I am Oleg Birger, head of the customer experience development center. I help to create products and services so that they achieve the best result for clients and in a profitable way for the company. My main goal is to guide, support and accompany product teams and their work in such a way that the product is in demand and helps clients in solving their problems in the best way.
Reading the text will take 16 minutes
Most of the services that I accompany are aimed at selling fuel to motorists. But, if you think about it, at first people moved on foot, then on horseback, then they invented the wheel, went by train, then by cars. Perhaps a teleport will appear later and people will continue to move even more efficiently. The need to move remains, but the way changes.
My task and the task of the center is to "ground", remind and direct teams to achieve the final client result. We are all people, and we sometimes forget why services are created, for what deep purpose of the client. For example, sometimes we in teams over-focus on page design, tonnes of fuel sold and internal business metrics, and forget about the main question “Why do people buy fuel at all? What task are they solving with it? " The answer may be: to get from point A to point B. If we remember this, then the task of our team should be the same: a person who has successfully traveled from home to work. And then the focus of our attention at all stages of development will be directed only to solving the final client problem, because it is precisely in order to get there that the client buys a product from us.
There can be different people in the team. There are fans of their work who do not care about a salary, a bonus - the main thing for them is to make everything work. And there are people who, on the contrary, are focused on making a profit. But in the team they all have one task - to make a product that will be sold by solving the client's problem. Everyone understands this. But sometimes, due to the operational routine, the focus is lost and you need someone to bring it back.
This can be called customer intelligence, or customer-centric development control . Control in a good and useful way for everyone.
As if there was a person striving to lose weight. He came to the store for groceries, among which obviously there shouldn't be any dumplings or sweets. But since he is hungry, very busy with his own affairs and is still talking on the phone at the same time, some snacks and chocolates now and then fall into his basket. But there is another person who can notice and point out this, remind him why he came, what is the purpose. How to call it, what is this function? After all, a person eventually loses weight and says thank you. So it is with the owners of the product. They need to show, through customer research, observation, through real customer experience, what is happening in the customer's life, in order to be constantly reminded of what he is making the product for. It is beneficial to everyone: the client, the business, and the product owner.
About motivation
People are all different, and everyone has their own motivation. All this must be taken into account. Some understand what is happening and thank you for checking them. Others will say: “No, don't, this is an additional burden. Should we remake the product? " Yes, redo. If the client result is not achieved with a profit for the business.
It must be remembered that we all have a common main goal - to make a good product in demand. Everybody wants it. It doesn't matter what your personal motivation is: to make money, enjoy the result, or grow in the company. A successfully created and sold product will solve all these problems.
COMPETITION WILL BE ONLY DUE TO ACCURACY, CARE AND CUSTOMER SERVICE
The value of customer experience design has been proven by many companies. The more you prepare, the more you know about the client and the more accurately you make the product. Therefore, if you do more preliminary research and get more reliable data from customers, development will take a little longer, but the probability of product success will be disproportionately higher.
This is why this approach works with agile. Scrum helps to quickly and flexibly manage the product: I did the research, did some of the functionality, checked it with clients, collected data, adjusted the work, and moved on. Design work has long been replaced by a product approach. And now the paradigm of the product approach is changing to the paradigm of achieving customer results, regardless of the product.
Customer experience managementIs a relatively new topic. But soon it will be impossible to compete without him. Everyone already knows how to make applications and websites, all stores buy goods in China from the same factory for about the same price. Over-saturation of the market and serious competition in goods and prices are created.
When competition intensifies, it is no longer possible to make mistakes in product development nine out of ten times and companies will be forced to switch to a customer approach. They will do research, perhaps sadly and reluctantly, but get a more accurate result and win the competition.
To improve design accuracy, you need to stop brainstorming a product in the office, then immediately develop and try to sell. First, you need to reliably study the existing customer experience, collect artifacts, take photos, videos, in-depth interviews, see how they live, how they solve this problem now, and based on this data, search for or create the best solution. Now there is no need to produce a product flexibly or not flexibly, but it is necessary to solve the main final task of the client.
For example, if we sell gasoline, then the business will end with the internal combustion engine. If we solve the problem of moving, we will be the first to make a teleport, for example. With this approach, we are not tied to any particular product.
The importance of speaking and being heard
Product creation is a team game, and sometimes communication breaks between the participants. We need everyone to understand that ordinary employees and managers need each other equally. All in one boat. Product teams should be able and willing to boldly come to stakeholders and say everything that is in their area of responsibility (how the work is happening now, with what efficiency, how much money is spent on features and how many of them work, what trends, technologies and solutions are on the market, what happens to customers and competitors, how a stakeholder's order can affect customers and business), and then show reliable real data and your forecast of what will happen with one solution or another.
SOME ARE AFRAID TO SPEAK AND SOME DO NOT WANT TO LISTEN
Product owners must communicate information with courage and credibility so that managers can make decisions based on real data. And managers must give them such an opportunity, accept information, provide resources for work, and most importantly, get involved in the realities of product development and customer feedback. This greatly affects the success of the development.
About the task that the business must solve
In reality, people move around, eat and drink coffee. This happens as if outside our business. Everything else is inside the system, in the head, in the office, in the computer. For example, the application is not real, it's just numbers in the cloud and pixels on a smartphone. Realistically, only the physical movement of a person from point A to point B. And while this person does not have a cheaper and faster way to move, he is a gas station customer. Because people make decisions quite simply and predictably. If a conditional "teleport" appears at the price of gasoline, people will stop buying gasoline.
