5 Things We Need to Understand Customer
The customer is something that we have to understand each and every single day of our entrepreneurial days. The customer by any means is different for every single business.
Because every business is unique if you copy someone else business to your business it will most likely to fail (copying it) because you aren’t he/she who build the business. In my perception what make people success is always different because the success itself is different for each person.
I'm running my early stage startup suarsocial after I move on from my previous business cubic.inc an incubator startup based in Bandung, Indonesia. Those 4 years in Cubic thought me many things to understand startups and its customer. Every batch in the startup incubator program makes me realize that customer is the key to spread the word, the key to startup success.
So, who is the customer? Do they need our solution? Why they should care?
Those are the 1 million dollar question in order to achieve success in build startup, that what I believe. Know who is our customer need to come first before our focus to selling more product. Marketing & selling is not just making people buy our product. More than that is making people using our solution to solve his/her problem or making his/her life better.
“Why?” Become something that I believe need to be continuously asking by our self in order to fulfill our life. That is also the question to running our business to achieve customer satisfaction.
Have you ever asking yourself and your team why they (your customer) should care about your product?
If you have done it that means we are on the same boat where we need to keep seeking what make they care. If you haven’t done it, you should or customer will ignore you.
Here 5 things I learn about how to understand customer:
1. Know who is your customer.
“Customer is King”. Know them Beaviourly, Psychographically, Demographically, & Geographically become a real need for us who want their business thrive and shine. Really know your customer also means create or find a good habit that involving your brand.
I also recommend you to pick some sample from your customer and really get to know them. Find what really matter from them and also find what similarities from those customers you pick. In some case, brand knows more than their customer itself because of great observation and deep understanding from the years-&-years experience of serving their customer needs.
2. Know what do they need & have empathy for them.
People consume 3000+ brand massage daily. Yankelovich study (later quoted by the NY Times), depending on what’s included, studies support that message and brand “exposure” can range from 3,000 to 20,000. There is nowhere you can force someone to give free attention. We now live in an era that we can easily access information and we got so many options for our problems. (Media Dynamic Inc, 2014)
Meet the customer expectation is what we really need to achieve. Solution never will become real, unless the customer really uses it. Product -Market Fit doesn’t stop when you achieve your MVP (minimum viable product) or even launch your product to the market. Even after you scale your business internationally, we still need to understand and always care to our customer, right?
Empathy map, you can use it to get better understanding of your customer.
Start with incorporated goals into the map, to help teams clarify the context and purpose of the activity. Because people always start with what will they do. 1 to 7 sections in the map is making us learn better the customer intention & sequence of activities. Start with who are we empathizing with following by what do they do and so on. The last section is what they think and feel, the pain and the gain from that experience.
The map head picture is made to emphasize the “Think and Feel” process element are central and put it inside the head. It also to emphasize the difference between observable phenomena interaction between thoughts and feelings. In this map we get some thought-starter questions, to make it easier for teams to facilitate the exercise. (Dave Gray, 2017)
3. Find product balance between technology push & market pull.
Technology push is when research and development in new technology, drive the development of new products. And market pull is when research & development from customer drive the development of the products. So my suggestion is doing both technology push & market pull all together.
A good balance for your product is when your customer accepts to use it that whats matter in business. New technology is not always something out-of-space or very high tech. New technology simply better solution than previous that we use. When we develop our product we have to make sure that we do care both about our product development and also how markets adapt & accept the product.
4. Become better alternative is a way you do it.
An “alternative” in a definition is two things mutually exclusive “the facts fit two alternative scenarios” (English dictionary). That means become exclusive to a specific customer to start selling your product is the right way to do it.
Your scenario of how customer meets your product, think about it, compare it to something else, prefer to try, then finally buy and use your product have to unique compared to other solution in the market. When we learn from big brand out there, customer journey of a product designed to be different despite they have the same target market.
We can learn how Grab different from Gojek, Pepsi different from CocaCola, AOV different from MLBB, Mercedes-Benz different from BMW, and so on. They maybe fight for a same targeted customer but they delive different story & experience for them.
5. Continuously innovate to meet customer need.
Customer need is changing every single minute because of the flood of information nowadays. What viral today may be outdated tomorrow. In this globalization era, customers always seeking a better solution. And they can do it easily using the internet to find one.
Willingness to keep learning is always a way to survive in business. Internet era brings so much opportunity and also a challenge. We have to continuously innovate to exist as customer alternative. And here is Lean Startup, one proven way to do continuous Innovation.
Lean Startup
Lean Startup thought us the fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. Startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop in order to achieve their mission and be successful. Three main component of the Lean Startup is Build, Measure, & Learn.
The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning with the least effort.
(Eric Rise, 2011)
Any company is not one solution to solve one problem. It’s about making things better and better. It dies when you stop build-measure-learn.
These are some methodologies to get (measure) your customer need: Observe, interview, survey, analyze, AB testing, cause-effect, diary/log, etc.
I highly recommend you to also watch Seth Godin TED video to understand how valuable is customer and customer attention itself. How to get your ideas to spread — A TED talk by Seth Godin
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This article is one of my 5 Things series a part of a longer-term project that I am doing to better understand startup success & serve the customer better. Feel free to use the figures by referencing this article.
I’m Faris Sundara Putra Co-Founder & CMO Suarsocial: a Community Crowdsource Platform Powered by Blockchain Technology.
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