Posts Tagged ‘customers’

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Customers are talking: “Why Customers Really Buy”

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

“Why Customers Really Buy: Uncovering the Emotional Triggers That Drive Sales” by Linda Goodman & Michelle Helin is a worthy addition to the literature on customer research. It describes a method of learning about customers by conducting in-depth interviews aimed at identifying “emotional triggers” that influence how and why customers buy products and select certain suppliers over others.

These emotional triggers bear a resemblance to the “deep metaphors” described in Zaltman & Zaltman’s “Marketing Metaphoria” but the means of getting to them is much more akin to the story-gathering and sensemaking methods we’ve discussed in this blog than in the collage-making at the center of the Zaltmans’ approach.

The authors’ description of the complexity and emotion of the sales process, and how customers can reveal their true feelings within open-ended interviews, are excellent. I’ve done projects like this and my approach has a lot in common with Goodman and Helin’s. They neatly summarize the difficulty with the most-prevalent customer research method–the survey:

Frequently, surveys include a list of choices that are ranked in order of priority or in order of preference. For example, customers may be asked to rank the importance of a number of considerations impacting the shopping experience. The list might include cleanliness, helpful sales staff, good lighting, neatly displayed merchandise, competitive prices, good selection and so forth.

Although the ranking would accurately report how customers rated the choices they were given, there’s still one little problem. Their actual “hot button” might never have been on the list.

There are also many case studies that add richness and depth to the ideas. The volume and variety of case studies is the best part of the book.

I wished Goodman and Helin talked more about the sensemaking process – the method of distilling insight from the interviews. In my experience this is the “secret sauce” of the entire approach and not a straightforward process. It would have been valuable for the authors to describe how they got from the customer interviews to the “emotional triggers” that were central to each of their projects.

Finally, I would have loved for the book to cite external sources that inspired their thinking. It’s possible that they came up with this approach completely alone, but it’s more likely that their ideas stand “on the shoulders of giants“–it would be a significant benefit to their readers if Goodman and Helin could, in a future edition or on their website, include notes and a bibliography.

(Thanks to Tom Gibson for pointing out the book to me.)

Related posts:
The weird, alchemical process of distilling insight from stories
“Marketing Metaphoria”: the deep insights behind the products we buy

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Central Penn Business Journal writes about narrative work

Monday, June 1st, 2009

CPBJ is my local business newspaper. A few weeks ago, I sat down with their technology reporter Jim Ryan and talked about my customer narrative work. Jim also interviewed Cynthia Kurtz and a client, Ross Kramer of Listrak.

The article turned out really well. For all those for whom I’ve been unable to explain what I do, this article does a good job of discussing using narrative analysis to understand what customers want and how companies can apply it. Check it out here.

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Customers are talking: the stories of credit-card customers

Friday, May 29th, 2009

There’s a great post over at Verbatim, the Communispace blog, by Karen Barone, discussing a project she did some years ago interviewing customers who had stopped paying their credit card bill. A major finding–people wanted to find some way to connect with their credit-card provider to address their situation. (Sadly, it’s not clear that the companies Barone worked with did anything with the information she provided them.)

The credit-card providers have millions of customers that they treat like indentured servants. In addition to restraints on their business practices via the recently-passed reform legislation, the bill is finally coming due (”Consumer Credit: The Next Crisis” by MacMillan and Jarvis, on harvardbusiness.org) for their history of hard sell, easy credit and swift punishment.

I think credit-card processors could do a lot to turn their reputations and the futures of their businesses around by collecting some stories and, unlike Barone’s experience, acting on them.

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Thinking about: “low tech and on the ground”

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

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Customers are talking: some good terms to describe business narrative work

Monday, May 18th, 2009

A couple of recent blog posts have featured useful discussions of key elements of business narrative work.

“Sensemaking is what we refer to as intuition”
Idris Mootee, in his blog Innovation Playground (via Futurelab), discussed sensemaking–which in many ways is the secret sauce of the narrative approach to gaining business insight. Here’s what Mootee writes:

Sensemaking is a metacognitive strategy, it is clear that people recognize patterns in the data in ways that they can’t talk about. That kind of inarticulate recognition (meaning that you can’t express it easily) is what we perceive as intuition. We’ve all got it, and good sensemakers have good intuitions about how things go together.

Applying Mootee’s ideas to narrative works except for his statement about “good sensemakers.” For narrative work, a single “good sensemaker” doesn’t exist–instead, the collective intelligence of a group of people reading through and finding patterns in stories is the sensemaker.

