Authors: Peter Sander
Not likely. The members of the product marketing team went back to their hotel, slept off their late-evening snacks, and went for a nice breakfast in the morning. Did they know their customer any better? Probably not. They’d heard all the answers before. Did
their senior managers know the customer better? Definitely not. They didn’t even attend the focus group. And the report they read (if they read it at all) was watered down with corporate-speak so as to not be too disruptive, and to reinforce all the things that the company was doing right.
And of course, none of the people involved can act on anything they saw last night, because focus groups are not statistically significant; now they must do quantitative research.
The report may or may not have been read. It was filed with all the other reports. Whatever “ahas” might have come from that two-hour session were now buried in some file somewhere in the organization, probably never to be seen again. The organization validated what it could, and may have added a feature or a refinement here or there to solve a problem. And it moved on.
The marketing team—and the company—continued with the next product release in its product plan.
There were a few tweaks. Faster, cheaper, and better, but not different.
The customer got a faster horse.
The organization did what organizations usually do.
Did the marketing team really understand the customer? No. It checked a box—“we did research”—and moved on with the mainstream “mission” of the business.
The story just told is true, although a lot of the details are missing. I was there, and it was a major Silicon Valley tech firm that conducted the research.
But those details aren’t important. The point is that this kind of story happens over and over, and it’s part of the reason why Apple is Apple, and everyone else is everyone else.
The “faster horse” quote was one of Jobs’s favorites. If you ask a group of customers how to make a product better, they’ll usually tell you what’s wrong with it. The customers will tell you “from experience” that the horse is too slow.
Naturally, the product people will focus on designing a faster horse, without questioning whether a horse is the right product to begin with. The faster part is easier to work on than replacing the horse. Everybody understands the horse. It’s easier to focus and concentrate on improving the horse.
Perhaps most of all, the organizational “antibodies,” with all their reasons “why they can’t,” will rise up to attack any idea that takes the organization away from its cherished steed. In most organizations, these antibodies exist at all levels—including the leadership. The horses (the legacy technologies) stay in place and, at best, get bolt-on, incremental improvements.
Steve Jobs did things differently. He didn’t take the horse for granted or see it as a given. The horse was in play. Faster, better, smoother, on less feed, and with fewer hours brushing in the stall would be nice, but what the customer really wanted was conveyance. Fast, yes, but also easy, dry, comfortable, reliable, cheap, less maintenance, longer range, carry passengers, easier to store—it’s not hard to see now, but it took Henry Ford to see it then.
Apple and Steve Jobs, as well as Henry Ford, are famous for not hiring consultants, not doing traditional market research, and not listening to customers in the traditional way. What is it that they know that most of corporate America doesn’t know?
Customer intimacy—and all of its phraseological variants—was all the rage in the 1990s and 2000s. The 1980s fad for Japanese quality and manufacturing techniques gave greater impetus to the idea of really focusing on customers, watching them in action, and listening to what they want.
The Internet, of course, made this all the more possible, and soon, in the 2000s, we started to hear about “collaborative design” and “crowdsourcing,” where the customer not only gave you feedback but became part of the process to help you design your product.
Customer intimacy implies a relationship with customers, a closeness that makes it possible to have a dialogue that enables you to understand the customer and the customer to understand you. As in any relationship, open lines of communication, patience, and listening can draw out some of the customer’s inner thoughts about you, about your products, and about how you deliver and support your products. You, in turn, if you so choose, can take that information and do a better job of making the customer happy.
That’s the standard construct, and for most businesses (and governments, schools, and other nonprofit organizations, for that matter), this is a good thing to do. These intimate contacts, if they are executed well and really used to deliver customer value, can’t hurt and probably can help.
But there are some important limitations to the traditional “intimacy” approach. Intimacy can help you design better products and a better customer experience, but the resulting improvements are likely to be incremental. So long as you take the following shortcomings into account, intimacy efforts make sense. But don’t expect them to pay off in the game-changing manner in which Steve Jobs has led Apple. Why not? Because no matter how intimate you are with your customers, they can’t give you the insight you need to really change their world.
Listening to customers is great, but in most cases, you’ll run into the following limitations:
•
Customers can see only where they’ve been
. As in the focus group session described at the beginning of the chapter, most customers are aware only of what they’ve experienced. Most customers are more aware of the shortcomings and pain of using your products than of the possibilities. You can listen in to hear their pain, especially if you can turn those micro “pain points” into larger class issues, but these customers won’t tell you where to head next.
•
They can see only what they have, not what they don’t have
. If someone asks you about your car, are you going to tell him about the one you have now? Or will you tell him about the one you’ll have next? Aside from citing some feature that a competitor already has, can you or would you tell the carmaker what you don’t have and would like to have? Customers tend not to see beyond your product and a competitor’s product.
•
They don’t see what they
could
have
. Again, customers don’t see very far ahead; in addition, they don’t know the technology (or the financials), and
they don’t know what’s possible. In Jobs’s own words, “Customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Once again, these limitations don’t mean that you shouldn’t listen to your customers. It’s just a question of what you can expect when you do—incremental tweaks, not game-changing results.
