Customers should not have to come up with solutions

If you listen carefully, customers give you answers every day. Customers are not always right, but they are experts in their pain. And if you listen to them, they will tell you everything you need to know about improving their lives.

However, customers are not experts in the solutions that will let this pain disappear. They don’t know how to turn pain into delight. That’s your job.

When someone tells you something is wrong, they’re almost always right. When someone tells you how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong. - Neil Gaiman

When nobody is actively working with customers on how life, work, process, interactions, and value delivered can be ‘better’, how can you expect customers to discover it for you and tell you the solution?

You can’t. That’s why it’s essential to have someone with dedication to this task. Someone who can listen to customers, understand their pain and come up with solutions to improve their lives.

Pick up your role

Everybody has a role to play when you are co-creating with customers to create a better future. To ensure that everybody picks up the roles they have to take, you need to ensure that both on the side of the customers and your side, there is a level of dedication to focus on this.

It all starts with being clear about who is the expert on the problem and who is the one that needs to come up with solutions. If you start in the wrong place, it isn’t easy to reach the right destination.