When did you last speak with your customers?

All businesses are solving problems and unmet or under-met needs of their customers. The heart of any product or service is the customer, and understanding them is the existential need of a company. So why do many startups and small to medium size companies do not have processes to engage with their customers on an on-going and deeply connected basis as they innovate on new products and services?

A lot of startups and companies believe in quote attributed to Henry Ford-

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse."

(Incidentally there is no credible source connecting the quote to Henry Ford1)

While the thought is that asking the customers to canvass a solution will only lead to incremental changes, this hides deep customer empathy Mr. Ford had about understanding his customers' needs holistically - simple operation, affordability, family needs etc as evidenced by his quote "I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces."

Companies who have placed customer front and center of their philosophy like Amazon, Harley Davidson, Disney, Netflix, Adobe amongst others have been richly rewarded with loyal customers, great brand reputation and market share. This is even more important for startups to focus on user research and customer engagement, to ensure that they don't fall into the trap of building the product for problem of One - the startup founders or early friends and family customers.

Understanding the customers' pain point is easier said than done. Here are some best practices I gathered from leading customer innovation workshops and user research for Fortune 500 companies and startups and speaking with Strategy, Product and Innovation heads at the likes of Adobe, Walmart, Amazon, Morningstar etc.

a) In-depth interviews: Once you have identified target audience for your product, conduct in-depth interviews to understand what are the activities related to the problem the product is solving, how to they go about completing that activity now, what alternatives they have currently and what do they don't like about the process. Recruit the right panel via Social Media, using existing customer base, sites like userinterviews.com and market research agencies. The interviews as best performed in person, but for ease can also be performed via video conferencing. Thanks to the rise of broadband availability, we can now connect meaningfully with subjects without really needing to travel. The goal should be to understand how the customers perform the existing activity and not sell them the solution, so structuring the questions to ask and probe is paramount. Customers can also be recruited for long term for a periodic check-ins and feedback as the product develops which helps in understanding their evolving journey with the product.

b) Focus groups: Focus groups are a good method to get feedback faster from a larger group of people especially if they are in the same location. This is especially great if the needs of a group of people, team, class or family need to be unearthed. I personally prefer one-on-one method more, as I find 1-2 people in the group can end up dominating the discussion and need an experienced interviewer to get participation from all. However this is still an excellent method to get qualitative data fast.

c) Quantitative and market research: In addition to qualitatively understanding the customer problem, it is also important to get a gauge of how big the problem is. This can be partly addressed by market research on the sector, and competitive analysis. Doing a survey of key questions from a target audience base helps in quantifying extent of problem and feature desirability by segments. There are existing panels of audiences in sites like Surveymonkey, Qualtrics, Userinterviews etc and of course panels can be recruited from social media, and companies' CRMs. The survey questions should be carefully thought through and pre-tested as omissions and mistakes can be expensive to fix.

d) Net promoter scores & product reviews: Companies should institute automatic feedback gathering post usage of product not just for posting reviews on App stores, and other sites but also to get valuable feedback on what's working and what's not working for the customers. A short NPS survey with select product attributes and free form text works well to get both qualitative and quantitative feedback. While there are a lot of tools in the market to analyze the customer comments, I would highly recommend reading the more detailed comments both positive and negative personally to get the insights. I have done this myself.

e) Customer sales and support interactions: This is a gold mine of data which was largely underutilized because of the scale of interactions and inability to glean meaningful insights from large stores of unstructured data. I worked on some of the cutting edge technologies to analyze not just customer sentiment (positive/ negative) but also second level of details like what product features are liked/ disliked, key terms analysis and competitor comparisons. Medallia and Clarabridge are some good solutions I have seen in the market. There are other cheaper products, though the accuracy tends to be lower. To start simply, manual sampling of more detailed interactions also works.

f) Product Analytics: Analytics software should be ingrained in the product right from MVP. Actual customer usage of the product with detailed metrics of bounce rates, page drop offs, feature usage and broader demographics are invaluable for product optimization. At the very minimum having Google Analytics/Firebase free version in the least one should do. Software tools like Usertesting, FluidUI are within budget for all to get more useability feedback. More sophisticated products like Adobe experience cloud, Optimizely amongst others, are for A/B testing features before full launch.

In conclusion, customer engagement for feedback and growth is a critical function and should be thought through Day 1 of creating the product. Do comment, I would love to hear the strategies your company uses as well!          

1-https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/28/ford-faster-horse/