Authors: Peter Sander
What would surprise and delight a customer about your product or service?
A customer-centered thinker realizes that the whole product is important—that is, the software, the services, the setup, the replacement path, the instructions, and so forth. It’s not just about the box itself, as has been so plainly illustrated by Apple. No Apple product comes without a perfect OS, a perfect music service, and an app store that all work together to make the experience better.
Too many companies think only about the product, and may even go for a “surprise and delight” level of experience with the product. But they fail to think about the whole product—the total experience—in the same terms. They align themselves with the idea that the surrounding features and experiences should be a
nonnegative
, not a positive. If the sales process, the service
experience, and the replacement experience are OK and not negatives, check the box; we’re done.
Of course, a customer who loves your products may hate the rest of the experience and shy away. It’s interesting how Toyota plays both sides of the fence on this one. It sells excellent cars under both the Toyota and the luxury Lexus nameplates. But the surrounding Toyota experience is terrible (obnoxious salespeople, boorish service), while Lexus customers get the white-glove treatment all the way. How much more would it cost Toyota to give its Toyota customers the Lexus experience? One wonders, but it sure as heck would help the image of the whole product.
Ask yourself: what would make
all
parts of the total customer experience exceed expectations? When you can answer that question, you have a 360-degree view of the customer, and you are ready to lead your organization forward.
Caveat leader. Do you want to be like Steve Jobs? Sure, but you need to appreciate the pitfalls. And there’s one big elephant “pitfall” here that any aspiring Jobsian leader should consider.
Very simply, Steve had some extraordinary powers of customer intuition and customer vision. He didn’t always get it right, but he got it right enough times in a big
enough way to rightly be considered an expert on customer experience, at least in the businesses he operates in.
That was fine for him, and he had enough experience and enough capital to afford the risk that he might be wrong. That was good for him, but it’s not hard to see how such a firm position of success could make one arrogant. I’m not saying that Steve Jobs was arrogant, but it is plainly possible for someone in his position who insists on approaching things his way to become a bit overconfident—and miss something.
We mortals can’t do that. We mortals probably can’t rely on our own raw intuition to the degree that he did. We probably need to study customers a bit more than he did, and we probably need outside help a bit more than he did. But we need to recognize the limitations of having others do it for us.
We might need training wheels for a while, but if we get the thought process right, and if we see the customer as the base and support of all things leadership in our worlds, the odds are that things will come out right.
We just need to protect ourselves in case we’re wrong.
An example of what Steve Jobs could probably do on the back of a napkin in a Cupertino, California, restaurant,
but we can’t without some thought, is the following “Quick 3” test offered by innovation consultant Nicholas Webb.
The “Quick 3” Test
• Can you quickly describe three things your customers like about your products?
• Can you quickly describe three things about your products that frustrate the heck out of your customers?
• Can you describe three experiences your customers have had with your products and have told you about recently?
• Are you getting three useful inputs or comments about your products each week?
• Have you been “in the field” at least three times in the past calendar quarter?
VIf you can answer these “threes” positively, you, and thus your organization, are on the right track.
Of course, if you become a customer expert, but you can’t translate that expertise into a premise or a vision that
your team can use, you won’t get anywhere at producing market-beating, market-
defining
products. The message: leadership doesn’t just stop with knowing the customer; that probably isn’t a surprise. You need to expand that customer sense into a vision that the rest of the organization can use. That’s the subject of
Chapter 5
.
What Would Steve Jobs Do?
may be starting to sound like a book on the topic of innovation. There are many such books. We can’t talk about Steve Jobs without talking about innovation. Good leadership requires good innovation; without it, you aren’t really leading, but rather fighting a rearguard action in the marketplace.
Good innovation is one of the major differences between leading and following, no matter what you’re doing in the enterprise. So no, it’s not a stand-alone topic. Innovation is a part of leadership, and customer knowledge is part of innovation. These principles apply whether you’re making personal computers or potato chips.
• Be in charge of customer sense and of conveying that sense to the organization.
• Don’t delegate or outsource that task.
• Don’t assume that customers will know or tell you what they want.
• Think about customer pain and what causes it.
• Think about “deep needs.”
• Consider the whole product.
• Consider what would surprise and delight your customer.
• Never stop adding to your customer knowledge.
When Steve believes in something, the power of that vision can literally sweep aside any objections or problems. They just cease to exist.
