Embracing customer intimacy at Trade Me

Customer intimacy isn’t a new idea. In fact, startups can’t stay in business without it. But when a company starts maturing and scaling, sometimes it loses sight of the customer in favour of feature delivery or shareholder growth. In these times, methodologies like design thinking will help drive customer intimacy and ultimately, create better products and experiences.

We need to listen to our customers, know their problems, and understand their needs. Illustration by Misha Petrick.

Symbiosis

The relationship between a business and its customers should be symbiotic, much like we see in nature. Flowers need bees to pollinate, bees need flowers for food. From a business perspective, if we’re looking out for our customers’ interests, then the customer will continue to engage with us. To achieve this, we need to listen to our customers, know their problems, and understand their needs. Only then can we create experiences and products that are useful, engaging, and ultimately, better for the business.

A good example is one of Google’s most engaging products, Google Photos. It’s a cloud-photo service that directly deals with the problem users have bemoaned since the beginning of digital photography: storage needs. Google Photos allows users to backup unlimited photos and videos, free of charge. The reason Google gives its customers such a dang good deal is because it takes their data in return. While some may see this as a cause for concern, it’s a fantastic model in which the customer and business participate in a symbiotic relationship.

Connecting the business and the customer

Building customer empathy is important, yet one piece of the larger puzzle. From here, we need to connect the dots between the customer and the strategy, for which many modern businesses use ‘design thinking’. It’s not a new concept, and it’s how most businesses begin, just worded and packaged in different ways. At it’s core, design thinking is a customer-centric methodology to help businesses cut through ambiguity and validate assumptions. The tactics within design thinking focus on observing human behaviours and using that knowledge to make better business decisions. Watch the video below to learn more:

“Design is too important to be left to designers.”

If nothing else, design thinking promotes learning and self-awareness. If we have a broad business strategy and learn and observe from our customers, we can adapt our business strategy to fulfil the customer need. Then we can look at how to go about executing that vision.

“For these type of cultural shifts, everyone has to change.”—Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX

This isn’t easy for many larger (and smaller) companies to adapt to. Observing and asking questions about a customers’ behaviour is a stark contrast to inquiring with them about specific products or services. Design thinking empowers team members to take a divergent approach of problem solving — creating new innovative ideas and strategies based on customer and market research — as opposed to a convergent approach of making choices based on a set of available options.

Illustrations by Michael B. Myers, Misha Petrick, Jelio Dimitrov, and Chris Gannon respectively.

Everyone has to change

Principles of traditional business, lean, and agile, all overlap and show themselves in this methodology. Many companies, such as IBM, adapt a unique design thinking model. Some rename it and package it as a service, like the Objective Based Design framework from Telepathy. They all have a similar end-goal of delivering the desired outcomes in an effective way. Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX, says this is a major cultural shift for many organisations and to be successful “everyone has to change.”

Understand business objectives

It’s important to embrace ambiguity and focus on outcomes rather than output, which can be a grand future vision or a bunch of smaller outcomes. For example, because Google Photos uses photos to collect data, it might have a business objective of “1 billion more photos uploaded by users.” Maybe Google needs more data of dogs to better serve its search algorithms, so it could have a business objective of “Moar dawg photos.” The more specific the objective, the more likely it is that the business has refined it down due to customer research.

Customer research will be a catalyst for new insights—the “Aha!” moment—and a divergent method of ideation. Infographic by Evelina Yatselenko.

Understand our customers

Empathy for the customer and their market both validates and refines the business objective, but it is also a catalyst for new insights, aptly known as the “Aha!” moment. For example, Google (in the previous example) might find that people aren’t uploading dog photos because the AI doesn’t recognise their dog as the same dog from their other photos. Product managers or UX researchers typically facilitate the formal research practices, but it’s on the entire team to have knowledge of whom they are building for.

Design Kit from ideo.org has a lot of good tools and resources for successful design thinking practices. And don’t be distracted by Martin’s charm—HMW are so helpful in team brainstorming exercises.

Prototype and experiment

Following the previous two phases, the team is now empowered with the validated business outcome and the customer insights. Starting with the phrase “How might we…”, they can use collaborative, convergent thinking to help narrow down ideas and fuel rapid prototyping. The core objective is to obtain feedback on ideas as early as possible so quick decisions can be made on what to create, evolve, or adapt— whether it be a product or service. Often times its designers who shine in the prototyping and experimentation phase but, especially for offline experiences, all creative thinkers are necessary here.

“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” — Agile Manifesto principle #1.

Build, measure, and iterate

This is the phase most larger businesses and development teams focus on, typically using agile development principles. The agile manifesto encourages teams to focus on incremental work cadences, iterate based on empirical feedback, and respond to unpredictable circumstances, whether it be dependencies or scope changes. What companies often forget is that agile isn’t just a methodology, but rather a set of principles which revolve around the customer and the team, transforming the mindset and tactics of the teams building products. And because of the focus on iterative development, it’s a great way for teams to reflect and measure if they are achieving the outcomes they originally set out to do and pivot if necessary.

Jeff Gothelf (❤️) said in one of his popular talks that one of the foundational principles of design thinking is “humility in all things.” Furthermore, as teams start to break down the ambiguity—understanding the business vision and the customer, ideating with each other, and rapidly building products and services—they shouldn’t always expect success but rather to grow roots in customer empathy, proactive learning, and awareness of how to do better next time.

Illustrations by Maori Sakai, Fran Solo, and Tom Morris respectively.

Building Empathy within Trade Me

At Trade Me, we are doing some of these things well and others not so well. To start this cultural change, we are focusing on building intimacy with our customers. I’ve identified three (of many) ways we can increase customer empathy within our team:

1. Going out and visiting our customers in their element. Visiting with customers isn’t just going and interviewing our Top Sellers, real estate agents, recruiters, or car dealers. It’s about also being observant in our daily lives. We all use Trade Me day to day and through our lives—attend open homes, search for cars, apply for jobs—the list goes on (no wonder we rebranded ‘Life Lives Here’). I also recently found this awesome empathy map from Dave Gray that seems like a fantastic way to build customer intimacy.
2. Increase and encourage knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing is huge! We need to look at how our people closest to the customer—customer service and sales specifically—can share more about all the nuggets of information they already have. This process can be structured, such as weekly emails or digests, or unstructured, such as AMAs or coffee dates. Teams can invite them into workshops or join them during sales presentations and pitches. At Trade Me, we have a program called ‘CS Fusion’ where team members can sit in on random support calls.
3. More emphasis on user research practices. Journey mapping builds empathy for customers and collects rich qualitative information about their experiences and pain points, all in one space. There are so many other user research practices that can build empathy with the customer that I won’t go in to but if you want to learn more, check out this resource from Design Kit.

For our work to succeed, we must have a good foundational understanding of our customers. Only then can we look internally to bring more experimentation and incremental product development so that ultimately, we can create world-class products and experiences.