Customer Discovery
From Talking to Humans PDF
Talking to Humans
Download this free, seriously important, essential guide so you can best prepare for talking to customers. Go to the "School download" option for a free PDF version.
Read this great resource, keep it for the future.
Understand through your customer's eyes.
Think of customer discovery as a listening session to ensure you understand as much as possible about the problem or issue you are trying to solve.
It is essential when talking to potential customers (or users) to not provide info about what you think the problem is or what you think the solution is; our goal is to simply learn from the customer/user, to find out everything they think about the pain (or problem/issue or need) you want to solve.
This is your chance to get real, unbiased feedback. Talking to customers is part of how you validate that there is even a problem that is in need of solving.
Customer Discovery - is primary research. This means you do the research directly. Primary research includes a variety of methods, such as talking directly to your customer in a conversation, giving out a survey, hosting a focus groups, and conducting interviews.
"Simply put, customer discovery is the process of learning what customers want rather than trying to find customers to buy what you already have." - Wayne Barz
No matter if you are a tech company or a main street, community-based business... you will need to make sure you know what your customer wants or needs or understand their problem or issue. This is because ultimatley, you want to make sure you solve that problem/issue or meet that need in the right way. This is what Product / Market Fit is all about.
Prepare for customer discovery
Things to do
Read Talking to Humans! (at top of page)
Review the rest of this page
Decide how you will do your research - survey, focus group, interview, conversation - can be a mix of all!
Prepare your questions (see suggestions below)
Make sure your questions are not biased! Read the OWL Purdue resource about creating good interview and survey questions
Make a plan for where you will do research. Make sure it is targeted to your key customers! Don't just post in a Lowell based Facebook page if you are opening up a restaurant in Wells, Maine.
Make sure you can get the info from the people you are trying to help!Refine questions, have Professor look at them
If doing an interview: Read Customer Interviews: Tips, Do’s, and Don’ts by Agostinho Almeida, Venture Well, Oct 2018
What to ask?
Learn what questions to ask with Justin Wilcox from ExEC
Ask clear unbiased questions!
“Is access to healthy food a problem on campus”
VS
“Don’t you agree that access to healthy food is hard on campus.”
Interviews
Focus Groups
Conversations
Focus Groups
Conversations
Prepare your questions beforehand, don't wing it and check questions for bias.
You probably start with some assumptions about the problem/issue/need. What are you trying to prove based on your assumptions? What do you need to find out?
Ask questions about:
The Customer Problem ….
What is the hardest part about _(insert the problem/pain/need)_?
Tell me the last time you had that problem.
Emotions ….
Why is that (insert emotion they described in the problem answer - hard, troubling, difficult, frustrating, etc.) for you?
Current Solutions …. (your competition)
When did you last try to solve this problem?
What did you use/do?
Deficiencies …. (product/market fit - where you can fill a market opportunity!)
What’s not ideal about that solution?
How could it be better
Channels …. (where the customer looks to buy and how they buy)
How did you find that solution?
At the end, be sure to ask - "Is there anything I did not ask that I should have?"
Surveys
Prepare your questions beforehand, check for bias.
You probably start with some assumptions about the problem/issue/need. What are you trying to prove based on your assumptions? What do you need to find out?
Goal is to make it easy for them to take the survey.
Succinctly summarize the purpose of the survey at the top
Make clear it is anonymous and for purposes of school project
Plan on tops 6-7 questions
Limit to 1 open-ended question at end or allow the option of other for some of the responses with opportunity to enter what “other” might be
Give choices - make it multiple choice, or allow to select one or two responses versus having an open-ended question
Keep it simple, make sure the information is easy to understand
Bad Example
Fill in the blank, what do you eat for breakfast?
_________________________________________
Good Example
What kinds of things do you eat in the morning?
Please select all that apply:
Cereal
Pancakes
Eggs
Bread
Fruit
Yogurt
Granola Bar
Coffee
Tea
I don't know
Nothing
Good Example
Below is an example of a beauty salon. She used Survey Monkey and then posted this survey on local Facebook groups with a majority of women of color. She posted there because that was her most likely customer. She received over 450 results. What is nice is that Survey Monkey also automatically creates charts of results.
Chart example show the results. This info told her valuable information about her customers and how often they use services at a salon, this will inform market opportunity. This data will help her forecast future sales.
How to build a survey
When you are done, if you think your target market are students, send it to Professor Hargis and she will share.
After customer discovery
Now what? What do you do with the info?
Analyze your results. Start by making graphs of the data.
Learn how to make a chart or graph of the results HERERead "How to analyze survey data" by Survey Monkey
Read the "How to Make Sense of What Learned" chapter in Talking to Humans, page 58