—Trip Hawkins, former Apple VP
Strategy & Marketing
From the stage at Macworld 2007, on January 7, 2008, dressed in his trademark black turtleneck, faded jeans, and a pair of white sneakers, Steve Jobs, as he usually did, captured the day:
This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for 2½ years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along and changes everything (and, first of all, one’s very fortunate if you get to work on ONE of these in your career). Apple is very fortunate. It has been able to introduce a few of these into the world. In 1984, we introduced the Macintosh. It didn’t just change Apple. It changed the whole computer industry [applause]. In 2001, we introduced the first iPod. And, it didn’t just change the way we all listened to music. It changed the entire music industry. Well, today, we’re introducing THREE revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a wide-screen iPod with touch controls [applause]. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone [applause], and the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device [applause].
So, three things.
A wide-screen iPod with touch controls. A phone. And an Internet communications device.
An iPod. A phone. And an Internet communicator. An iPod. A phone. And an Internet communicator.
Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone [steady applause].
Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. And here it is (a picture of an iPod with a rotary dial on it, laughter).
No, really, here it is [pulls one from his pocket and holds it up for his audience].
We all know the rest of the story. The iPhone changed the mobile phone industry.
That was 2007, and this is now. Jobs and his team did it again. They synthesized the form and features of the iPhone with the size and scope of the PC, and created the iPad. The iPad is currently changing the entire personal computing industry.
What’s next?
We don’t know for sure. What we do know is that time and time again, Steve Jobs and Apple changed the game. Time and time again, they came up with the “wow” solution that bundled technologies to leapfrog the competition. Time and time again, they came up with the “wow” solution that leapfrogged customer expectations and created a new customer experience.
What we do know is that not only was Steve Jobs introducing a new product, but he was also articulating a
vision
. What does that mean? That’s what this chapter is all about.
Did Apple invent the smartphone? The tablet? The MP3 player? Did Apple invent touchscreen technology or miniaturized storage or music downloads or the computer mouse or the graphical user interface?
As we all know, the answer is
no
. Apple didn’t invent these things; they had all been on the market in some form, or well underway in a lab, before Steve Jobs and Apple did their thing.
Steve Jobs and Apple didn’t invent these technologies. Instead, they perfected them. And in perfecting them, they combined them and packaged them beautifully. They combined and packaged and bundled them beautifully to meet or exceed a known customer desire—to listen to music, to make mobile calls, and to have access to the Internet.
They combined them beautifully to
create
customer needs—
future needs
, needs that we mortal customers didn’t even know we had. Needs such as using computers to produce graphic newsletters and presentations,
storing music libraries, and using simple “apps” to accomplish everyday tasks.
Steve Jobs and Apple put existing technologies to work. They put them together. They put them into a really cool, well-designed package—not only a beautiful physical plastic or aluminum or titanium case, but also bundled with the right services—to deliver a game-changing customer experience.
So how do you turn a bunch of stuff that’s already out there into a game changer? What’s the secret sauce that takes a solid customer sense, applies existing technologies to it, and sets the world on its ear?
It can all be summed up in one word:
vision
.
Vision is the ability to see the world ahead. Vision is the ability to see how ideas and technologies can be integrated to solve problems. Vision is the ability to see how ideas, technologies, and design can be redirected to create customer surprise and delight.
When it’s done really well, vision is the ability to see how to make customers’ lives better.
Did Apple invent the iPhone? Yes, in the purest sense, Apple created it. But really, the company
innovated
it. What do we mean?
Lots of people invent things. Patent offices worldwide are stuffed with new, original ideas for things, or ways to make things, or how to show things to people. But the number of patents that turn into game-changing products (or marketable products at all) is amazingly tiny.
For years, tech giants such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM bragged about how many patents had been issued for technologies they had developed in-house. They bragged in their colorful annual reports, and they bragged to the media. But how many of the 3,000 or more patents that these companies churned out each year ever got to market? Very few, if any. The last game-changing technology brought to market by HP was the inkjet printer, and that was back in 1984. The last IBM breakthrough doesn’t even come to mind.
What’s the difference? Both of these companies and many others spend big bucks on R&D. They have labs, and they have scientists and engineers hunkered down, usually in separate R&D facilities, to do basic research. They have lots of ideas, and they obviously know how to push them forward through the patent process. But they remain detached from the business and detached from the customer; there is no vision to accompany them.
In fact, this is the reason why Xerox doesn’t rule the computer space today. It had the technology for the graphical user interface, the mouse, the laser printer, and basic networking at its Palo Alto PARC laboratories.
But there was no vision to guide these inventions to commercial success. Steve Jobs supplied the vision, and the rest is history.
Meanwhile, scores of individuals have good ideas, too. They may come up with them deliberately, or they may have them quite by accident. They may be by-products of other ideas. But do they ever get to market?
To get a patent, an idea must be original, must do something useful, and must be nonobvious. But does it have to sell? Does it have to sell profitably? Does it have to be marketable? Does it have to make lives better? Does it have to be noticed by the public? No, not at all.