You Can’t Brainstorm Your Way to Customer Empathy
Even if you’re using a customer empathy map, customer journey map, or customer persona template, unless you’ve actually observed and interviewed some customers, you’re still making sh*t up!
I see it all the time, teams misguidedly think they’re doing Design Thinking and being customer-centric by brainstorming who their customers and potential customers are and what their jobs-to-be-done, needs and pains are. Even if you’re using a customer empathy map, customer journey map, or customer persona template, unless you’ve actually observed and interviewed some customers, you’re still making sh*t up.
By the same token, kicking off fresh customer research without understanding what you already know (and don’t know) about your customers and potential customers is also not best practice and can be quite wasteful of limited budgets and resources.
A better way is to start by reviewing what you do and don’t know about your customers and potential customers and then decide if additional research is required. If yes, then the gaps in your research (what you don’t know about your customers) help form your fresh research plan and discussion guide.
Everything that you identified as interesting and relevant from your existing research and your new research then comes together in a distillation stage. This is when we can start unpacking (not brainstorming) who our customers and potential customers are and what their jobs-to-be-done, needs and pains are.
Read on for more details and downloadable templates for these steps:
1. Conduct a knowledge and research review
A great tool for helping you and your team review and distil existing knowledge and research (and decide whether you need to conduct additional customer research) on the opportunity area and potential customers is the Re-sight tool.
The Re-sight tool helps you to:
- identify what you know,
- identify what you don’t know,
- identify new findings, and
- formulate any hypotheses and ideas you’d like to explore
Some good sources of existing knowledge and research to review include:
1. Existing research reports on the opportunity area, key trends, the market, competitors and brands, and customers.
2. People within your organisation (and outside) who know a lot about this opportunity space.
From the completed Re-sight tool, you’ll be able to decide whether fresh research is required - depending on the number of knowledge gaps you have. If new research is required, you can create a research plan and research discussion guide to fill these gaps on ‘what you don’t know’ and explore your initial ‘hypotheses and ideas’ (the right-hand side boxes). The outputs from the left-hand side boxes are carried forward to the full distillation stage.
2. Fresh customer empathy research
Conducting new customer research is about filling your knowledge and research gaps around the opportunity area and potential customers.
A great tool to help you plan your research for building empathy and understanding of your potential customers is the Multiple Sources Framework.
According to research and insights guru Steven Melford: “If we ask the same questions of the same people in the same ways, we’ll get the same old findings.”
The Multiple Sources Framework helps us uncover new findings by exploring the opportunity space like a detective and pursuing multiple lines of enquiry, including:
· Being the customer – experience the situation the customer experiences
· Being with the customer – observing and talking to potential customers
· Learning about the customer – talk to the people and experts around the customer.
Once you’ve completed your customer empathy research by pursuing multiple lines of enquiry you should have lots of new observations and findings. By bringing these back together with the interesting findings from all your existing research you can start unpacking, synthesising and articulating (and not inventing) who your customers and potential customers are and what their jobs-to-be-done, needs and pains are. And this is how you create great products, services, and experiences that your customers will love!
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more about building customer empathy and what comes after this in the Design Thinking and Product Discovery journey, including a guest article with a fellow expert in this space.
To go even deeper get your copy of Innovator’s Playbook, published by Wiley.