KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERSHoward TierskyCEO

It’s often said that to succeed at innovation, you must have deep insight into your customers needs.

Although, there is an alternative approach some companies take. We call it the UNNI HASKELLMethod.

Who is Unni Haskell?

Unni Haskell, is a 62-year-old

woman from Stamford, CT,

famous for hitting a hole-in-one on the first swing of

the first hole of the very first

game of golf she ever played.

The odds of that are 25,000 to 1. But she did it!

So you do have a choice. You can use the Unni Haskell method, get crazy lucky, and your customers will “just happen” to love the innovations you create.

Or, you can use the strategy of successful innovation that comes from deep insights into your customers needs and points of pain.

Early in my career, I got a cool chance to lead a product development team to create a new kind of internal communication platform for large accounting firms.

Our target users were auditors and tax consultants.We had some past experience with people in these “types” of roles, and we felt we knew what they needed.

So we checked that box: of course we knew our customers!

And we came up with a concept for the product that we loved. It was innovative, creative, exciting!

We worked hard on that idea! Eighteen hours a day for months. We were inspired and committed to the idea, the product, fulfilling its potential.

What happened when the product launched?

We had overlooked some of the users’ critical needs.

The features we thought were so FANTASTIC were of marginal importance to our customers.

On top of that, we had some major usability problems because we had failed to understand some of the circumstances under which the product would be used.

It was a disaster.

Our sponsors pulled the plug.

The team disbanded.

We couldn’t believe it!

We cared so much!

We tried so hard!

But honestly? It was totally predicable.

We fell in love with our idea, instead of falling in love with our users

We wanted our PRODUCT to fulfill its potential, instead of thinking about how to help our CUSTOMERS fulfill their potential.

But these mistakes are not uncommon. According to Nielsen, 85% of new products fail.

85%

That’s probably for a variety of reasons, but let’s imagine for a moment:

Your next product has a set of

features that solves a huge

problem for customers. It is

communicated in a way they find

easy to understand, and it

is available at a price they are willing to pay.

Do you think that product would have an 85% chance of failure?

How well do YOU know your customer? What does it even mean to “know your customer”, anyway?

Lack of sufficient customer insight is a major reason why large organizations fail to innovate and transform.

So here are a few quick tactics for incorporating the customer voice into your product development process.

The first tactic is humility.

Have you ever bought

something expensive that

you totally intended to

use, but once you bought it,

you used it once and then

barely ever used it again?

Or have you ever bought a gym membership, and then not gone to the gym after the first week?

So the reality is, we don’t even really know ourselves that well!

Acknowledge that it’s no small feat to understand someone else well enough to predict their future behavior!

The second tactic is specificity.

What do you need to know about your potential customers or users? Why they do business with you, or why don’t they do business with you? What are their unmet needs? How is their world changing, and who else is courting them? What do they like least about your product or service?

And, what is the one thing that, if you could do it, they would happily pay double?

The third tactic is involvement.

Don’t leave customer

insight to the market

research team.

Have everyone on the product design team spend at least a couple days trailing customers, watching them in their native habit, to help them understand their current reality.

Team members come back from this type of experience full of ideas!

The fourth tactic is iteration.

The world is changing fast. Keep studying your customers. Learn how their needs are changing, and, as your product moves from an idea to a prototype to beta, take every opportunity you possibly can to study how users react.

The fifth tactic is 4D Listening.

Try to see past the surface of what your customers are telling you they need to what they actually need.

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Henry Ford famously quipped:

Which is exactly it. Your customers may not be able to envision the kind of solutions your product team can conceive. Listen past their stated requests to understand their underlying concerns and needs.

Ford’s customers wanted to go faster. And he found a way!

FROM helps clients win the digital customer by developing and optimizing properties, creating new digital products and transforming teams, unifying the digital experience online, in stores and everywhere you need to touch the next generation of digital consumers.

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