I’m encouraged!
My conversations with business leaders these days show that, more than ever, they’re genuinely trying to understand their customers deeply.
They’re putting effort into addressing critical questions like “What are my customers trying to achieve? What’s getting in the way and frustrating them? Which alternate solutions have they found? How pleased are they with these”?
That’s an essential first step.
Without knowing what’s truly going on in your customers’ minds, you cannot innovate. You will limit yourself to incremental solutions showing diminishing returns over time.
I’ve written quite a bit about how to gain such deep insights and even created a sprint online course on it: “Customer Insights Matter.” So I won’t belabor that part.
What’s fascinating, though, is how difficult it is to engrain customer-centricity into your company systems and culture.
Your role as a leader is critical to help operationalize that deep customer understanding. You’re here to make it part of your systems and processes. You must also find ways to make it part of your company culture.
Easier said than done!
Yet, as I looked into how successful businesses are approaching it, here are a few takeaways to maximize the impact of fresh customer deep understanding.
Set your happy pace
Ensure you, your product managers, and your CEO, CMO, CPO have a set cadence to talk to customers and review raw customer data. There’s no right or wrong number, but I like having one weekly conversation and setting up monthly raw data reviews.
Make it part of critical conversations
Customer insights should not be a best-kept secret in the organization. Share them generously! It helps if you identify a few champions who will carry the voice of the customer in cross-functional meetings and make it part of the ongoing agenda. For instance, you can have your product managers regularly share key findings at sales, marketing, and executive team meetings.
Bring real customers (or non-customers) in
Even better is to identify key opportunities for select customers to join and participate in critical discussions. I once invited one customer to product development sprint reviews. It required some organization, but the insights we obtained were priceless.
But it doesn’t have to be limited to product development activities. Your business reviews will highly benefit from inviting some customers – or non-customers – to share their perspectives on their experiences with all your internal stakeholders present.
You get it. The goal is to make everyone fluent and aligned on the top customer problems you are uniquely positioned to solve.
Now onto the one million dollar question: what will tell you are succeeding in your customer-centric efforts?
A clear indicator is when you see conversations in your company shifting from internal challenges to customer challenges.
It doesn’t happen overnight, but once you’ve made an effort to embed deep customer understanding in your processes and culture, that shift will happen.
Good luck!