What Customers Want
Hani Khalaf ????? ???????
Storyteller | CTO | Arabic Speaker | Consultant | Mentor | AI, GenAI, IoT, Computer Vision, Smart Cities | Providing 'Outcomes' to organizations through Technology | ???? ?????? ????????? ? ?????? ??????? ?????? ??????
As a sales professional, if you watched the Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt movie “What Women Want”, you realize that the best thing that can happen to you is to have a “What Customers Want” moment! This is the moment where you feel you really understood your customer and listened to that voice inside their head!
Understanding your customers’ “real” requirements is a valuable skill by itself, let alone understanding your customers’ requirements when it comes to a new technology like Internet of Things (IoT). Even though IoT has been around for a few years now and many customers “heard” of it, many still lack the knowledge of what it is truly about and its true potential. In almost every customer meeting on IoT technology, I find the customer interest surge once we start talking about business outcomes beyond sensors, connectivity and compute.
I recently met with a rail customer who was not sure that Wi-Fi is necessary in their soon to be operational metro. To the customer, Wi-Fi meant providing internet access to the passengers and looked at it as an additional way to attract the younger generation to use the metro. The conversation changed when we started talking about monetizing Wi-Fi. This is when I realized my customer had a concern about the costs of providing Wi-Fi in the metro. By tracking passengers through Wi-Fi the moment they enter a station, on the train itself, and to the destination station, lots of valuable data can be collected and converted into revenue. An example would be tracking whereabouts of passengers of a certain age group and targeting them with ads while they are in the station. The key here was to understand what “my customer” wanted and drive the conversation in the right direction.
Many of my customers have created “Digital Transformation” and “Innovation” departments to catch up with the disruption that is happening in their industries. Once I start engaging with these customers, a good amount of time is spent understanding “what they want to achieve”. In almost all cases, it starts with a foggy picture of requirements, which starts to sharpen as the conversation gets to “what is possible” with technology.
Do you know “what your customers want”?
#DigitalTransformation #IoT #Disrupt
Applied Gen AI Scientist
7 年Well said Hani, Voice of the Customer (VOC) is an important step towards meeting Customer expectations. This process is essential part of the #SixSigma process towards conducting process improvement as well.
The Fixer, guiding the efficient use of technology in diverse industries
7 年Nicely done Hani, I must add though that there are times when the customer does not know what they want, it then is essential to understand the customer business and tailor solutions that will augment the core business of the customer. On point, mate!