Scaling Customer Obsession In Your Organization, Part 2: Skills and Tools
If you’ve ever been to a big game, you can instantly tell the true die-hard fans from everyone else. An everyday fan might wear a jersey or hat with the home team logo. But the die-hard fans? They have it all: Noisemakers. Big signs. Bodypaint.
Anyone can say they are a fan, but… do they have the gear? Are they there every game? Do they have the commitment?
This is the same difference that exists between companies who merely claim to be “customer-focused” or “customer-obsessed,” and those that truly are. Companies that are committed to their customers invest in the skills and tools to make customer happiness happen.
(This is part two of my series on scaling customer obsession. If you didn’t catch part 1, it was on leadership — it’s worth taking a look at that piece first, as leadership is the foundation for putting the below stuff into place.)
Are You Investing in the Right Skills and Tools for a Customer Obsessed Culture?
The key to sustained customer obsession is hiring people with the right skills and then giving them the tools they need to grow and sustain the customer-obsessed behavior.
The main skill to look for here is empathy. Customer obsession is about treating customers as people, not as transactions. Your team needs to be able to look at a product from the point of view of the customer and really care about their experiences.
But empathy does not happen in a vacuum. It is something that is cultivated. That is where tools come in. For example, here is my (admittedly incomplete) list of tools for customer-obsessed cultures, which I have broken down into eight main categories:
Ideation Tools
Organizations are breeding grounds for great ideas. But to create lasting customer value and delight, the ideas have to be customer-backed. Teams can benefit from using tools such as the Value Proposition Canvas, Customer Journey Map, Lean Canvas, or Business Model Canvas. Once ideas are prioritized, Amazon’s PR FAQ is a great way to gain alignment with key stakeholders. You can find one product manager’s method for applying these tools here.
Rapid Prototyping Tools
Once you have a concept, it is time to do rapid prototyping. Prototyping helps teams validate ideas by getting them in front of target customers. Tools like Sketch, Figma, and Balsamiq are very good user-friendly tools at this stage.
Tools for Customer Interviews and Focus Groups
Getting prototypes together is one thing. How do you get user feedback? Simple customer interviews and focus groups are a product manager’s time-tested tools, especially if your business serves SMBs or consumers. Product teams can use these to do market research, conduct usability testing, and/or run feedback sessions regularly.
To get people in the door, there are many great user recruitment tools like userinterviews, respondent, ethnio, userzoom that can help your team recruit the right target customers, schedule remote interviews, and easily conduct interviews.
Survey Tools
Sometimes, you don’t want a handful of opinions. You want to survey a wider swathe of your customer base. Marketers, product managers, and user researchers can have all of their burning questions answered with tools like Typeform, SurveyMonkey, and even Google forms.
Field Interviews
While most of the tools in this section facilitate remote customer discovery sessions, nothing can replace field interviews with customers. For example, I guarantee that your team will gain many priceless insights with “follow-me-home” sessions to understand how they use your product in their natural habitat. Granted, these can’t be done over a Zoom call — but you will learn things you never could with a mere customer interview. I feel this is one of the most underused but powerful tools on the list!
Real-time Feedback
For any experience-centric products and business, this is a core tool. You will want to collect feedback in those critical moments of the customer journey, monitoring responses in real-time. Tools like usabilla, appcues or qualtrics are just right for this.
Tools for Experimenting with Customer Experiences
Creating great customer experiences takes many iterations. The best way is for teams to experiment with different variations for achieving the right customer outcomes. Tools like Optimizely, Google Optimize, or AB Tasty, are critical components for doing this kind of testing.
Analytics Tools
Once you have experiences created, your teams need powerful analytic tools to get detailed insights on customer behavior. Tools like Mixpanel, kissmetrics, Heap analytics are highly effective to make sound decisions.
Internal Collaboration Tools
Most of the time, teams are not conducting their customer research projects in silos. So, in addition to using the tools above, team members have to use the right communications tools to ensure that the right people will be able to easily access the right customer insights and the right time. Most organizations have their favorite tools — Slack, Jira, intranets, and so on — so just remember to leverage these to make customer insights widely understood. Not only will this keep customer focus front-and-center, but it will also prevent different teams from duplicating customer discovery efforts.
Don’t Just Talk a Good Game — Commit to Those Tools!
Most organizations invest in good tools, meaning that they spend good money on them. But too often those tools sit, unused, by team members.
So don’t just invest. Commit. Your organization should have a customer research champion(s) with a clearly defined process and a standard tool kit to hold leaders accountable and drive effective tool use.
When leaders start asking for the results from customer research at every step of the product development process, folks will get the message: “This is a customer-obsessed organization. Act accordingly.”
And that brings us to the final ingredient, engagement, which will be the third part of my series.
