Building Connection with our Customers
2020 has been quite the year. A worldwide pandemic. Social unrest. A divisive election. Amidst all of that (and sometimes because of it), Americans are lonely. A poll conducted in May by NORC at the University of Chicago showed that about twice as many Americans report being lonely in 2020 as in 2018. One headline I saw said that we were in the middle of a loneliness epidemic.
The pandemic has impacted our gatherings. Social distance and video conferences have become the new norms as we strive to connect despite restrictions. But as I have reflected on all of the things I’ve seen, heard, and experienced this year, I’ve wondered if our loneliness is more than just physical distance. Have we forgotten how to see and listen to people, especially those that are different from us?
While reflecting on this question, I began comparing how I strive to connect in my personal life and how I connect with others at work. Do I make the same effort to listen and understand the goals and needs of my colleagues and customers as I do my family and friends?
What is connection?
I like Brené Brown’s explanation of connection, even though it might feel strange to apply it to a business setting.
“I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgement; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.”
- Brené Brown
While this matters for everyone, it’s especially important for product managers (PM). A good product manager is a central hub, the main connective tissue between customers, engineering, sales, marketing, and customer service. If a PM isn’t able to foster connection, especially when it comes to customers, it will be nearly impossible to build the right thing at the right time for the right audience.
Connection needs to be more than having a good relationship with colleagues and customers, though that is important. It is about having the compassion and empathy to understand their situations — their challenges, joys, motivations, and goals.
Since understanding the customer is one of the primary goals of a product manager, I want to break down Brené Brown’s definition and brainstorm ways to better connect with customers, though the principles should apply to internal stakeholders as well.
Feeling Seen
I believe we can break down feeling seen into two areas. The first is during customer calls and the second is responding to a customer when they’ve provided feedback or a feature request via other channels.
Creating Connection During Customer Calls
It’s easy to let customers become a number as we focus on metrics. Talking to customers every week helps keep product managers grounded, but if the interviews are only used to validate ideas and designs, we are missing an opportunity to make a connection and understand the customer better. Every conversation is a chance to better understand customers and help them feel seen. One of the ways we can do this is simply by making eye contact and being mindful of body language.
Many customer conversations happen remotely, which can make this a little more challenging. Video conferencing helps, but product managers should have their camera on and encourage customers to do the same. While it isn’t as easy to see all of the body language, gestures, facial expressions, or to make eye contact over video, actively focusing on these elements can reveal a lot more about what customers are thinking and feeling.
Communication is both verbal and nonverbal. If we aren’t seeing someone’s body language, we are missing a lot of what is being said. It’s also how PMs can let the person know they’re seen. A 2009 study found that when we empathize with people, we often rely on facial expressions to communicate it.
In addition to showing empathy, facial expressions help facilitate trust. A 2016 study found that facial expressions played a major role in deciding if you are willing to collaborate or “team up” with another person. This is critical when talking to customers.
If trust is established and PMs ask good questions, customers will be more open and share details that can lead to valuable insights. Here are some questions I like to use:
- “Tell me about the last time you…”
- “Set the scene for me. What were you doing before that?”
- “What happened next? I want to hear the rest.”
- “How did that make you feel?”
- “Interesting, why is that?”
- “Tell me more.”
- “That makes sense. What else?”
All of these questions are intended to show genuine interest and indicate wanting to see the full story, not just the surface level. To reinforce this feeling, PMs need to fight the urge to interrupt. Sometimes what the customer has to say doesn’t answer the question. Sometimes the answer might be long. No matter what, don’t interrupt. This time is about the customer and a PM should always listen to the story the customer wants to tell. It might lead to discovering new problem areas or maybe it will just help build empathy. Regardless, don’t worry if your research questions aren’t being answered. It just means you should talk to more customers.
Responding to Customer Feedback / Requests
When customers reach out to provide feedback or requests, I see it as a bid for connection. Dr. John Gottsman, a relationship researcher, has studied the bids of connections that happen between couples and how it can be an indicator to the health of the relationship. Bids for connection, Dr. Gottsman says, are usually minor requests that could range from wanting someone to pay attention to you to helping with a simple request to asking for help solving a problem. When one person makes a bid for connection, the other person can decide to turn towards the person and engage in that bid, or turn away. In successful relationships, couples turn towards each other 86% of the time. In couples that divorce, they turn towards each other only 33% of the time.
The bids for connection from a customer may look a little different, but I believe the principle is the same. When a customer reaches out, they are communicating that they want your attention. They want to be seen, heard, and validated.
Product managers don’t have the time to respond to every customer that provides feedback — we can’t hit the metric for successful couples — but perhaps there is an opportunity to respond to some, or even ask to set up time with a few as a part of the weekly discovery process. Showing this level of involvement on discussion boards, or wherever customers are conversing, shows a level of interest and caring.
Feeling Heard
Humans are terrible listeners. A Harvard Business Review article, Listening to People by Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens in 1957, cited studies that showed that immediately after listening to someone talk, the average listener only remembers half of what he heard, even if he thought he was listening carefully. After eight hours, we tend to forget one-half to one-third of what we learned.
