Whenever I talk about building customer empathy with engineers, or with any analytical business person, they wrinkle their noses like I’ve got something noxious stuck to the bottom of my shoe. And I don’t blame them – human beings are messy, unpredictable and confusing. Yet understanding why customers do the things they do is the […]
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As Jack rode his bike home from work that evening, he reflected on the meeting he attended at the end of the day with Kim and Celia. They had gathered to talk about using journey mapping in their innovation project. He had agreed to find a resource to help lead customer interviews and gather the
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As the workshop came to a close, Jack reflected on all they had learned that day. The whole day had been spent on their customers – who they were and what their aspirations and challenges were. They spent the last hour working on gaps and workarounds, those pain points that indicated where they could help
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I have worked in many organizations where the customer was at the center of our business strategy. We segmented them by things like, “white, male, 35”. We sometimes went a step further and gave them a name – Sally the Soccer Mom was my favorite. But all of our analysis came from within our organization.
How to use your Customer’s Point of View to Inspire Design Thinking Read More »
Celia and Joseph came back to the workshop after lunch filled with customer information. They had been instructed to dig into their customer’s point of view and their emotional measures of success, what made them feel good about working through their tasks. The topic had been presented during the customer empathy discussion that morning. The teams
Do You Care about Your Customer’s Point of View? Read More »
This week I participated in a virtual dementia tour where I quite literally walked in the shoes of seniors with dementia. Having spent a lot of time in the last few years visiting seniors in their homes, many of whom had this debilitating disease of aging, I thought I had a pretty good idea what
How … and Why to Build Empathy for your Customers Read More »
Celia entered the room where their customer discovery workshop was being held. She hadn’t been able to sleep last night. She was filled with excitement for the innovation journey ahead but she also was worried – was this approach going to work? Would building empathy for their customers lead to new innovative ideas? Or would
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Your customer has a task they are trying to accomplish. For example, a dad buying a minivan wants to safely deliver his daughters (and all her friends) to their activities and back home again. When that dad comes to your car lot, that is his job-to-be-done. Yet many businesses treat that customer as if he
The Customer’s Job-to-be-Done Read More »
I love the word discovery. To me, it conveys uncharted territory and exploration. If I seek to discover, I have a mind open to new ideas, and I expect to be surprised by what I find. Add the word “customer” before discovery and I am poised to learn extraordinary things from my customer. While a
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Kim, Jack and Celia were planning their customer deep-dive workshop scheduled for this Friday. They would spend the morning learning how to interview and observe customers, and then at lunch, conduct a few interviews to put their new skills in practice. “What will we do with the information we collect?” asked Jack. “How do we
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