How can you get customer insights?
Getting insights from your users should be a standard way of working because working with an outdated understanding of your user can be dangerous.
For example, if I got to know my users three years ago and concluded that my three-day delivery was perfectly aligned with their expectations and needs, I would most likely discover that the very same three-day delivery has now become a source of dissatisfaction due to the comparison my users make with current delivery alternatives.
So, how can you get customer insights?
The first method is immersion. This means getting as close to living the experience of your users as you can. If you go through the experience as your user does (removing any internal, employee, or VIP aspects of the experience), you will notice and learn something new every time, whether you are observing users as they experience your product or service or going through the experience as a user yourself.
Several years ago, working on a project for a point-of-sale system for informal small shops in Mexico City, I decided to create my own small shop in our office building and run it with our team, using our own system. We started to discover many issues we could quickly rectify and ideas for features we had never thought of, just because we were finally using the product ourselves in a real-world context.
The second method is digital evidence. This means asking your user to share with you evidence of their experience. Imagine you send packages to your clients and you think you know how they arrive. Ask clients to send you pictures/videos of that, and you might get some surprises on the way the packaging looks, feels or is opened! The theory of your customer’s experience may be quite far removed from reality and asking them for digital evidence is one way to close the gap.
The third method is the direct interview. This involves having one-on-one open-ended conversations with your users where you can go deep into their personal values, priorities, frustrations and needs. The beauty of these qualitative methods is that with very few interactions, you can get a world of information and actionable insights about your users that explain the “why” behind that “what” that you might find in more superficial quantitative methods like surveys or transaction databases.
My recommended method to continously get insights from your users is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which combines both quantitative and qualitative questions to allow you to benchmark your score, measure change over time, and most importantly, understand the “why” behind the score to then act on it.
Of course, getting insights from your customers won’t directly tell you how to solve their problems, but it will help ensure you are focused on the right problems!
Remember, your users are not stagnant entities, which is why you must constantly engage in customer discovery to first understand them and then ideate on how to evolve with them. This is the key to staying relevant in the market.
At Atrevidea we help you map your customer and deeply understand their needs to get powerful insights and turn them into innovative and successful solutions.
