Spend a Day Walking in the Shoes of Your Customer
Every successful business is built on delivering some value (aka set of benefits at a cost) at a cost that is profitable. As long as this equation is sustainable the business thrives. Seems as obvious as day light, right? You will be surprised at how untrue that is. Not all successful businesses consciously choose a set of value propositions, or articulate them clearly to their customers. Business world is littered with “me-too” enterprises which either stumble into a value proposition or do not appreciate how theirs differs substantively from their competitor’s. All too often, corporations end up fighting with the same “weapons”, i.e. cost, to a point where they self destruct by commoditizing their business segment. You need to look no further than the Wintel world of PCs and contrast that with Apple.
As part of self reflection, businesses owe it to their stakeholders a very clear definition of what value they are in the business of delivering and not delivering, to defined customer segment(s). A very good way of articulating the value proposition is to spend a day in the life of your customer – a theme that I had alluded to in my last blog.
Paying attention to the customer is certainly not a new idea. If one thinks of value delivery as a chain of links, most companies focus on their immediate customers. This is a serious mistake. Each link in the chain, all the way down to the end-user, is important. Savvy companies want to add value to the customer’s value proposition, i.e. to provide benefits to their customer’s customer. Let’s reflect on this for a bit - while Vocera’s immediate customers are the hospitals (in the Healthcare vertical), we are quite cognizant of the value our customers (hospitals) are trying to offer their end customers by way of delivering better patient safety, higher patient satisfaction/experience, increased staff empowerment and improved patient flow.
How does an organization determine the value proposition of its products or services? It is certainly not by examining the product features or differentiating them from those of the competition—that is inward focused (internally driven) and rarely translates to the actual end user benefits. Let me explain this with an example. An internally focused airline1 might decide that their true “value” is on-time departure and arrival, yet exactly because of that, they may have a lousy baggage handling record. Result: the airline protects its on-time performance; the passengers arrive on time, only to have to wait a few aggravated hours for their luggage to arrive.
An extreme opposite of inward focused businesses are those that are customer compelled. Customer compelled organizations can also routinely miss or reject real opportunities. Some of this century’s greatest products or technological advances were confidently rejected in customer surveys: microwaves, computers, cell-phones, voice mails etc., because most often, asking customers about a benefit in vacuum usually does not result in correct choices. Scott Adams was not exaggerating in a Dilbert comic strip in which he makes fun of the historical use of market surveys2:
Airline Survey (1920)
If you had to travel long distance, would you rather:
1. Drive a car
2. Take a train
3. Allow yourself to be strapped into a huge metal container that weighs more than your house and be propelled through space by exploding chemicals while knowing that one of a thousand different human, mechanical or weather problems would cause you to be incinerated a spectacular ball of flame!
If you answered ‘C’ would you mind if we stomped on your luggage and sent it to another city?
A much better approach, I believe, is to watch customers in the context of their environs, going about doing their daily activities and identify common frustrations or problems faced by them. One of the best techniques to observing your customer is to spend a day “walking in their shoes”, or as some companies do, observing them as if doing a video recording or actually doing one, and then carefully analyze them. Honda designed their car trunks by watching many hours of footage of potential customers buying groceries and watching them load it into the trunks of their car.
“Some consumers are seen struggling to get bags into the trunk as the lids keeps closing, others arrange their bags in the trunk to keep them from tipping over, and still others pause to rest the bag on the edge of the trunk as they search their pockets/purses for the keys”
Honda Engineers came up with innovations such as, keyless automatic trunk opening, removal of the trunk “ledge” and making the rear bumper level with the trunk floor, adding grocery netting etcetera, after watching end customers struggle in those videos. The motorists did not tell Honda their trunks needed the desired benefit. Honda engineers lived a part of their car experience by walking in their shoes for a day.
Successful enterprises also determine early on not only a set of benefits they will provide, but which ones they will choose to deny. As I had mentioned last time, Southwest Airline, the most profitable airline in the history of our country, chose earlier on to provide the following benefits3:
1. Flying takes less total travel time than on competing airlines (office-door to office-door)
2. Interaction with Southwest personnel is a more fun and more sincerely personalized flying experience than typical on other airlines
But they chose to deny following benefits:
1. Assigned seating
2. Meals
3. Interline ticketing and baggage
The company then went about their strategy of delivering these benefits by deciding to not use a city’s main airport, choosing instead to fly out of smaller alternate airports which were usually closer to downtown. They decided to fly out of Dallas Lovefield Airport (instead of Midway), or the Oakland or San Jose Airport (instead of SFO) as part of delivering the benefit of less total door-to-door time. I had mentioned that Southwest chose to only have Boeing 737s in their fleet to help reduce the aircraft’s turnaround time (from the time it touches on the runway, to when the same aircraft takes off) to improve the efficiency of the ground crew and the pilots who did not have to deal with different procedures and checklists because all they ever flew were 737s.
Proctor and Gamble is another remarkable company that is acutely in tune with their value delivery systems. Pringles came up with an innovative packaging for the potato chips by focusing on delivering a value proposition that allowed them to be safely transported large distances without crushing the crunchy contents. Note that they did not highlight the freshness as one of the benefits because it would be highly incredulous to think that symmetric and identically shaped chips could be correlated to freshness by any stretch.
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