Should you rethink listening to your customers? I don’t think so.
A thread of discussion in the industry lately, stating that the way to get ahead is to stop listening to your customer, is leaving me a bit uncomfortable. The premise of this conversation is that reaching out to your customers is only allowing you to get to the next incremental improvement on an existing product or service, while the big innovation is being left on the table.
To be blunt, I think what we’re facing here is naivety about how to structure and leverage customer research effectively throughout the product development process. User research has become a bit like desktop publishing over the years. Anyone who can say the term “observation” automatically can become an ethnographer, just like anyone who had PageMaker on his or her computer years ago, overnight become a graphic designer. Sorry to break the news…it just doesn’t work that way. A tool does not make the professional. It aids in his or her creations.
This flippancy of saying “I’m a researcher,” I fear is the reason why this conversation questioning the value of knowing your customers is even occurring. Because, honestly, the idea of creating your products in a vacuum or only looking to your competition for inspiration just doesn’t make sense. You’re either taking shots in the dark, hoping that something might stick, or setting yourself up to forever be a follower versus a leader in the industry.
Designing, conducting, analyzing and synthesizing customer research is a science and requires skills and knowledge to ensure that the product emerging informs the goals set forth for the research to begin with. Each step of design, execution, analysis and synthesis must be considered in equal weight for a project to be successful. For instance, if you’re designing a study that’s suppose to define the next breakthrough product for a company, it doesn’t make much sense to focus on the current products in your portfolio as the focus of that research initiative. Rather, you’d have much better success taking a broader focus in your research and studying process instead. That’s what’s going to give you the insight on the latent needs that are rich territory for innovation.
Likewise, you need to have thought about your analysis plan/process before you’ve decided which tools and techniques are best to be leveraged to actually conduct the research. It makes no sense to randomly choose a set of techniques to use if you can’t explicitly state how the data that will be collected from each will ultimately inform the goals of the project.
I believe customer insight is critical to the long-term success of companies. Is it the only tool that should be leveraged for growth? Absolutely not. It’s one tool of many. But it is an important one. Because if you’re directed about how to solicit customer feedback and learn of and about customer needs, the development process becomes immensely less challenging with less uncertainty embedded in it. It saves money and makes your developers happier.
I believe this business of rethinking customer research is the result of a lot of bad research, which unfortunately is tarnishing the reputation of those that do know what they are doing. I guess the lesson that can be learned here is, ask questions before you buy. Do reference checks.
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[...] few weeks back I wrote about how I was feeling uncomfortable with a recent thread in the industry stating that the way to get ahead in the marketplace is to stop listening to your customer and to [...]