Most organizations talk the most, and listen the most, to their biggest and/or most mainstream customers. That makes sense intuitively: you talk to the people who butter your bread. But those are the people who are most used to, and most dependent on, your products. They’re most likely to demand only small tweaks to the products. They’re pretty happy with what they have already; if they weren’t, they’d be someone else’s customer, not yours, right? Worse, depending on what you’re selling, since they buy a lot of it, they may be more concerned about lowering the price than about adding features to it.
The point is not to ignore this group, but to realize that new ideas and new markets may not originate here.
Customers operate in the past and in the here and now. They know what you sell. They know what the competition sells. However, they don’t know what they will need five years from now, or even a year from now. More to the point, especially in a tech-driven business, they don’t know or can’t conceive what’s possible.
In sum, customer intimacy will help you learn about your customers’ pain, if you listen closely. But you need to fill in the gaps if you are to turn those pain points into a meaningful and actionable customer need. Fair warning: if you become
too
intimate with customers, you’ll only tweak features and monkey with the price.
And you’ll never deliver any positive surprises.
When you’re at the helm, whether you’re the CEO or a line supervisor in the shipping department, you need to thoroughly understand your customers. You can’t let others, like consultants, do it for you, and you can’t rely on your customers to tell you what they need. They may know what they need to get their next task done, but do they know what they
really
need to make their lives better?
What made Steve Jobs different? Did he understand technology better than everyone else? Did he understand better than everyone else how products work? Was he a better speaker than everyone else? Was he a better recruiter of talent than everyone else?
Maybe so. But what really set him apart was his understanding of the customer and his
passionate empathy
for the customer. He had the ability to turn customer needs—“deep” needs, “below the surface” needs that they don’t even know they have—into solutions.
Quite simply, you can’t provide solutions unless you know the problem. And Steve Jobs knew the “problem”—and defined it and articulated it—probably better than anyone else on the planet. That became his vision, which we will cover in the next chapter.
Intimate knowledge of the customer
is
often what sets exceptional enterprise leadership apart. Strong customer knowledge and a strong customer sense will help you and the organization make the right decisions. As we’ve learned with Apple and Steve Jobs, this customer expertise goes a long way toward establishing the respect and credibility that are so important to leading successfully. You know what to do, your employees know you know, and they know that they can depend on you to guide the ship toward the right results.
As a leader, you must become your customer’s champion-in-chief for the organization. You have to be the
customer spokesperson and representative. You have to visualize the customer and the customer experience, and drive everything from it. You are the focal point for your organization’s customer sense.
You aren’t the only person who needs to do this, however. Customer sense needs to happen at the bottom and middle tiers of your organization as well. But don’t just delegate the task. The bottom and middle tiers can’t develop this sense for you. If you turn it over to an organization, you’ll get an “organization” solution. If you turn it over to outsiders, you’ll get an “outsider” solution, one that is far distant from the soul of your enterprise.
Steve Jobs didn’t really have a process to develop his strong customer sense. He did it intuitively by thinking about customers and thinking about what
is
and what
could be
as a customer.
Jobs did these things very well, and, of course, we’d all like to be like Steve. But some of us mere mortals need a little more of a cookbook, a little more of a recipe and checklist to follow, especially as we redirect our sensibilities from our day-to-day organizational lives to the external world and “deep” customer needs.
I have made an attempt to bottle what Steve would do into three essential steps to develop that customer
sense that
all
leaders should think about if they are to stay on board and out in front of their customers. Those components are:
•
See
the customer
• See the
experience
•
Be
the customer
Let’s take these items apart, one by one.
That sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? Just watch or listen to your customers and try to understand who they are, what their experiences are, and what their needs are, right? Well, yes, but the devil is in the details.
You can quantify and segment your customers with surveys and all sorts of other metrics. You can watch your customers in action using a product or at a local store, although you must take care to avoid the spotlight—and the possible behavior changes that can be brought on by being in the spotlight.
These activities are a good start. But they only get to the surface of the customer. They might give you some insight into who your customers are and what they do with your products. But they don’t get to the deep stuff—what your customers
think
and what they
could do
with products.
To get there, Steve and others really tried to get into a customer’s mind—to think like a customer. They wanted to visualize all the customers out there: who they are, how they became customers, what they’re thinking about the status quo, and what they’re thinking about the competition. He directed his organization to do the same.
Once he asked his team: “Who is the largest education company in the world?” Apparently only two responders got it right: Apple. So special effort went into thinking about those customers, how they would view the status quo, and ultimately what they would want in a current or future Apple product.
Beyond these and other “core” customers, Jobs took a pretty wide view of who the customer is. Think about the customer on the fringe, not just the mainstream. Think about those people who aren’t customers at all right now. How can digital technologies be used to make their lives better? A good example is the “fringe” customer in the late 1990s who was trying to get digital technologies to work to download music from the Internet. Being a music lover himself, Steve was fascinated by this possibility; it was something that could be done much better with digital technology, just as desktop publishing and computer graphics had been revolutionized years earlier.