Resolutions for 2010: Getting Beyond the Voice of the Customer « Fredzimny’s CCCCC Blog

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Doesn’t it make sense that:

If you want to know what customers want, just ask them.

If you want to see if they’re satisfied the experience they had, just ask them.

If you want to know if they’re come back or will refer you, just ask them.

If you want to understand what you can do to improve, just ask them.

Unfortunately, we’ve found that traditional “voice of the customer” research is not only ineffective for designing influential customer experiences, but it can seriously undermine innovation by directing investment at the wrong things. It’s common for companies to conduct customer interviews, surveys, and focus groups trying to understand what customers want. The reality is that what customers say they want is not often well-correlated with the subconscious factors that influence their behavior. In many cases, what customers say they want is actually quite inconsistent with what ultimately drives their behavior.

I first encountered this disconnect about 25 years ago. At the time, I was working with Dick Larson at MIT . Dr. Larson is an expert in the psychology of waiting. The situation involved commercial real estate managers responsible for several high-rise office buildings in New York . These managers were trying to figure out how to address customers’ dissatisfaction with the amount of time spent waiting for elevators during peak periods. Not surprisingly, if you ask customers what they want, they’ll tell you that they want an increase in service levels: faster elevators and less waiting. Obviously, the complexity and cost of actually improving service levels are quite high; it would involve installing faster elevators, dedicating more interior space to elevator banks, improving the optimization of elevator queuing, etc… It turned out that the most effective improvement was to install mirrors in the elevator lobbies. This allowed people ...

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http://fredzimny.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/resolutions-for-2010-getting-beyond-the-voice-of-the-customer/

http://fredzimny.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/resolutions-for-2010-getting-beyond-the-voice-of-the-customer/