Empathize with Your Customer

It’s powerful to say to your customer: We heard your complaint, and we get it. We’ve been there, too. Sometimes the only way to understand an experience is to live it.

Back at Aqua Blue, its innovation team would benefit from booking rooms at some of the hotels around the world to experience firsthand:

• When do they experience friction?
• When could they have been delighted but instead were disappointed?
• When were they pleasantly surprised and impressed?

What is the variety of experiences you and your fellow anthropologists should experience firsthand?

Shadowing involves observing alongside your customer and asking questions about their actions and comments to dig deeper into why they do what they do. This technique is valuable because often the designers of an experience don’t share the same characteristics as the customer.

We recommend these best practices while shadowing.

• Look for patterns—Take notice of everything. Something as mundane as ordering coffee or scribbling a note down on a piece of paper might not seem interesting. However, in observing when, why, and how the person did it, you might uncover opportunities for improvement.
• Consider dominant environmental dynamics—If you’re observing internal employees, how is power brokered in their organization and how does that impact their day-to-day jobs. If shadowing your customers: Where are they and who’s in charge? Are they students who have to follow school rules? Are they patients who have to comply with strict hospital and medical policy? Or are they hotel guests being treated like royalty?
• Observe the entire process—When trying to better understand a process, make sure that you’re including the full context of that process. If you want to make getting your driver’s license easier, spend a day in the Department of Motor Vehicles. Try to observe all aspects of the process, not just one or two parts. If trying to understand the check-in process, ask yourself when that process really begins and where it ends.
• Take notes—Of course it’s awkward to follow someone around with a pen and paper. Come up with a discrete system to capture your observations and direct quotes. Your phone camera, sketchpad app, and an audio memo app are super useful. Or bring a scribe.
• Prepare for technical issues—Make sure that your phone is charged! Bring a backup camera and chargers.

Having a simple conversation with the people who matter most is invaluable. Direct interviews are the best way to hear your customers’ current experiences in their own words, and what they’d like to experience in the future. During the discovery phase, conduct interviews with both key stakeholders and your customers.

Stakeholder Interviews

Think back to the first module, “Innovation Basics,” in which we discussed the stakeholder map for your innovation project. Part of the process of making these important individuals feel buy-in is to get their perspective through one-on-one interviews. An interview is their chance to share candid thoughts, concerns, and ideas. Ask them about their role, their personal view on the innovation goal, their ideas for the change they want to see, and anything they feel you need to know.

Customer Interviews

In customer interviews, focus your attention on uncovering the emotional and psychological drivers behind your end-users’ actions. Also, remember that your customers include employees.

First, think about which type of customers you want to meet. It’s important to establish this criteria upfront.

Aqua Blue, for example, decides that they want to speak to:

• Loyal guests who travel for either business or leisure
• Guests who were loyal but haven’t booked in over a year
• People who travel frequently but never choose Aqua Blue
• Front desk and concierge staff across Aqua Blue’s properties and competitors’ hotels.

Across all these groups, Aqua Blue ensures that it’s accounting for diversity across gender, ethnicity, and geography.

Golden Rules of Shadowing and Interviewing

While interviewing is certainly the most straightforward type of research, consider these best practices.

• Get permission to record—If you want to record the conversation, whether voice or video, get approval from the interviewee first.
• Keep things informal and human—Engage your participants as you would a friendly neighbor. Picture them as the world expert on their unique perspective. Focus on understanding what makes them tick and how they conceive of what they’re trying to accomplish.
• Ask open-ended questions—Avoid “yes” or “no” questions based on your assumptions. Open-ended questions get participants talking. And just as Newton’s First Law would predict, after you get a person talking, they tend to keep talking.
• Practice active listening—Stay in the present moment rather than trying to analyze during the interview. You have time to analyze when you listen to the recording or watch the video later.
• Ask why—Listen closely for vague or general answers and immediately follow up by asking participants to explain more.
• Don’t do it alone—Have a note taker, or use an audio or video recorder. You don’t want to miss an important point because you weren’t able to type or write fast enough.