The Outcomes Based Approach to Voice of Customer Interviews

The key concept in this approach, is to focus on what your customer is trying to achieve. Find out how your customer will be successful, and what role your business could play in helping them with that. Get under the challenges they face and explore what could ease those challenges.

Very quickly you will be hearing opportunities, getting free-of-charge deep insight, meaningful contextualised feedback and you will suddenly be sitting on the same side of the table as your customer, as their partner, rather than pitching a sale.

At all costs, avoid pitching at this stage. It's what the customer anticipates, but is probably reluctant to hear. Surprise your customer.

Outline of the Conversation

• Prepare: Obviously be familiar with your customer beforehand. When setting up the session, clearly layout the intention to have a conversation with them about exploring how your business could better support their success.
• Do make structured notes and ask permission to record the session. You will be surprised how much comes out.
• Keep it intimate, the fewer people involved will lead to more open conversations about outcomes, success factors and challenges.
• Listen. Let the customer do the majority of the talking. Limit your own input to open questions to explore and closed questions to check understanding.

In very abbreviated terms an interview conversation will flow something like this:

• Regardless of how well you know your customer, ask them to introduce themselves, talk a little about their career and describe the role they play. (This will soften defences, trigger a reflective thought process and surface out something you didn't know about your client, probably creating some context.)
• Explore the what's important for your customer in terms of their own success:-
• "What does success look like for you?"
• "How do you know you are being successful?"
• "What challenges do you face?" (The answers to these questions will help you shape Key Performance Indicators for your customer's success.)
• Dig deeper, to get under the rationale behind what your customer is trying to achieve. For example they may tell you the implementation of a new CRM solution is a critical success factor. If you dig deeper they may say to boost sales, but digging deeper might reveal their customer disputes were at a high level and they want to get data around that to better understand what they need to put right and in the interim, handle complaints more effectively:-
• "Why are these things important to the business? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?"
• Allow the conversation to get specific about how you support your customer's success. They have already brought their real challenges to mind and will now be better able to connect what your business does to their own challenges:-
• "How do we support you in being successful?"
• What could we do differently to help you be more successful?  DO NOT PITCH
• Allow your customer to envision their success, hopefully with a greater inclusion of your business:-
• "What would a great year look like?"
• "How would you assess whether this is being successful or not?" (Use this to add to your view on KPIs.)
• "What improvements are you already working on? How can we support that effectively?"
• Do a bit of active listening and test back what you think you have heard. Refer to your notes, as it looks thorough and not to be forgotten:-
• "Of the things we have talked about, what are your top 3?" (This will be helpful when you analyse the output later.)

Thank the customer for their time. Remind them that this is great insight to help you improve what you do to support your customer. Promise to follow-up at some point in the future to share what your business has done as a result.

DO NOT PITCH DURING THIS CONVERSATION

Handling the Interview Outputs

Your meeting notes should reveal a few customer needs.

• Don't expect all customers to express the same needs.
• Theme the needs together
• Consider customer segments
• Think of the needs in terms of capabilities your business needs to have. Avoid thinking in terms of "levels of service" (as it will limit your ambition for offering new capabilities to all relevant customer segments).
• As your thinking develops, stay true to how well your capabilities can positively impact the customer KPIs you heard in the interview

Review Your Capabilities in Terms of Value to Your Customers - KANO Analysis

Professor Kano, of Tokyo University, developed a simple method of understanding customer or client needs. We can use this

method to truly understand how a client values a service or product.



Think about your customer interview and the capability(ies) you identified. Then for each capability, based on your notes, ask yourself how your customer would answer two questions (of course, in the future you can actually ask them):-

1. How would you feel if we provided you with this capability (service or product)?
2. How would you feel if we did not provide you with this capability (service or product)?

Classify the responses to both questions

as either:-

• “I like it”
• “It’s normal, I don’t expect it to be different”
• “I don’t care”
• “I don’t like it”

Plot each response against the following matrix.

The answers to the two questions about each capability will plot as either a "Delighter", a "Satisfier" or a "Dissatisifier". Any other plot means we have gone somewhere.

Be very careful at this stage. Businesses often miss the basics and end up wondering why their customers leave them.

You must absolutely land the Dissatisfiers. You must focus on how well you deliver the Satisfiers and only then consider Delighters.

Be very aware that the Satisfiers of today, will be the Dissatisfiers of tomorrow. This is a pipeline and should be revisited regularly.

• Dissatisfiers or Basic Needs – Expected features or characteristics of a product or service (legible forms, correctly spelled name, basic functionality). These needs are typically “unspoken”. If these needs are not fulfilled, the customer will be extremely dissatisfied.
• Satisfiers or Performance Needs – Standard characteristics that increase or decrease satisfaction by their degree (cost/price, ease of use, speed). These needs are typically “spoken”.
• Delighters or Excitement Needs - Unexpected features or characteristics that impress customers and earn you “extra credit”. These needs are also typically “unspoken”. These are the future pipeline of satisfiers and dissatisfiers.