Stop your Business Projects from Failing by Improving Customer Fit
Let me teach you how in 5 minutes
Most business projects and customer campaigns don’t fail because a lack of:
budget
resources
commitment
They fail when businesses are trying to solve for problems that don’t really matter to customers.
Speak to customers
Therefore, it’s a wise choice to start out with a discovery phase first before jumping into planning & execution mode.
To improve your chances of a successful launch, follow the steps below:
Research the problem/opportunity and back it up with facts & data
Identify actual customer needs and pain-points; don’t make assumptions!
Speak to customers before you build
Quantitative research: surveys, questionnaires, short telephone interviews
Qualitative research: in-depth interviews, face-to-face meetings, focus groups
Test customer reactions to different product price-points — will they buy?
Capture customer feedback, build, repeat
The output from such a research programme can prove valuable for your business, and now you just need to pay the invoice to the swanky down-town customer insights agency that have been doing all this work for you. Have a go at guessing what their day-rates might be? Now multiply that number by the headcount that they allocated to your project. Customer insights work is really important, hence why this is big business!
If your corporate piggybank is well stocked you might not even blink, although for many small-business owners and entrepreneurs out there, hiring consultants and external project teams might not be a realistic option.
Not doing any customer research at all would be a terrible idea, but are there any alternative ways of gathering similar insights for those businesses who operate on a shoestring budget or simply have a penchant for high execution speed?
Introducing: The Customer Test Lab
Rather than going down the path of a having a structured customer research programme for every project, we can use ‘quick and dirty’ in-house version instead.
Instead of progressing one detailed research programme at the time, step-by-step, we want to test several different things in parallel, with the aim of failing fast.
We can do this by creating a temporary and pre-agreed operating framework which is a failure-safe environment to quickly help figure out which key issues, ideas and customer propositions that resonate the most with our customers before launching the project formally.
“Failure is success in progress.”
— Albert Einstein
Step 1
If you’re in a large organisation, seek agreement from your Senior Leader(s) to start collect customer responses and initial reactions to new product/service ideas in the day-to-day interaction with customers. This is an interesting approach because your Product, Insights and Operational teams will likely belong to different areas. Now they have a reason to work as a team!
Example:
Customer Services or Sales department:
“Thanks for your time today Mr Customer, glad we could help! Oh, while I got you on the line by the way, we’re interested in capturing our customers views and preferences on new product ideas…
We’re thinking about building a new and different version of the same product you already got. It would be twice as fast, half the size and price would be +25% more. Would you consider upgrading to this product version if we built it?”
Step 2
Develop a few initial key questions that you’re looking for answers to. One piece of advice is to keep the questions as short and simple as possible, and only record binary answers (Yes / No) with no middle-ground option to choose from.
Verbatim comments from the customers are useful, but this is not the time for detail. You want to keep everything simple, brief and standardised at this point to be able to move fast and build up a clear picture of customer preferences.
Step 3
Log down customer answers as they come in and continue until you got a good volume of responses (depending on the environment you operate in). If you’re in a consumer or high-volume customer environment, aim to gather 100 answers from customers to a particular query.
This number is not high enough to be difficult to reach, nor low enough to be so small that the results can be easily dismissed by others. You’ll soon start seeing a meaningful distribution of answers, which will give you an idea of the customer needs and wants.
If you have plenty of capacity (e.g. large call centres), you can consider running multiple queries in parallel, but stick with the goal of 100 responses and don’t go overboard. Speed and breadth are more important than depth at this point.
Example:
“We asked 100 customers two questions:
If they like the concept and messaging of a future campaign we are planning
Whether they would make a purchase at the proposed price
Result:
30 customers liked the idea, of which 10 said they would buy
70 customers didn’t like the idea and would not buy
Final remarks
The idea behind this way of collecting customer insights is that it should be fast, effortless and low-cost by piggy-backing on customer interactions in already existing channels (sales, servicing, online).
By no means is this a substitute for a fully-fledged customer research programme that an external agency or consultants could deliver for you, but it’s nevertheless a useful ‘compass’ to guide you towards higher customer value.
An important aspect lies within the speed of execution for gathering this customer intelligence.
You need to do it quickly and in short bursts — or run the risk of losing momentum as your Sales, Servicing or Operational colleagues are basically doing you a favour on top of their day-jobs.
As a rule of thumb, try to complete the 100 customer responses in a single day and then step back to analyse and repeat.
Useful approach? Let me know what you think of the Customer Test Lab idea in the comments below and give it a 💙
MUSICAL CODA
Love this approach. Especially in the current cash stricken environment, a valuable way to collect initial customer insights