Photograph: Ryoji Iwata/Unsplash
True needs
Nobody can argue that 2020 wasn’t a year of rapidly changing customer needs. Remote work wasn’t a complete novelty, but the time constraints of implementing it turned into a major hurdle when the lockdown started. As one astute journalist noted, it was the tech of 2012 that saved us in our time of need.
It took 8 years for 3D printers, massive open online courses (MOOC) and telepresence products to perfectly fit the majority of customer needs. A decade ago, when most of these products were being developed, they weren’t completely without an audience, but most customers didn’t exactly know why they would need them.
That’s the first lesson any innovator should remember from 2020. When the time came to truly rely on them, these technologies had already gone through several full product development iterations. As a result, having these mature products in the portfolio was immensely profitable.
Divination or deduction
Fortunately, predicting the future is not the only way to be on the right path. The “customer needs” that validated the R&D investment were there from the beginning. We’ve only seen them amplified in these troubled times.
Obviously, customer-centered rapid innovation is a very powerful approach but applying it can be challenging, particularly as it can conflict with the traditional way of doing business. It might even be completely outside the comfort zone of some organisations – although this reluctance ultimately comes from lack of clarity. But customer-centered services and products can be roadmapped just as easily if there is a good sync between provider and client.
Building a service and product to satisfy customer needs is about creating a long-term relationship with your customers. By making it a part of our culture, we ensure that our interactions with our customers are proactive and continuous.
This relationship goes beyond just asking what the client wants. “Needs” are not always represented as successfully as “wants”. A famous and apocryphal Henry Ford quote describes this situation very well: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Discovering the true client needs means building a relationship that values two way communication. Ultimately, it’s all dependent on the company culture.
In my team, we put great value on synchronisation with our clients for these very reasons. By addressing real problems and identifying the customer’s perceived needs, a service or product can be created more quickly and with fewer mistakes. That’s also why I involve myself in the technical discussions with clients whenever I can. When your product is built with the customer in mind, your team can respond quickly to their real needs, and that’s when you can begin to deliver ‘human-centred’ customer experiences.
How does human-centred design help to expedite product development? Of course, we need to consider our customers and their needs to ensure that our service and products meet their requirements, as quickly and accurately as possible. But we also need to ensure that those requirements are correctly defined so that the final product will actually fit the bill.
Ultimately, customer-centricity is about listening, understanding and responding in order to make their lives easier, more enjoyable or more satisfying. It is not about designing something based on a predefined procedure, even if that procedure is followed with a certain amount of skill.
Building a service and product to satisfy customer needs is about creating a long-term relationship with your customers. By making it a part of our culture, we ensure that our interactions with our customers are proactive and continuous.
Engineering reality
The truth is that it’s a new world out there. In our case, as we started to adapt to the new normal, it was clear that this client-oriented part of our company culture was of prime importance in the face of escalating confusion. Customers were faced with a reality in which the conditions of doing business were changing every day. To fit these needs, we took the proactive approach of filtering our own portfolio and looking at what kind of products and services would be likely to gain importance.
By analysing government measures and the patterns of social movement, we highlighted a few existing topics of interest, including touchless interfaces, cybersecurity, privacy-friendly technologies and virtual assistants.
To better understand which directions had the most demand, we reached out to clients to clarify their goals and establish a common strategy for adapting existing IPs, or developing new ones that fit the reality of the situation.
We have IPs in development that tackle issues in these categories, but at the same time, some developing needs did not fit well into the existing categories. We needed to invent new ones, for needs such as contact tracing, mask detection, social distancing and triage surveillance. To better understand which directions had the most demand, we reached out to clients to clarify their goals and establish a common strategy for adapting existing IPs, or developing new ones that fit the reality of the situation. Our virtual assistant technology has already proven to be a success and we expect the others to follow.
In short, even though it might require additional effort, customer-centricity should drive companies to constantly evaluate the situation and improve the overall customer experience. They should actively engage with their customers to understand their requirements and expectations. Customers, on the other hand, should also show interest and empathy while applying their valuable feedback to develop products or services.
Digital communication is all we have right now, so it is necessary to set up feedback loops at both ends. The feedback should be relevant to the product development process and should be provided quickly. This helps organisations identify and address the potential problems and to understand their customers’ needs. Overall, customer-centric approaches may seem daunting but they build mutually beneficial relationships that lead ultimately to better products and services, and a better experience for all.
