Connect with Your Customers
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Talk to your customer about what you learned from your research.
- Organize your customer’s challenges.
Make a Connection
Now that you know what challenges your customer faces, it’s time to share what you’ve learned.
In step three of customer-centric discovery, Connect with your customer, you prepare for your customer meeting, confirm and sharpen your insights with your customer, and organize and visualize your insights through the process of whiteboarding.
Prepare to Connect
Before you set a date to meet with your customer, review what you learned so far.
- Return to the details about your customer, their business, and their industry that you discovered in the Know your customer step.
- Review the insights you gathered during the Be your customer step, taking what you learned about the business and their customers into consideration.
- Make a list of possible solutions for the challenges you noticed along the way.
When you reach out to your customer to set up a meeting, include a summary or preview of your insights. This way they know you’ve done your homework and you have something interesting to discuss.
Connect Over Thoughtfully Delivered Insights
When you meet with your customer, deliver your insights with these tips in mind.
- Be sincere. Share your experiences with their business in an authentic and optimistic way. Describe positive points and the areas for improvement.
- Follow your insights with an empathetic statement. Try something like, “We’ve seen this before…” or “Other customers I’ve worked with deal with this same challenge by...” These kinds of statements show you have experience.
- Get your customer’s opinion by asking open-ended questions. If you find something challenging about your customer’s mobile app experience, ask, “What is your current strategy for mobile development? How well do you think it’s working?”
- Share a notable quote that your customer has said before. It can be very powerful for the customer to hear their own words, especially when they’re about something that needs improvement.
These actions can motivate your customer to take notice. They’ll see that you’re paying attention to what they say, that you’re focused on their business needs, and that you’ve taken the time to learn more about what they do in detail.
Ask the Right Questions to Connect the Details
After you review insights in the meeting, show your customer that their current challenges are real issues for their business. Organize them into what’s called the three levels of issues, or 3Ls.
- Level 1: Tactical or technical issues, like system errors or missed customer calls.
- Level 2: Overall business consequence, like being behind in industry standards.
- Level 3: Personal impact on their customers or employees, like attrition or high turnover rates.
Then, analyze each challenge with your customer by asking:
- Who—Who’s most affected by this issue?
- What—What’s the result of this issue?
- Where—Where does this issue happen?
- When—When does this issue happen?
- Why—Why does this issue happen?
- How—What conditions cause this issue?
This process often leads to clearer solutions or reveals additional challenges.
Connect It All at the Whiteboard
As you explore your customer’s business challenges, document what you learn.
- Write down your ideas on a whiteboard.
- Brainstorm and write more ideas on sticky notes, then move them around.
- Draw diagrams.
- Organize ideas by level of importance.
Invite your customer to join in by adding their ideas, making their own drawings, or moving sticky notes around. Whiteboarding helps you confirm that the challenges are real, and helps you clarify your customer’s thoughts and concerns about the business.
In addition to whiteboarding, feel free to get creative with how you brainstorm.
- Use brainstorming and mind mapping tools—this is especially helpful in conversations where you don’t meet in person.
- Role play—this helps bring the challenges to life.
Whatever you do in your meeting, make sure you record the key takeaways. Take photos of the whiteboard and save screenshots.