#11: Don’t Listen To Your Customers
Thinking that customers know exactly what they want is a fallacy.
CX playbooks insistently advocate always listening to customers, emphasising it’s the essence of centricity.
But I (as usual for me) have a contrarian view - the truth is much more nuanced.
Blindly adhering to customer opinions can stifle your strategic thinking, leading to misguided tactics, incremental-only progress, and outcomes that mimic competitors.
A me-too result.
If you want to simply be better - faster, cheaper, easier - then listen to your customers. Your reward is incremental progress - a series of small improvements to your existing product and experiences to make them better, faster, or cheaper.
No bad thing, but:
It can lead to blandness.
Because everyone else is also doing it.
Which is where we are with much of today’s brand experiences.
Listening exclusively to customers will improve efficiency, reduce pain points, and create more pleasant experiences, but what do you get?
Homogeneity, that’s what.
The notion that customers know exactly what they want is a fallacy.
Often, consumers only recognise an answer to their needs when they’re presented with the solution.
Asking them about incremental improvements is fine - they will give satisfactory results for existing products, but they won't pave the way for groundbreaking changes.
Amazon said it: "If you don't listen to your customers, you will fail. But if you only listen to your customers, you will also fail."
To innovate, don't just ask what customers want; instead, seek insights to explore the realm of possibilities. Consumers may excel at pinpointing likes and dislikes, but they struggle to envision radically different solutions. Their requests usually lean towards faster, cheaper, or easier, rather than new thinking and new experiences.
They want inspiration.
But they don’t know how to reach it.
Differentiate meaningfully
To stand out, you must differentiate yourself meaningfully.
Not just doing something different.
Your difference must have the potential to be meaningful, and that needs more than just relevance.
Your difference must offer something people find helpful, appealing, and desirable. It must make people’s lives better in some way, even if that difference is just a feeling. Your challenge lies in identifying which aspects can stay conventional and which must be distinct.
Isn’t this a big part your your job, being the CX voice in the room, asking which bits are ok to be just like everyone else, but also which other bits will be meaningfully different?
Relying solely on customer input won't push you ahead of your competitors. Renowned companies learned this the hard way. Walmart responded to clutter complaints by reducing product variety - a was rewarded with a significant sales drop. Coca-Cola customers wanted a sweeter taste, so changed its formula - leading to substantial losses before reverting to the original.
Customers can’t describe their needs for new experiences and innovations because they can’t articulate what they can’t imagine.
But analytics and behavioural understanding can. That’s when you uncover latent desires. You’ll gain insight into their lives, beyond the confines of surveys and focus groups, and can refine your strategy effectively. Use analytics and an understanding of behaviours to show the customer they have a need for something, a reason to purchase your product or your service.
When did customers know they wanted a mobile ‘phone to call an Uber? Or a PC on a tablet?
Ideas will often emerge when thinking about solving needs in novel ways or creating entirely new experiences.
Breaking Out of The Box
Success means breaking free from the constraints of traditional thinking, the atypical CX playbooks, to explore the art of the possible.
We all have inherent limitations, preconceived patterns and narrow understanding, so we must unshackle ourselves from routine thinking.
We must start unthinking.
As Steve Jobs said, ‘People don't know what they want until you show it to them.’
Innovation requires stepping outside the familiar and imagining possibilities beyond existing norms.
It's not about faster horses.
It's not about simple or faster.
It’s not about optimisation.
It’s about designing experiences and solutions that meet needs and wants in new ways that excite and inspire.
Customers usually don’t grasp what's possible until it becomes a reality. We couldn't have imagined an Apple retail store, Slow Commerce, a Monzo or Curve, Amazon and Spotify until they offered such obvious solutions.
Experts said In-Store shopping was dead, but in-store has become the stage for experiences and making use of all five senses.
This is part of today’s failure with CX. While many brands focus on creating frictionless experiences, alone it usually fails in driving consumer inspiration.