Low Tech And On The Ground
I love this expression, coined by Terry Miller, describing story gathering and sensemaking work in his recent post at the Cognitive Edge Guest blog. “On the ground,” is a crucial term. Narrative approaches require seeing things at ground level, not at 35,000 feet. It’s immersing oneself in the moment-to-moment and using collective evaluation to make sense of what is going on. Without this, you could be like the generals in “War & Peace”–making detailed war plans that have no effect on winning or losing.

“Low tech” is also a critical observation. Potential clients recoil from this–we have been brainwashed to believe that applying enough megaflops can solve any problem. And, by contrast, anything handmade and low-tech isn’t “industrial strength” and is to be avoided. But stories require context, and creating context requires human experience and sharing that experience through dialogue. Computers can’t do that, no matter how many megaflops they can process.

Another application of low tech is the interventions that help people deal with what they learn from stories. In my experience, the findings of a narrative project imply two kinds of changes to help address them:

(1) very simple changes that are obvious once the problem is properly understood. In a project of mine, we learned through examining customer service rep stories that fewer than 1/3 of the reps used the best practices that had been designed, and also saw that calls where reps forswore best practice didn’t end as well as the others.

(2) small things to try that may or may not help. Other learnings from narrative projects do not have straightforward solutions. The bad news is that the best course of action takes some time to determine. The good news is that a low-tech, cheap experimental approach can be applied. My favorite example of this type of approach is the solution a Singapore hospital devised to reduce emergency-room wait times.

Related posts:
An important definition of sensemaking
On “War & Peace” and complexity in business
Stop studying the problem, and just try something

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The art of the customer interview

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

I’ve done a lot of customer interviews in the past couple of years, and have learned a fair amount about what works and what doesn’t. You want to create an environment where the customer feels safe and free to share his/her actual experiences, and engaged enough to explore her memories without being distracted. Some tips:

1. Learn from Terry Gross. I love “Fresh Air” and I love the way Terry, the host, can get her guests to reveal very interesting insights about themselves. Many of the lessons below are directly borrowed from Terry’s approach.

2. Be curious and interested. One of my best preparations for doing customer interviews was podcasting (here’s a list of the podcasts I’ve done to date). I decided I would only do podcasts on subjects that really interested me, which made preparation not a burden, but a joy. With interviews you do on behalf of someone else, this isn’t possible–the client sets the subject. What is possible, even mandatory (and Terry Gross would agree), is to be interested in learning about a person and situation that is new to you.

3. Warm them up. In my early interviews, I tried to jump right into the meaty stuff. However, I found it far more effective to ask basic (but useful) questions up front. “What’s your role?” “What was the process you went through to purchase product X?” This gets the subject comfortable with talking with me, and allows him/her to ease into the subject matter. Ten minutes in, the more difficult questions work better.

4. Ask for stories. It’s easy to for people to spout their opinions. Stories, however, are more useful for making sense of difficult situations (see about 100 other posts on this blog for more on that idea). Anecdote, the Australian narrative organization, published a list of story-eliciting questions, which is a good starting point for making up your own questions.

5. Leave space for silence. In my first interviews, I jumped in with another question when there was a pause. I found of course that people had something else come to mind after they thought they were finished with a response. Now I try to leave lots of space for silence, so in case they have anything else to say they can say it without having to interrupt the interviewer.

6. “Is there anything else?” This question, the last question of the interview, has perhaps provided the most interesting answers in the interviews I’ve conducted. My first story project had me talking to customers at a market, taping interviews using a hand-held recorder. In my first dozen interviews there were probably six instances where I had turned off the recorder, thinking we were done, when the subject remembered something else important. I finally began leaving the recorder on until the subject and I had parted. The “anything else?” question, perhaps by its sheer openness, often probes more deeply than any directed question.

7. Thank them. “Thanks a lot for sharing your experiences” gets some warm responses from the interviewees and leaves the door open for a recontact if necessary. Plus, I really mean it!

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Customers are talking: the weird, alchemic process of distilling insight from stories

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Book clubs are big these days. A group of folks read the same book, then get together and discuss it, accompanied by refreshments (often of the wine & cheese variety).

Besides the social aspects of the book club, there’s something powerful about a group of different people, who’ve read the same story, discussing and deciding what it’s about.

When I try to describe to folks the work I do helping companies gather, find patterns and put to use stories their customers tell, I say that the “discussing and deciding what it’s about” is the secret sauce of the whole process. It’s the part that can’t be automated or left to algorithms to decipher–it requires a diverse group that shares key experiences to root their assessments in common ground.

You can find and collect stories by hand, by computer or by applying algorithms to data sources. (The pluses and minuses of each technique are best left to another post.) But I haven’t figured out a way to computerize the weird alchemy that allows a group of colleagues to distill 100 stories into 10 deep insights in 4 hours, and I’m fairly convinced there may never be a way to automate it.

