Customer feedback isn’t enough
My family and I just got back from a trip to Disney World. I spent five days there with my husband and our daughters, ages 7 and 4. We had the best time, but as any parent who has been knows — a trip to Disney ends in certain exhaustion.
We woke up early to catch our flight and proceeded to get our bags packed and leave. As we walked to catch our bus to the airport from the resort, we were greeted immediately by a Disney cast member who took our bags and checked them into the airline with a smile. Then he handed us our already-printed airline tickets and off we went. We got on Disney’s Magic Express to the airport with nothing more than our computer bags (and our kids, of course). Our luggage circling on the carousel when we landed back home in Nashville, TN. No waiting in line at the Orlando airport, no struggling to get bags up onto the scale to ensure they were under the 50 pound limit.
Sure, lugging numerous bags plus keeping track of young kids through a busy airport is a hassle, but it’s one we signed up for. We knew what we were going into.
Apparently, so did Disney.
The delight we had in that moment was unbelievable. We had spent five days at the most magical place on earth, and the first thing I told friends and family about the trip was that story.
We never told Disney this would be a challenge because in our minds it’s just part of the trip. You’re responsible for what you bring. But they knew it was a pain point. How? Because they studied every bit of a customer’s stay with them and did all they could to make it frictionless.
When you work in the digital product world, the first lesson you’re (hopefully) taught is to listen to the customer. It’s vital to have a pulse on what your customers are using your tool for and how well it is working to solve their problems. The issue is that sometimes you can get so wrapped up in customer feedback that you miss the opportunity to innovate beyond what your customers are telling you.
When a customer has an issue and is able to easily articulate it to you, chances are, there are other people who are trying to solve that same issue, AKA your competition. If you solely use that feedback to dictate the roadmap of your product, you’ll be swimming in a red ocean in no time.
I’m not trying to downplay the importance of customer feedback when it comes to planning out feature development, but it is only one small piece of the puzzle. There is so much more to analyze and understand.
If you have a great product that is getting attention in the industry it’s meant to help, chances are it’s because you intimately know your user base. You know what keeps them up at night, why they succeed or why they fail. You study their journey not only through the lense of how they use your product, but through their daily work life.
Customer journeys are so often related to directly how they relate to our product: how they found us, how they interact with us, what they do after they leave us. After we launch, we zero in so deeply on how our product impacts them, that we can lose site of the world around our customers where we aren’t involved. Our product is is only a small piece of their day and while it is a solution to a problem they are having, it’s not the ultimate.
The issue begs us to take this route: We need to fall more in love with the problem we are trying to solve than the solution we currently have released.
Follow that overall work life journey of your customer and you start to notice small friction points. These aren’t big enough for them to complain about just yet because what they’re articulating to you now in the form of feedback is what is most concerning or hindering the most productivity. But these small friction points are friction points nonetheless. With technology rapidly advancing, the feedback we get now is often what we didn’t recognize as the small friction before. We’ve solved the big problems, and now the smaller have become more noticeable.
Companies who master this are companies who thrive. Take Amazon, the world’s most customer-centric company. We didn’t know that we needed Amazon Prime, but when I forget socks while on a business trip, it’s an incredible advantage to click two buttons on my phone and have them show up at my hotel room door.
The future is now.
A good product isn’t enough anymore. We as digital solution creators need to be more in tune in with our customers’ journeys in order to delight them and build more loyal communities around our products.
