A Disturbing Pattern

We’ve found that teams further from the customer tend to be tempted by the belief that certain changes to internal processes will result in an improved customer experience.

At Context Partners, we’ve helped clients from global apparel retailers to software companies develop hypotheses, run tests, and learn how to best engage with their customers. As our clients have become larger over time, we’ve noticed a disturbing pattern. We’ve found that teams further from the customer tend to be tempted by the belief that certain changes to internal processes will result in an improved customer experience. In this fictitious story describing real tensions, we will explore different perspectives on customer problems and how to move towards more human-centered approaches to solve them.

Jackie and Amy’s story

It was a crisis point though no one put it that way. Jackie looked hard at Jim who had just made an argument for internal process improvement. He believed that this process improvement should not only drive a decision but beat out pressing well-known customer needs. It was the third time that month Jim, the lead from the systems administration team, had made a process change argument based on a small mountain of quantitative data at hand. As the meeting ended Jackie, who was in her second year as Chief Customer Experience Officer, headed outside to clear her head. As she left the building, Amy fell into step with her. Amy had come up through customer service, she had already re-written the book on how to increase customer satisfaction for the most frustrated customers. She had even formed a casual group of advisors that helped get to the real heart of the customer experience. Amy wasn’t directly on Jim’s team but worked closely with them and had seen them struggle to reach the customer, stay within budget, and deliver on product milestones.

A couple of weeks ago, Amy had an inkling that there was another way to address Jim’s concerns and solve the deeper customer problem. Her approach would be less conventional than he was comfortable with but promised to put the customer experience back at the center, addressing those painful customer needs. Amy had researched the idea, formed a hypothesis to test it, shared what she learned with her group of advisors for feedback, and then after some refinement, was persuaded it could work. As she walked with Jackie, Amy started to unpack her idea and how it could bring them closer to the customer and test a new process that would lead to better engagement in the future.

If the struggle in this story sounds familiar, you’ve probably been Jackie or Amy. You’ve seen a problem and been dissatisfied with process-centric solutions to fundamentally human problems. Or maybe you feel like the tools you’re using to better know your customer just aren’t cutting it. You may even feel like your colleagues don’t understand where your organization’s real priorities should be. Here are four key areas of tension you may experience and tips on addressing them.

The battle of Quantitative vs. Qualitative

It’s easy to rely on numbers, they’re quick and persuasive, but as we saw in our story, what Jim fails to recognize is that human behaviors and expectations impact performance. In complex systems, human behaviors such as motivation, for example, are key to the whole system functioning at all. We often say around that office that quantitative data will tell you how high you’ve climbed on the mountain, but not which mountain to climb. The most important things to us as humans are not quantitative. We can look at quantitative data as a platonic truth but it just doesn’t work that way. We’ve also seen that when people feel stressed they pursue process improvements when dealing with the real customer need appears too difficult or out of their control. They can use quantitative data to avoid dealing with human factors, exhibiting forms of resistance as described in Peter Block’s classic book, Flawless Consulting.

When you encounter a Jim, keep in mind that few people are intentionally fighting against the customer. Jim probably believes that fixing a process will fix the customer problem. But customers care about their experience, not your process. It doesn’t matter to them whether your internal process looks like a steaming bowl of linguini or a Ferrari’s engine, the customers’ experience determines your reality, not the other way around. A simple tip for working with Jims in your life, if you need to win him over, try using the language of hypothesis and experimentation to explain your approach.

Proximity paralysis

Why is it so hard to get up from our desks and meet customers? Maybe for you, it’s not, but for many of us who since grade school have been trained to complete tasks and been reprimanded for talking to our neighbor, it’s not so easy. To solve complex problems it takes understanding people and that means getting close to them. And people are messy. We all are. One way we’ve tackled this with our clients is by running real-world experiments. We recently worked with a client to run three experiments with their customers and each one involved putting new ideas into action quickly rather than speculating about possible outcomes or building internal processes. In the spirit of the Lean method, they formed a hypothesis, tested an approach externally, and learned from it. When the temptation is to build a new internal process or you sense perfectionism eroding action, dive in with your community and seek tangible real-world customer engagement.

Customer POV

There are many rational and accurate reasons for why a feature, function, or service is the way it is. However, the moment you realize there’s a delta between your customers’ expectations and what a product or service is designed to do, it’s time to look more deeply at how they’re interacting with it. Key to understanding where a product or service is being perceived as broken is understanding what customer expectations of that product or service have become. Not what they were yesterday or when the product launched. There are times things are simply and truly broken, e.g., unintentional 404 errors, and no point of view changes that. But there are other moments when customers’ expectations have shifted and what once worked for them no longer does. There’s only one way to find answers to that, by building a positive relationship that lets you ask good questions. If you’re up against something that appears to be broken from a customer’s perspective, don’t just fix it, use it as an opportunity to find out what’s changed in your customers’ world.

The tough part

Most people in the Chief Customer Experience Officer or product manager roles are working to hardwire continuous and relevant engagement into their organizational culture and customer communities. While it’s become faster and easier to get in touch with customers, the customer themselves is changing rapidly. When we talked to some of our advisors, these were the questions keeping them up at night:

• Are we ahead or behind our competition in anticipating changing customer needs?
• Is the data our product teams are using pointing us in the right direction?
• We’re getting bigger but are we losing touch with our customer?
• Are we as close to our customers as we think we are?

Superficially this might look like a case of business FOMO, but looking deeper it appears that increasing customer power, autonomy, and falling switching costs are making it harder for organizations to learn what customer needs are and deliver consistently against them. This is why continuous engagement is so important.

Tools that work:

So what tools can you use you to keep up with your changing customers? Here’s a short list of some of our favorites to get qualitative insights to close the gap between you and the customer. They’ll help you see your customer in their world, learn how to test ideas in the marketplace, and simply ask people what they think.

• Dscout — remote customer research via video diaries
• Lean Start Up — classic thinking on creating small market tests for little or no money
• Quora — simply ask the world a question and pick people to answer it
• Observation — the cornerstone of ethnographic research
• Interviewing — a conversation is still one of the best ways to understand someone
• Concept sketching — made an idea just real enough to interact with your customers

If you’re looking to learn how to get close to your customers we’re here for you.