The mechanics of the process are mundane, at least the way I’ve practiced it. I spread the stories, printed one to a page, around a conference table. Graphs that show the correlation of certain story attributes (the graphs are also stories) are arrayed on the wall. People immerse themselves in the stories. Perhaps they are sales calls. Or complaints. The people read slowly at first, tentatively. Then one person writes something they noticed on a sticky note. Then something else on another. Soon everyone is writing.

They may share thoughts while this happens. I scramble around the room collecting stickies and plastering them to an empty wall. Eventually the pace of writing stickies slows. It’s like cooking microwave popcorn. When the frequency of popping slows down, it’s done.

They cluster the stickies, finding relationships. Then they name the clusters–those are insights. Perhaps they go through another round of clustering and naming, if they have time and energy.

Then we talk. There are 8-10 clusters that stand out. They may be issues their customers are facing–which present opportunities and threats for the company’s products. They may be values the customers hold–which are key to marketing and positioning the company. They’re always interesting, usually surprising, and often unveil conflicting or contradictory views. For instance, a very strong attribute the company or product has often is highly valued by one constituency but viewed negatively by another.

It’s an amazing process to watch, to see a group of people take the same material, view it from different angles, reconcile their assessments, and come up with “the truth” as they see it.

It’s a lot like a book club, without the wine and cheese.

UPDATE, 6 May: Per Stephane Dangel’s comment below, here is a fictional example of a story told by a graph:

This chart tells a story, don’t you think? It’s a crosstabs chart comparing people who bought a product over the phone versus those who didn’t, under two scenarios. In one, the sales representative used established best practices; in the other, he/she didn’t.

I get two themes from this “story.” One, when reps use best practice, more sales are made. Two, best practice is not frequently used.

Both are valuable insights for a company seeking to improve its telesales. The first is probably no surprise (though it’s possible to imagine a situation where using best practice would make no difference in closing sales–that would be a surprise!). The second theme is probably surprising under any circumstance!

Related post:
Another kind of value proposition

[If you're interested, the new version of Cynthia Kurtz's "Working With Stories" e-book contains a case study I did on my first story project. Check it out here.]

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Catalyst #2 – launch new ventures with real customers

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

I posted earlier this week on the new book, “The Catalyst,” but there are a couple of more points I’d like to share before I leave it. The book, by Jeanne Liedtka, Robert Rosen and Robert Wiltbank, investigates the mindset needed to grow new businesses at established companies. It’s highly recommended, especially as a companion piece to McGrath and MacMillan’s “Discovery-Driven Growth,” which tackles the new-business question from a methodological perspective.

The authors assert in “The Catalyst” that successful new businesses should start with addressing a need of a real customer, one who provides a level of commitment to using the product. They call this an “early yes” and illustrate that it helps galvanize support for a fledgling project.

The customer’s commitment is important. Since launch customers have a stake in the project, they take it seriously and provide more focused and useful feedback than prospects would provide:

Demanding an early yes provides a reality check on customers and partners. Importantly, looking for an early yes minimizes the influence of potential customers. Potential customers are a false positive: They act like customers, they look like customers, but they may not be actual customers. We use the word potential in a pejorative sense here. Potential customers may lead you down a primrose path that involves investment on your part, with only the promise of future business that may or may not materialize. To weed these out, the Catalysts place some demands on those who have the privilege of influencing the growth opportunity. They want to influence and be influenced only by actual customers and actual partners.

Vitally, the close working relationship with an actual customer forces the project team to get out of theory and conjecture and get real: “They are able to work around forecasts and predictions, because direct involvement with others gives them much more specific and useful information.”

I’ve seen the problems with building new products around the need of potential customers. In the 1990’s, I was the product manager on a prepaid cellular product (before such a thing even existed). We had an important launch customer (a large market of what is now AT&T). I worked with the design team and customer to come up with specifications, test prototypes, etc. After several months of this effort, we were no closer to getting the customer committed to using the product. Yet they continued to provide feedback and we continued to rework the product in hope of getting them to install and use it in production.

Eventually the customer’s focus moved onto other projects. Our management killed the project, and we put our code on the shelf. A couple of years later, of course, this type of product emerged (from another company) and became very successful.

To this day, I believe the customer’s option (them being a potential customer, not an actual customer) prevented the product from being installed and used, which would have provided critical momentum to help us continue to develop and improve the product, and for the customer to gain revenue from their customers for this new offering.

Related posts:
“Discovery-Driven Growth” – a vital handbook for developing new business
Innovation catalysts view making mistakes as essential to growing new business

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Using values: connecting deeply with customers

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

(This is another in a series of posts about gathering & using customer stories via social media. Prior posts are listed at the bottom of this post.)