IN REALITY, THERE IS ONLY CLIENT EXPERIENCE. PEOPLE MOVED BEFORE US APPEARED AND WILL MOVE AFTER US
And in the office, we should only talk about things that change the customer experience for the better. Faster refueling, cheaper refueling, faster drive home. Faster coffee, tastier coffee, cheaper coffee. With this approach, the business is no longer limited to products.
We have regular customers, they go to work every day and refuel every other day: it is so convenient for them. And our task is not to sell fuel to these people, but to help them get there. The focus should shift from the amount of fuel sold to how many people we helped get to work this month. Because the fuel sold is a consequence of the daily physical movement of people.
We must accompany the movement of customers by any means, then they will buy more from us. We must visualize the process of how a person leaves the house, starts the car, drives to work, and takes the children to school. If his car doesn't start, then he won't fill up with us. If he does not have insurance and is taken to the impound, he will not refuel. If he didn't change the tires and got into an accident, he won't refuel. We must accompany clients in as much detail as possible at all stages where we can, and this must be done with the benefit of the business.
And here there may be objections: “Let's not do insurance and tire fitting: we are fuel retail. Yes, we have to do it! In reality, after all, everything is unambiguous: the man did not start the car, he did not bring us money - we did not receive a salary. The most important thing is to step over this bar so that we all understand:
I RECEIVE A WAGE ONLY BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE MOVING, NOT BECAUSE WE TRADE PETROL
Let's imagine: if our salaries depended on this main criterion, the conventional Ivanov would have successfully traveled from home to work 22 times in a month, and each employee would have received “one ruble” from the purchased fuel. Then we will check his insurance and wake him up in the morning so that he will not be late for work. Such thoughts usually help maintain focus on achieving the client's result.
About client reality
My task is to make sure that the person who develops the product first sees the reality in which the product will work. Part of my job is to establish a direct connection between employees and the reality of clients. This is important for all employees, with the results of whose activities the client somehow comes into contact.
Let me give you a short example from research on coffee point. We have two coffee machines at the gas station, one has a queue, and the other has no one. Because the coffee machine is on the side, inconspicuous. During rush hour, 20% of people leave without waiting for their turn. Or another: if you are about sixty meters tall and taller, then you cannot see where the hot water comes from in the coffee machine, because it is away from the main coffee tap. Nine out of ten tea buyers spill water past the glass, and one burns his hand.
It is very difficult to learn about such nuances while sitting in the office or at the cash register. And the solution itself is usually very simple. A sticker where it will be written that there is a second coffee machine here, and boiling water is pouring here, it costs two rubles. The investments are insignificant, and people will get a successful experience, will not complain on social networks and will not leave us because they burned their hand. It seems like a minor nuance, but it can be the cause of customer churn that we will never know about sitting in the office. It is imperative and imperative to research the points of contact of the company with customers and regularly collect feedback. The difficulty is that we know our product very well and the brain convinces us that we know our customers just as well.
VERY NOBODY EVER STARTS WITH OBSERVATIONS. WE THINK THAT WE KNOW EVERYTHING. IT IS A TRAP
There is an illusion that we already know everything about this coffee machine, but in fact no one has done reliable customer research. And my job is to conduct it together with the responsible employee: go to the “field”, see how people interact with the product and what can be improved, calculate the costs and show the value potential from changes.
At one of the gas stations, I conducted the gemba for the team that made the gas station control system. The designer must correctly position the screen buttons that the cashier operator will press. How does he decide that the button should be exactly like this and not different? I offered to work at the cash register, to observe what the operator-cashier was doing.
There is a barcode scanner near each checkout. The scanner is on the right at one checkout and on the left at the other. And both cashiers are right-handed, which means that one constantly reaches with one hand to the opposite side to take the scanner. Could the designer add one button that would mirror the functionality for the cashier on the right or for the left? Could. But it’s impossible to find out and think about it while sitting in the office.
I try to explain and help my colleagues, and those who want to figure it out usually go to the “fields”, because they intuitively understand that it is impossible to develop something only in the office, without communication with the client. Understand that from the operating routine, you need to try to allocate time to communicate with clients and regularly practice research activities.
How to get started with customer experience?
You need to think about what you are doing every day. What external physical experience of the client are you changing? Imagine that every action you take, even a word, should be aimed only at changing this external client experience. It is necessary to practice keeping the focus of attention in work only on the final client result and direct all actions only to him, and exclude other actions.
I have already said that customer experience is the only thing in business that is in reality. And often goals are mistakenly set within the business (in rubles, in tons, in pieces). Therefore, you need to learn how to formulate and direct all business tasks only to the external customer experience, and only to measure the effects with internal metrics.
For example, there cannot be tasks like “improve the atmosphere in the team”, “make customers happy”, “sell 100 tons of fuel” or “improve efficiency”. And “100 delivered goods”, “a client who has reached work 22 times” or “queue at the checkout - up to three people” - such an external task can have a stable probability of success. And as a consequence, for example, as a result of reducing the queue and accelerating the service, there will be such and such an increase in revenue, such and such effects.
If you get at least ten minutes a day to think about it, no matter what you do, it will already be good.
