Techniques in Identifying Customers’ Needs and Wants
An innovative product doesn’t come from a law passed by the government. It also doesn’t come from venture capitalists looking for a higher return on investment. Innovation comes from identifying customers’ needs and wants and providing solutions that meet those needs.
Companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Intuit understand this. Uber’s success, for example, has come not from building new, better taxis, but from seeing — and then solving — people’s transportation problems.
Starting with existing data
In the experiencing of customers’ needs and wants, you most likely have existing data at your fingertips. Review past surveys, customer interviews, and customer-support call logs. There’s no point in funding an extensive and expensive research campaign if the data in achieving the customer needs and wants is already collected.
Interviewing stakeholders
Why not start with the data you don’t have to pay for: stakeholders’ collective knowledge? Begin with the sales and customer service departments. They are familiar with both the product and the customer. They frequently have a list of feature requests, issue reports, and enhancements – all directly from customers.
To make a preliminary list of needs, combine these. Look for patterns, but don’t rule out one-offs; instead, see if they can be backed up by data from other sources.
Mapping the customer process
Make a diagram of your customer’s process if you know it.
To catch a trip before Uber, you would phone a taxi company, wait to speak with a dispatcher, wait for a car to be dispatched, pray the driver would find you and hope you had enough money when you arrived at your location.
With Uber, you just open your smartphone and, with a single tap, summon the nearest car; you already know how far away the car is because you can view it on a map in real-time. The driver is also aware of your location, allowing him or her to arrive promptly. A simplified process map comparing these experiences is depicted in the diagram.
Mapping the customer journey
A customer journey map depicts the steps that a consumer takes when interacting with a product or service. It elevates process mapping to a new level by incorporating all of the phases and touchpoints that a person goes through on their way from prospect to loyal customer. It’s a document designed to bring disparate activities together and identify friction points and chances for improvement. so is achieving customers needs and want you should be able to know how to fix the solutions in that aspect.
It’s not just about damage control when it comes to identifying and addressing pain points in a customer’s journey: it’s also about the innovation that comes from doing so.
Doing some “follow me home” study.
Observation is used in “follow me home” research, which involves following a consumer home or to work. You accompany a customer to her workplace and spend the day observing her work. You seek for process pain spots and then look for ways to improve them.
For example, a team of Intuit researchers found that retail customers were exporting their transactions from their point-of-sale cash registers into QuickBooks to manage their books during a “follow me home” exercise. This phase took time and occasionally resulted in disappointment and failure.
What is the creative solution? QuickBooks Point of Sale was created after developers integrated QuickBooks into a cash register and eliminated the export process for clients (POS).
Customer interviews
Direct your attention to the source: Customers should be asked about their difficulties and desired features. You can often get insights that lead to successful inventions even when customers can’t describe their wants clearly.
Conducting customer satisfaction surveys
Voice of Customer surveys gathers information on existing and prospective customers’ attitudes and expectations via email or a pop-up on a website. Use a combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions to evaluate which yields the most relevant information.
Although customers aren’t always adept at identifying their own needs, this type of survey frequently generates data from which you may discover customer goals, difficulties, problems, and attitudes, and then suggest ways to improve them.
Examining your competitors
One of the ways to the customer’s needs and wants is to consider hiring research firms to provide a more objective perspective to customers who interact with your company and its competitors. Consider applying the SWOT analysis: Determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that your rivals pose. A SWOT analysis can be used to evaluate a brand, a product, or even an event.
Identifying and evaluating cause-and-effect relationships
Although it is generally beneficial to think positively, negative thinking can sometimes be more useful in solving issues, and in achieving customers’ needs and wants you may discover issues through observations, surveys, and other data sources that are truly symptoms of other underlying cause issues.
Task failures, mistakes, and extended task times are typically indicators of a variety of underlying issues. This could be due to interface issues or a gap with the user’s aims. You can help discover and address root problems in the user experience by asking “Why?” many times and segmenting distinct causes.
Recording experiences through diary studies
Over time, opportunities may present themselves. A diary study is a cost-effective longitudinal approach. Request that participants keep a journal of their issues, disappointments, positive experiences, or thoughts at regular intervals throughout the course of a day, week, or even a year. This can be low-tech, such as having consumers write down their experiences and ideas on paper and mailing it in, or high-tech, such as sending customers text messages or emailed surveys at predetermined intervals.
Because you’ll be asking your consumer to collect data for you, make sure you have specific questions and hypotheses in mind to test with the information gathered, so as to achieve customer needs and want.
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