The frictionless experience becomes so unremarkable, so me-too, that it becomes table stakes and eventually unnoticed.
To stand out, you must keep delivering differentiated and memorable experiences, align with your promise, and evoke emotions that build brand affinity.
While customer input is valuable, hoping they will dictate new thinking won't lead to groundbreaking results. Strive to unthink the normal, explore the art of the possible, and deliver experiences that go beyond meeting needs - experiences that truly resonate and differentiate your brand.
People don’t always know what they want. But they know it when they see it. That’s what makes CX innovation tough.
Innovating from the customer backwards doesn’t just mean ‘listening to the voice of the customer.’ Of course, it helps to conduct market research, get customers to fill in a questionnaire, or run focus-group sessions.
But people don’t always know what they want. They only know it when they see it.
Q: How Do I Innovate?
A: First, Workshop It.
A well-managed workshop will break everyone out of the traditional ways of thinking.
In the ideation or innovation workshops I’ve run, this is what I’ve found works best:
Work with a group of more than 15 and, ideally, around 30. (That allows you to work in small groups of 3 or 4 simultaneously).
The group should have CX, Brand, Marketing, Product, Service, and Retail all in the room.
You should focus on small teams, and kick off by asking these types of questions:
‘What are our competitors doing better?’
‘What would (name the best brand in your market) do to change us?’
‘What would (name a big brand in an adjacent market) do differently if they took us over?’
‘What would (eg: Apple) do differently if they had us?’
“What, specifically, is our customer buying from us?’ ‘Why?’
‘Who are our customer archetypes?’
‘What do we know/don’t know about our customer’s purpose, passions, and needs?’
‘What cultural megatrends do we recognise will impact our customers?’ (You should collect at least 10)
‘What are we doing to align with tomorrow’s megatrends?’
Explore the answers in small teams, expand and stretch them, and you’ll start to tease out ideas and strategies you’ve never thought of before.
As you continue your journey to build on them, remember to focus your product, service and experience development on being meaningfully different - and coupling this with:
— Deep human understanding
— Keeping one eye firmly on the future - the trends driving new consumer behaviours
— Great creativity that heroes your innovation
— A focus on experience from the outset
— Embracing technology, but be sure to connect with humans
Bear in mind:
We all have established patterns in our minds that drive a preconceived and narrow understanding of what a particular product or service is, what it is meant to do, how exactly it does it, what it is supposed to look like, where its limitations are, and so on. Most of us find it extremely difficult to see outside of these patterns and imagine how things could or should be different. Management consultant Mohanbir Sawhney wrote ‘to gain customer insights, we must understand that we are prisoners of what we know and what we believe.
and, this may help your thinking:
Consumers are people first, and people are searching for ideas, relying on brands to provide solutions, inspire them by setting a good example, and make their lives better.
Inspiring consumers is a powerful thing.
This is why inspiration is so practical a thinking approach for brands and experience design. In defining your product/service potential to inspire customers, different but complementary roles are set up. Higher-order roles can play in identity creation whilst coexisting with utilitarian roles that help people get stuff done.
There are three pillars of people/consumer inspiration:
Elevating
Describes inspiration sources that help people build their aspirations, by connecting to people’s value systems and making them think more broadly about their potential.
Magnetic
Describes inspiration sources that draw people towards them by presenting them with choices that feel irresistible, popular and exciting.
Motivating
Describes inspiration sources that give people clear and compelling reasons to take steps forward to reach broader life objectives by bringing them new experiences/ideas, and helping them discover new things.
Here’s the Wunderman Thompson take on the most important elements of Inspiration from their 2021 study to their question: Q: I am inspired when someone or something….
Want Support?
If you would like support in creating either an Innovation or a Strategy workshop, either just brainstorming ideas or helping run one, contact me for a chat over a virtual coffee: michaelcooper@pobox.com or michael@unthinkingcx.com
Do Different is my mantra. Doing the same as everyone else doesn’t get you far.