Understanding Customer Need
It's not what you want, it's the consumer ;)
I had a comment from Mr. Hunter Hastings (Econ4Business) on the last post and I felt like my reply to the comment was some good thinking. The original comment:
Another place to start is choosing a customer or set of customers. Who can you truly get to know as a customer? With whom can you best empathize? Whose head can you get inside in order to design a service they really need and will embrace and flock to and tell their friends about? It’s not an idea, it’s a customer base, a set of people.
-Hunter Hastings
My Reply:
I like this. I think we so often think of a new business and say, "What do people want?"
If we were to think of a very specific group of people and think, "What does this group need?" It think it leads to better business ideas.
Routinely we find customers wanting us to do additional things for them that fall out of our scope. I ask myself, why? They want that because they enjoyed the way in which we conducted job and not specifically the actual task we completed. They then wish they could have that in all their areas of need. We’ve all been through a Chic-fil-a fast food line. It’s a pleasure! I wish we had that at all fast food, but we don’t! I find myself eating more Chic-fil-a sometimes just for how easy I can get in and out.
Before I started my business, I ‘got in the head’ of future customers. When I asked them what they liked or disliked was all related never to the direct product or service, but more around how the other companies went about it. Did they lie about start dates? Did they pick up the phone? Did they call back? Did they bill on time?
So going back to the idea of looking at a specific group of people, is what they need no anything different just done better? On some of my free phone coaching I have been doing lately, I encourage people to not try to think of a new idea, but find something already being done. Then look at how they are doing it and find a way to do it better based off what you know they customers need is that they may have missed.
If I were to think of an applied skill to achieve how to figure this out it would be:
Asking open ended questions (with a follow up close ended probe (advanced!))
Listening better than you have ever listened.