult conversation.
Create a feedback loop early
In order to decide what you’ll change about your product or service, you’ll have to make some assumptions. It’s important to circle back with the customer once the change is implemented and validate that it actually solves the target problem. Create continuity by scheduling a follow-up discussion once the fix is made. Circling back like this can also highlight the value that the change delivers for your customer, and improve their emotional alignment with you, your product, and your brand.
If you feel this approach could help your organization, let’s continue the conversation. Use this link to schedule a Product Innovation Workshop of your own.
I hope you find this actionable, useful, and can leverage your customer success teams to learn more about and to delight your customers. If you’ve had experience using this approach, I would love to hear more in the comments.
Ashok Sivanand is the CEO of Integral, a Detroit-based software consulting firm that focuses on building great teams that build great products. Ashok is a student of lean product management, organizational behavior, and cooking with a smoker.
