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Start planning my 2024 The ability to delight customers starts with the customer experience. You need to know what your customers care about, not what you think they care about, so you can please them. This means understanding what challenges they are facing, what problems they need to solve, and what they are trying to achieve.
Therefore, empathy and experience are the first steps in designing customer satisfaction. Your goal is to understand the customer's purpose and then design an experience that fits the needs. Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, and Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, famously told a story about a fast-food company that had invested heavily in researching people's taste preferences for milkshakes, and that effort was to no avail. It turns out that people don't care much about the taste of the milkshake when they buy it, they just want to be convenient, just want to find something to pass the time while commuting by car, to make themselves comfortable and full. Recognizing this, the company redesigned the way milkshakes were sold (making them easier to buy) and readjusted the formula (making them last longer), and as a result, milkshake sales skyrocketed.
Fieldwork – Really observing the customer's behavior is the key to empathy, rather than hiding behind a mirror and listening to the focus group. Some executives are always self-righteous, believing that new features and functionality of a product will lead to greater sales. As Christensen and Cook put it, "While we've made some things easier and cheaper, we're unlikely to succeed if the customer doesn't care about them." ”
A team from Continuum Design worked with a home security company to demonstrate the benefits of conducting a field survey. Toby Botov, head of Continuum, recalls that when they visited customers with the home security company, they learned that one of the company's core products was going in the wrong direction. "We found something that people want from a home security system, which is to simplify their lives, not something super powerful and complicated," Botov recalled. "In other words, the company has been striving for technology excellence at the expense of the experience that customers really want. Continuum's research helped the home security company redesign not only the system's functionality, but also its appearance and user interface. Conversely, if a customer needs a large number of features, functions, and options, the company's approach will be very different.
Empathy is a very powerful tool that can help you understand what your customers care about most. Try to be your own customer once: browse your own **; Try to find the person you are looking for through customer service; Try to order the product; booking flights and cabins; Try to find a hotel room without a map; Make a purchase at your own store. However, it's important not to substitute your intuition for direct observation of the customer when thinking from the customer's point of view. Surf Airlines' Jeff Porter said: "We think a lot of things are important to most members, but I suspect they don't actually matter. ”
Case in point: Wi-Fi (Wireless Local Area Network) on an airplane. Wi-Fi seemed a necessity for Potter, but he was surprised to find that attitudes toward the matter were almost divided. In fact, research shows that personal empathy can actually blind you to what your customers are really thinking (see the column "The Empathy Experiment"). By the same token, traditional market research can confirm the insights you gain from observations, but it is not a substitute for the observations themselves.
Harvard Business School professor Ryan Schlesinger said, "When you do market research, when you do focus group research, you get a lot of information that the client wants you to hear, but they don't do what they say they do." Data is part of the answer, but never forget to look at it from an anthropological perspective, to ask, to focus on social**, to see what successful competitors and peers are doing, what people are saying about them, and you'll know what the customer is actually doing.