Start your customer-centric experience strategy by UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER INSIGHTS
Build upon Customer Centricity Transformation to create the Ultimate Customer Experience (UCX).
State-of-the-art methodologies like Design Thinking and Service Design have taught us how to collect customer insights: you need to put yourself in someone else’s (the customer’s) shoes. Listen closely to what that someone tells you, even more observe what they are doing, and maintain a sense of empathy in order to learn about their true feelings.
The reason for this is — as mentioned already in our previous introduction articles on Customer Centricity Transformation, Flywheel Business Growth Model and Ultimate User Experience — that we want to be as close to our customers as possible, in order to really understand their problems and needs, so that we can provide them with relevant products and services.
What do you need to learn?
- Needs & Goals
What goals does the customer want to reach and why? - Problems, Obstacles, Challenges
Which problems could you possibly solve to improve your customer’s lives? - Desires, Expectations
What do your customers expect or wish about your service at which point in their customer lifecycle?
But the difficulty about Customer Insights is not just getting them — the difficulty is UNDERSTANDING customer insights correctly, analyzing the input you get, and identifying the right problems your products and services can or should solve.
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
This apocryphal quote from Henry Ford makes this point even more clear: you need to ask the right questions, to get useful answers. That is, you need to watch people’s behavior and dig as deep as possible into their lives to find out if what they say is what they really mean. As a matter of fact, in most cases people just don’t know what their real problem is. And how should they? If they knew, they could probably solve it by themselves. ;) As with apps — people didn’t know that they desperately needed them until they were invented by a company named Apple.
So, let’s assume you did lots of interviews with different kinds of people relevant to your business case. You even observed them during their daily routines and you collected tons of information. What are the key aspects you should focus on next? How do you know how to identify the RIGHT problems?
Basically, here’s a quick checklist, that helps you out at this point:
- Watch out for processes and tasks that are very time-consuming
- Watch out for any work-arounds of your users/customers
- Watch out for any obstacles, hurdles, impediments
- Understand the customer journey.
1. Optimize time-consuming processes
You might realize the focus is completely on the customers and their needs, NOT on your company’s needs. Don’t just eliminate everything that’s absorbing your company’s money, since you have to carefully evaluate whether the costly things you offer are what’s most valuable to your customers. But, if you optimize time-consuming processes, in most cases you will be able to save a lot of money as well.
For example, take a production line worker who has to process packages. Usually, this process takes him 30 seconds per package. For one package, the digital scale shows him that the package is heavier than expected, and so he has to unpack the whole box to check if there is an incorrect item in there. By the time he has found the wrong item and re-packed the package properly, 8 minutes have passed. Now, if something like this happens only 5 times a day, the warehouse company has already lost 40 minutes, equaling 80 packages not being processed. This leads to 400 unprocessed packages in a week, and 1600 unprocessed packages in one month. If the warehouse were to implement smart robots which make no mistakes during the packing process, or smart scanners that immediately identify wrong items — the company could save lots of money.
(You will find further examples on optimizing customer journeys in our article on creating a seamless customer experience.)
2. Provide solutions for work-arounds
If you observed people inventing some kind of a workaround to reach their goals, this tells you that it must be something quite important for them and you would do well to provide a convenient solution or service to compensate for their self-built invention.
Let’s go back to our production line worker. There’s a huge container above him containing air cushions to wrap products inside the boxes. But air cushions regularly fall out of the container and the worker takes a broom standing next to him to push the cushions back into the container. This again takes him a few seconds — let’s say 15 seconds, 20 times a day. This is another 5 minutes — equaling 10 packages, resulting in 200 unprocessed packages in one month.
You see, even very little things can sum up and have an impact on the overall costs and on the overall user experience. And even if the solution in this case might not be a digital product or service, but a differently built container, you should not go over it thinking “this is not my business”. Not only because of Amazon do we know how important fast and convenient package delivery has become for the end customer in the whole logistics sector.
3. Remove any obstacles
Any obstacles, hurdles, or impediments your customers might come across, and which prevent them from reaching their goal, should be removed. Those obstacles could be, for example, entering the same data twice because of an obvious platform switch. Or, unavailable products listed in search results. Or, no search results although items are available. Or, relevant information offered at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Or, or, or…
4. Understand the customer journey
Even though every one of us wants our data to be private and secure, we hate if companies and brands don’t know what we want. ;)
When you enter the same bakery every morning for your regular coffee, you expect the salesperson behind the counter to remember you and to start giving you what you want without even having to order it.
Why should this be different online? Companies HAVE to be aware of their customer’s journey and the complete lifecycle, which does not end after a person purchases something at your shop once or twice.
They also have to be aware of changing customer expectations at all times. A person who booked a trip to Berlin is probably NOT interested in traveling to Berlin again shortly thereafter. If a woman buys baby toys online as a present for her pregnant friend, that does not mean that she wants to get other baby stuff recommended all the time from now on. The “always on” culture means customers expect 24/7 service (or as close as possible)…
Putting all that together, a company needs to offer smart products and services that are highly personalized and adaptable to individual needs.
Want to learn more about how to create a seamless customer experience?
You may want to have a look at our previous articles on
Customer Centricity Transformation and Ultimate Customer Experience (UCX) or just stay tuned to coming up articles on Situative Relevance Index (SRI), Behavioral Analytics, Phygital Experiences etc… ;)
Get in contact:
Eve Cecon | Business Innovation Strategist @ Sensory-Minds
e.cecon@sensory-minds.com