Last post I talked about using emergent constructs to determine customer values related to a company’s product or service. Values are things customers find value in, don’t find value in, or find negative value in (that is, they buy & use in spite of a characteristic).

Knowing the values that apply across customer segments is a powerful tool for companies. They can use this to architect their services, products, support, etc., to emphasize the values that connect with the customers they want to attract. They can also focus their attention on those customers who share the values that they offer, and ignore customers who have other values.

Companies that understand what their customers value often have very deep connections with those customers, and strong attendant loyalty. Examples like Harley-Davidson, BMW and Apple come to mind.

Startup companies by definition espouse a set of values, often set in place by their founders. At least in part, this is because startups have to make explicit tradeoffs between what they will and won’t do. This address by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, at the recent SxSW Interactive Conference, illustrates the tradeoffs Zappos made:

For established companies, espousing values isn’t so easy. They don’t have the resource scarcity nor the founder’s focus of a startup. But they have a crucial resource most startups don’t–a customer base and history serving it. So, they can tap that base to gather stories and use the emergent construct sensemaking processes set out in the earlier posts in this series.

The story-gathering approach can measure values as the companies and markets change–and as the company’s leadership grows more disconnected from customers and their values, an inevitable result of business growth. Another powerful advantage: story-based values can trace back to the actual stories that influenced them. This is useful for communicating the values and their importance to internal groups and the outside world. “We help our customers save precious time by providing an easy-to-use, intuitive system. For example….[real user story here].”

[A similar type of assessment was described in the recent book "Marketing Metaphoria" by Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman. The Zaltmans use interviews and constructed collages to derive the values (what they call "deep metaphors"), rather than by gathering and looking at stories.]

Prior posts in this series:
Many ways businesses can listen to customers
Are 200 stories more useful than 2,000,000 data points?
Dealing with what customers tell you online

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Dealing with what customers tell you online

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Earlier this week, I posted on ways businesses can monitor what’s being said about them in various social media outlets. Perhaps in a challenge to myself, I promised a follow-up dealing with what businesses can do with this information. Finally, egged on by Amber and David from Radian6, here it is.

Companies are getting good at quickly responding to, and engaging in, conversations that others start about their products. For example, Amber and David quickly submitted thoughtful, interesting comments to my post. Dell is also very responsive, and so is Comcast. Your company should participate in these conversations as these companies do. You should be authentic and respectful and all that. Many social media consultants can help you do this. I am after something else.

Specifically this: it’s time to find useful, actionable patterns out of those gigabytes of chatter–Tweets, blog posts, comments–you’ve collected about your products, company, customer service from all these sources. And while these snippets may not follow a complete story format (i.e., “this happened, then this, then this”) per se, I treat them as stories and recommend using narrative sensemaking approaches to find the patterns.

For customer narratives, companies I’ve worked with have had success in finding deep customer values within these stories, using an exercise called emergent constructs. [Cynthia Kurtz's free e-book Working With Stories has been a critical resource to me.] By values I mean things customers find value in, or don’t find value in (or even find negative value in).

An example: I worked with a B2B online services company to help them determine what their customers valued/didn’t value in the industry segment the company operated in. We collected 50 or so stories from their customers, and ran the emergent constructs exercise with them to find the important customer values therein. They found that customers really liked responsive, personalized service, but didn’t like suppliers who appeared too small. They also didn’t have enough time so they valued time-savers of any kind. Plus they liked a supplier helping make them smarter, in other words extending their capability. They liked low prices, but were concerned that low price might indicate a supplier that wasn’t “industrial strength.”

These values, as you can see, aren’t straightforward to deal with. Anything the company did to enhance one value had some counter-effect. Amplifying a set of values might drive a customer segment away entirely. So they had to make hard decisions about things they were going to do and things they would do away with; customers they’d welcome, and customers they’d turn down. Once these difficult decisions were made, however, executing the plan wasn’t that difficult, and they could do it with confidence, given that they had a deep understanding of how customers really felt, grounded in the actual stories they told.

Sensemaking exercises like creating emergent constructs involve groups of people reading stories, answering questions, collaborating on meanings. Therefore, it’s difficult to do them with thousands or millions of transactions. How then do you narrow down the data? One simple way is to sample. Another way is to allow people who review the customer data to flag those that stand out in some way (perhaps using an Eureka button approach). Either way, gathering a bunch of stories and sending them through this process (see yesterday’s post for more on this) can illuminate very complex and nuanced issues for your company, products and brand, as illustrated above.

And once you have a grip on those, you’re prepared to use your existing decisionmaking processes to do something about them, and make real, vital improvements in your products and services.

Related posts:
Reading Between The Lines of Customer Stories
The Blackberry Storm/Twitter Project

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