Your Customer Knows Better Than You Do

We fail our customers when we assume we know what they want, but we never bother to ask.

A few years ago, I attended a departmental meeting with a few hundred people.

The speaker, a leader in the organization, was explaining how to set good goals. Good goals describe the end result you want to produce for the receiving party (such as a customer), rather than all the work we do in the hopes of achieving that result. In other words, goals are the destination, not the journey.

Noticing the lack of audience excitement for this topic (who can blame them), he decided to illustrate his point in a way that would energize everyone.

"A whole team of administrative assistants put together this event," she announced, asking them to please stand up. "Say our goal is that they feel appreciated by us. How will we do that?"

Instinctively, we all clapped.

"Well, this is OK, but come on - let's do this right," she continued.

She invited the assistants to come on stage. They lined up in front of the audience and, upon her prompting, received a standing ovation.

As I clapped, I felt somewhat uneasy. I wondered what was going through the minds of these assistants. So during the break, I decided to find out.

I approached a couple of them and asked: "When you were up there on stage, did you feel appreciated? "

"It was nice," one responded politely, while the other shrugged their shoulders.

"Can you say more?", I pressed.

"I was overwhelmed, honestly. It felt like I was diving into a tank of cold water."

"Oh, I see... So tell me, how do you like to feel appreciated?" I asked.

One replied: "I just want to do my job and be left alone, frankly."

The other said: "I want to be treated like an equal. So often we're treated like we're less than," she added, making a dismissive gesture in the air, as if discarding something beneath herself.

It was just two data points. Maybe all the other admins were happy, I could be wrong. But it got me thinking about how often we assume we know what our customers want without ever bothering to ask.

The Assumption Trap

I've lost count of the number of teams I've worked with who set goals or start creating solutions without first talking to their customers. I’m not talking about looking at market research data. I mean the physical, direct experience of talking to customers or experiencing their world, before doing anything else. Or at the very least, taking time to imagine we are in their shoes.

Here’s a typical example, from the many years I’ve worked in the healthcare space.

I start by asking, “What does the patient need?”

”They need a clear narrative about our drug,” someone responds.

”OK. Why do they need a narrative?” I ask.

“So that they can ask for our product at the doctor’s office.”

“Well, that’s what YOU need from them. But I think they couldn't care less about your narrative,” a statement that usually irritates the team but also stops them in their tracks. An opening.

True to my artistic training, I up the drama and start role playing, looking them square in the eyes:”Look at me! I am the patient. I am in pain. I am overwhelmed by too much information. I am scared for my life. I don’t know if I’m making the right decisions, if I should look for a second opinion, or what is going to happen to my kids. I don’t need your narrative. I need you to solve my problems!”

“Oh…”

Empathy comes online. And, at least for a while, the old mindset of selling to customers is suspended, and we move into “how might we make their lives easier?”. A space where we can truly innovate.

The customer wants to get their problem solved or to feel a certain way. You have to start there.

Even if you think you know what their problem is, a regular practice of talking to the customer in their environment ensures you are (quite literally) in touch with reality. You need to get out of your office or your zoom room and validate, complement your thinking with lived experience. Our mind can understand something, but true knowing comes from our bodies (no wonder that so many people who work in healthcare do so because at some point in their lives someone got sick). It could indeed be necessary that you improve how you communicate with your customer, but that comes later.

Don't even think about a solution until you've spent time in the shoes of the people with the problem. Novel ideas can come just by observing the everyday, mundane aspects of a customer’s life that they don’t even notice.

When teams skip this important step, the result is usually self-serving rather than customer-focused. Most humans are naturally self-referencing. And guess what, this is exactly the way your competitors think, too. But you won't get ahead by thinking the same way they do.

The Uncomfortable Truth

When I spend time with leaders investigating why they don’t think of talking to customers, we arrive at some sobering realizations. For example:

"We don't want to talk to the customer because we're afraid that what they tell us will derail our plans."

Isn't that interesting? We prefer to keep to our plans than find out that we are working on the wrong things.

And herein lies one of the ugliest, most ignored truths in organizations: The root of failed programs and products is, most often, human psychology. Not "business stuff" like bad technology, design flaws, or forecasting errors.

The majority of people working in organizations don't know themselves well. Their thinking, behaviors, decisions are driven by fears or beliefs they are unaware of. If they are aware, they don’t know how to overcome these psychological obstacles, nor how to help others do so. All business problems are people problems.

A Better Path Forward

Imagine what kind of society we’d have if companies would put a fraction of time and money they put into R&D or marketing into developing their workforce’s self-awareness and emotional maturity. We’d make better decisions. We’d simply get the important stuff done. No politics. No power struggles. No egocentric thinking. Just more products and solutions that delight our customers, without killing the planet in the process.

At the end of the day, work matters when it adds life to life. We all yearn for meaning. No one wants to work in “bullshit jobs” (as one business school professor put it), mired in endless emails, “alignment meetings”, presentations, working on stuff that adds zero value to customers - but which keeps us emotionally safe and in control, without ever doing the uncomfortable work of being uncomfortable.

When was the last time you went to talk to a human customer, simply to learn from them, without wanting to sell them anything? Have you ever witnessed a human customer using your product? What uncomfortable truth are you avoiding? And what might become possible if you faced it head-on?