Doing Customer Experience right: Value Discovery and Validation
How does Customer Experience support companies looking to their customers for new growth opportunities? By leading teams to see customers through needs, value and outcomes — not solutions or channels, following a process of value discovery, validation and delivery.
First: Value Discovery
Customer Experience offers a way to bring the team to the customer.
Customer focus has often meant seeing the customer through the lens of the corporation, finding our role and building solutions to fit.
What Customer Experience is trying to do is help the team empathize with and relate to the customer by looking at the whole situation surrounding the customer, understanding how she is influenced, not only by us, but by all types of actors and forces (in other words: we should be more system thinkers).
Through this system lens we try to discover the customer’s needs.
A need is the customer’s own desire to achieve progress or to overcome a struggle. It is something that already motivates them and where they are looking for support to move forward.
(please note: a need is not a means, a tool, tactic or something we (our organization) wants .. a need is entirely personal to the customer.)
Needs are wonderful elements of insights as people can usually reflect on what they need which you can get to with good interviewing.
(Compare this to asking them what they want (solutions or things) which I find both lazy and rude .. as it is asking the customer to do our job).
People don’t know what they want, instead people know what they need — Tony Ulwick, Strategyn
A good analogy here is the famous quote by Henry Ford: “if I ask people what they want they ask for a faster horse” because nobody knew what a car was — so how could they describe one?
Instead people know what they need, so they would be able to say “I want to travel from A to B, with my whole family of five, sheltered from the rain and the wind, and without having to run the upkeep of a horse”.
With these insights a team should be able to know and shape what good looks like to the customer and then start exploring how to offer value.
In summary: In Value Discover we explore the customer’s needs. We find where the customer and us have a shared interest and then help the team focus and explore.
Second: Value Validation
A second important part of Customer Experience is the need for assumptions, testing, experimentation and / or data collection.
We have to recognize that most customer environments are by their very nature uncertain, dynamic and complex. The ability to be able to predict what the customer wants is guesswork at best.
A distributed [customer] network doesn’t know what it’s going to do until input hits it. And when you are the input variable .. the idea of being able to predict the actions of [a customer network] … goes out the window. — Chris Fussell McChrystal Group
We need an operating model that helps us discover and deliver in these environments, this is where we use experimentation.
Unfortunately we often tend to treat the customer as a simple, predictable problem, not an inherently complicated one. Which means we also employ the wrong method if innovation and skip or skimp on validation (Design Thinking I am looking at you ..).
Ask yourself this:
Are we treating the customer as a simple problem, meaning we know what the answer is and we we are just trying to get there faster — then we are in the ‘we make things’ world, looking at the customer through the lens of our solutions.But if the team sees the problem as complex, something they can’t control, but can be a part of and influence. Then they are in the ‘we solve needs in situations’ world and in a much better position to understand the customer’s perspective.
In the complex domain we don’t rely on overconfidence. We identify what we know as assumptions instead of facts, and we run tests, experiments and data collection to learn more .. all the time.
Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. .. There is a false sense of security that heeding experts provide. When we pay consultants we get answers from them and not a list of experiments to conduct — Dan Ariely
In Value Validation we turn team members into experimenters and train, train, train to most efficiently, through several different approaches uncover new information and turn that into knowledge, insights, utility and new behaviours.
We are now ready to move into the last phase: Value delivery, where the team employs both earlier processes as they are launching and improving their ability to support the customers Needs (to be continued …)
