Why you need to engage with your customers on their terms, not your own

It’s apparent that now, more than ever, businesses need to take a brave new approach in engaging with our customers — on their terms, not ours.

We really need to begin by offering things that better target people, rather than just designing something because we think there is a gap in the market. This doesn’t sound like it’s a big difference, but the savvy CEO or business owner/entrepreneur will come to realise its everything between success and a business that does not meet the goals it could have — or should have.

Organisations are being hit globally because their customers are getting wised up to age-old marketing agendas, and are swiftly avoiding them. They know what they want and need, and will smartly avoid everything else.

Lots of CMOs will tell you they practice human-centred design (HCD), but what they are still doing is pushing their marketing agenda at customers and then continuing to engage habitually in what may have worked 10 or 20 years ago.

Customers are not interested anymore about promises and flashy products that don’t meet their needs, and definitely not your marketing department’s KPIs that focus on your margins, mass marketing and internal business performance measures — these just aren’t relevant to a customer.

Instead, customers want to be really seen; they want to feel noticed and they want to know you understand them. You need to find a way to make them feel that your business is interested in having a conversation with them, to share your purpose, and be co-creators of outcomes. This is when customers may consider spending money with your business; not because you are shipping another offer ‘at’ them — rather than tailoring it ‘to’ them. The difference is subtle, but it is noticeable.

The businesses that will succeed today are those that will put customers in the room when making decisions, and be brave enough to involve them. Dry measures like ‘increase sales’, ‘build brand awareness,’ or ‘grow market share’ are not going to cut it anymore. KPIs are created in the interest of the business, but should really be created in the impact or value they provide to the customer — their thoughts and expectations of us, or our products, services and brand itself, and how well they meet their needs. We need to start here before we design.

So how do we better measure ourselves and our outcomes against this? To be the CEO of the customer, we should very easily be able to answer a few simple questions:

1. Who are our users? Do we actually know them and engage regularly with them using HCD methods — or just assume to know them via data?

2. What big and small problems do we solve for them?

3. What value do we provide them? Why do they love or hate us?

4. Who else does what we do? Who is our competition, and who are the nimble edge-cases we need to keep an eye on?

5. What channels do we use? How do our users and customers engage with us across different channels, at different points in their journey?

6. What are the human measures that matter most across the entire customer journey with our product and service?

7. What measure of our success, matters most to our customers?

8. Do we really know their journey — or do we push our business processes into a journey and call it a customer journey?

Businesses need to tell the story of the customer, not of their product or service pitch. This is the only story they are interested in hearing today.

What if your business doesn’t do this?

A rapid sense-check is to ask yourself how often are you conducting user-based testing of your products, systems and services. Start with the basics — your digital channels — to see where you stand.

How often are your team actually talking to customers using ethnographic methods instead of survey data alone? If your answer is that you survey only, it’s time for a change.

Surveys only tell you ‘what’, not the ‘why’

You need to define your process for engaging users in your entire product development cycle, and do so by using more than solely surveying them. Instead, you should be using a human-centred design process to engage and validate your ideas with customers.

Ask yourself:

• What is the method and philosophy that you run your product development cycle by?;
• How often are you doing this? (Often and early should be your answer);
• Do we have regular cycles of ‘discovery’ up-front, and regular cycles of ‘validation’ at the end of a product development cycle?; and
• What is our ratio of designers to engineers to researchers? (if you are skewed too far to one role, you’re not considering a wider context).

Answer these questions, and build a HCD process that tells the customer story in order to succeed in our new generation of business.