Who Knows What the Customer Wants?
A short essay on how unconscious bias may play a role in the journey to the perfect product.
Customer Centricity is the Cool New Buzzword
For a long time, we’ve heard companies saying that the customer is at the center of all they do. It’s become a sort of standard motto or mantra as if believing and saying “we are customer oriented” would suddenly open doors from which happy people would come out and buy their products or services. The reality of course is that it’s not that simple….
Do I Not Know My Customers?
Although we possess precious, priceless information and believe to have customer preferences engrained into our DNA (built over years of customer contact or industry experience) there may be an unconscious bias playing a role here. Especially when we work with products that target several different cultures, spread across different ages, genders or countries.
Interesting perspectives from Sociology and Anthropology writers argue that it’s the collective unconscious that shape preferences and behaviors at a higher cultural level, and that these can be difficult to detect. How could you imagine that water can mean “the valley spirit” or “the water dragon”*? One would think that water is just water, until one works for a big international water bottler…
We Want to Walk the Talk. But Faster.
It may seem redundant to say how important it is that we talk to the customer on a regular basis. All of us, even those that have no direct contact with the customer can still request users’ views during a product development, collect dislikes after a product is delivered or even listen to what customers think before any concepts have been idealized.
In this sense, UX Research can help us to navigate this process faster, by focusing on understanding behaviors, needs and motivations of our customers.
Our Concrete Approach at The Discovery Team
In the ZTech Discovery Team, we have already started to implement a culture of Lean UX Research, of Test As We Develop, and we have also built our first Users Panel.
Soon, we also want to daringly propose that more employees talk more often with more customers on a regular basis.
Finally, to Answer The Big Question…
Yes — you do know what the customer wants! Of course, every company knows a certain amount about what customers want. But some get there faster and more on point than others, avoiding classic product mistakes. The latter is the kind we should all be aiming at.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” — Stephen Hawking
*Jung, C.G., Man and His Symbols