One of the reasons we’re terrible listeners is due to the difference in the average speed of talking versus the speed of our brains. Emilia Hardman in her book, Active Listening 101, says that the average speaking pace is 90–200 words per minute. The average listening rate is 400–600 words per minute and the average thinking rate is 500–1000 words per minute. That means our brains have spare time as we listen to someone. How we use that spare time defines how well we listen.
I mentioned being mindful of body language, gestures, and facial expressions in the previous section, but listening to the tone of voice is also important. Making note of each of these things helps us be a better listener. It helps fill the spare time, while keeping our focus on the person rather than letting our mind wander.
In the HBR article, the authors mentioned the story of a European church being taken apart stone by stone and then reassembled in the United States. That is what is happening in a conversation. One person is conveying a thought, word by word and the listener is trying to reassemble that thought in their own mind. The listener can stay focused on the thought by trying to visualize it, imagining the setting, the context, and trying to see if they can see the full idea or just a few stones. This also has the added benefit of helping us remember what we heard.
One of the other challenges in listening is that our emotions act as filters even if we don’t want them to. If the customer tells us something we don’t want to hear, we tend to tune it out or start thinking about our defensive response, rather than continuing to listen. Nichols and Stevens suggest two ways to combat it. The first is to withhold judgement until after the speaker is finished. Focus on understanding while the person is talking and save the assessment until after. The second is to search for evidence which proves you wrong.
For example, if I worked for Netflix and I had a hypothesis that binge watching only happens on weekends, I would want to be actively listening for stories about binge watching during a weekday. If I heard a story about that, I would want to dig in and learn as much as I could because it goes against what I thought I knew.
This practice is especially important if our goal is to truly understand our customers. We should always be seeking information that disproves hypotheses and what we think we know. This opens up our ability to listen without triggering our emotional defenses.
Showing Value
Dale Carnegie talks about the impact of appreciation several times in his book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I’ve heard stories of people taking these principles in his book and doing them insincerely, but that misses the heart and intent of the book.
While I always express sincere gratitude for a customer taking the time to talk to me and for the feedback they’ve provided, I’ve started to wonder if it comes off as trite. One of my goals in the new year is to spend an extra moment thinking about and then expressing a specific thing I valued in our conversation. I hope by doing this it will better convey my appreciation and how much I value that person. I believe empathy will be the key to make this successful.
In a recent Freakonomics podcast titled, How Do You Cure a Compassion Crisis, the host talks about the impact compassion has in healthcare, but that doctors often think they are more compassionate than patients do. The host interviewed Helen Riess, a psychiatrist and co-founder of a company called Empathetics that helps people be more empathetic. Riess talks about how she breaks down each letter of `empathy` to explain how we can do it better. E stands for eye contact. M stands for muscles of facial expression. P stands for posture or body language, A is for affect, T is for tone of voice, H is hearing, and Y is for your reaction.
Many of these have already been discussed, but the one that was unexpected for me was “your reaction.” Riess explained that this wasn’t about what you say, but about your feeling being with that person because feelings tend to be mutual. This means that if we genuinely see the value of the customer, feel grateful, and enjoy our conversation, they will likely feel similar.
Giving and Receiving Without Judgement
In The Lost Art of Listening the author, Michael P. Nichols, says that “a good listener is a witness, not a judge of your experience.” A product manager should always be focused on understanding a customer’s world, their context and experience with the product. This is sometimes hard to remember.
Before each conversation, some product managers think about what it’s like to be that customer. This can help get into an empathetic and compassionate mindset.
Another way to try to do this is to remember that you are not an expert on their experience, nor is that the point of the conversation. Go into each customer conversation not as an expert, but as a novice because you are a novice when it comes to another person’s experience.
Sustenance and Strength
One of the last parts of Brené Brown’s definition of connection is about deriving sustenance and strength from each other. Listening to the Freakonomics podcast I referenced earlier gave me an idea how this can happen.
In the podcast, they talked about doctor burnout being higher than other professions and that it is on the rise. Riess, the psychiatrist I mentioned earlier, explained that burnout happens when patients are seen more as a number or diagnosis instead of people. Doctors start to feel like it’s impossible to do a good job despite the amount of work.
I know I don’t experience the same level of burnout, but I’ve been victim to feeling like work is a never ending cycle of trying to meet deadlines and metrics. I feel like I can’t succeed. The fascinating thing that was mentioned in the podcast is that several studies have linked empathy to lower levels of burnout for doctors. While this isn’t causation, to me it shows that as we strive to see, hear, and show appreciation to our customers, it helps give us purpose and strength. The mere act of empathy can give us sustenance.
Bringing It All Together
The path to connection isn’t a formula, but there are techniques and skills that can help it happen. While long-term connection in our personal lives is important, I believe that the small moments of connections with strangers can be equally as important, especially when it comes to knowing our customers. Product managers need a deep understanding and a large dose of empathy to drive meaningful products and features and connection is how that happens.
Spend the time talking to customers about the context around why they use your product. Ask for stories and learn to truly listen to all of what they’re saying, from their body language to their words. Ask good questions, and learn how to show customers that you truly value what they have to say. These connections not only make PMs better at their job, but also make the job rewarding.
