On Understanding Customers

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These are three approaches to understanding customers beyond “let’s do a survey” or “what’s our NPS score”. Customers are often not great at verbalising why they actually use a product below the surface level or in some cases prefer to provide more socially acceptable or less embarrassing reasons. Understanding why customers make decisions and purchases and how to take a wholistic view of their experience is vital in being able to provide better products, meeting the needs of your customers, and also developing new products for which there is an actual need.

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Sensemaking

tl;dr: Sensemaking is the process of making sense regarding how people live life and make decisions. In a business context, sensemaking can help understand the deeper motivations of users and consumers, how they interact with products and services, and what really matters to them. At a more practical level, the sensemaking process can be split into a few key steps, reframing the problem (to the consumer perspective), collecting data (from ‘thick’ data sources such as shadowing, focus groups, and interviews), looking for patterns, surfacing the key insights, and leveraging the insights into the business to answer the problem.

Why does it matter: 

• Traditional approaches of surveying often provide a surface understanding of the ‘what’ but fails to tap into the ‘why’ which sensemaking can assist with
• In an ever-competitive and changing environment, the ability to understand the ‘why’ of customers purchases and actions is key to be able to continue to deliver the value that matters without becoming distracted by the current trends and changes
• Sensemaking embraces a customer-centric approach to customer research (see “Reframing the Problem” panel in the link) which is a healthy approach in almost any customer research

Link: https://hbr.org/2014/03/an-anthropologist-walks-into-a-bar
Further Reading: On ‘Thick Data’ – https://hbr.org/2015/11/big-data-is-only-half-the-data-marketers-need

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Jobs to Be Done

tl;dr: This is a personal favourite of mine, it breaks apart the difference between what people are buying and what purpose they are buying it for. When a customer purchases or uses an item, it is ‘hiring’ that item for a particular ‘job’. This reframing of why it a customer buys has significant implications for innovation (as it was originally conceived for) as well as determining the points of difference on which you actually do, can, and should compete.

Why does it matter: 

• The ‘Jobs to be Done’ approach provides an approach to better understand the causal drivers within the customer choices that drive a purchase
• It helps to determine who your competitors are – it’s not necessarily your category or product, it is the other products that a customer might ‘hire’ to do the ‘Job’ at hand. This has important implications for competitive positioning and advertising

Link: https://hbr.org/2016/09/know-your-customers-jobs-to-be-done
Further Reading: https://hbr.org/podcast/2016/12/the-jobs-to-be-done-theory-of-innovation

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From Touchpoints to Journeys

tl;dr: Typically organisations will focus on the individual touchpoints in a journey when thinking about customer experience, and this should not be abandoned but complemented with a focus on the customer experience across their entire journey.

Why does it matter: 

• Organisations are often organised as silos or functions, but the customer experiences the journey and makes a judgement based on the organisation as a whole
• As organisations expand their channels and ways for customers to interact with them, the number of potential customer journeys increases and these journeys can last days or even weeks creating many situations in which customers can fall between the gaps or have less than positive experiences

Link: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/from-touchpoints-to-journeys-seeing-the-world-as-customers-do