Over the past two decades, many books and untold numbers of journal and magazine articles have been written about the importance of listening to customers.  Becoming more customer-focused is now a critical strategic objective for many businesses, and listening to “the voice of the customer” is often seen as the path to success.  Companies in a wide range of industries have invested millions in customer relationship management programs and technologies to learn more about their customers, and many firms regularly spend huge sums on market research to better understand customer wants and needs.

　　Despite all of the recent emphasis on the importance of listening to customers, and despite the huge investments made in obtaining customer input, most companies still struggle with developing new products and services that resonate with customers.
 

　　Companies seek input from customers in order to create and offer products and services that customers will buy.  Yet despite all of the recent emphasis on the importance of listening to customers, and despite the huge investments made in obtaining customer input, most companies still struggle with developing new products and services that resonate with customers.  Numerous research studies have shown that only a small percentage of new products or services achieve real economic success in the marketplace.  For every iPod, there are eight or ten Segways (the motorized “scooter” that was supposed to revolutionize how people moved around cities).  If businesses are really focusing on finding out what customers want, then why is the failure rate of new products and services so high?

　　Of course, a new product or service sometimes fails because a company hasn’t listened to its customers enough.  But just as often, new products or services don’t succeed because companies listen to customers in the wrong way and for the wrong purposes.  In the typical scenario, companies ask their customers what they want and encourage their customers to describe specific products or services that would be desirable.  In effect, companies are asking their customers to conceive and design their own solutions.  The fundamental problem with this approach is that most customers aren’t well suited to perform this task.

　　Flummoxed by “Functional Fixedness”

　　I am not suggesting that most customers aren’t intelligent or that they don’t understand their own needs.  But most customers (like all human beings) do have a limited frame of reference. Most of what they know is based on their past experiences.  This means that customers can do a fairly good job of describing what they want when they are asked about familiar products or services.

　　However, when customers are asked to imagine or describe new products or services, they usually encounter what psychologists refer to as “functional fixedness.”  This is the normal human tendency to fixate on the way a product or service is normally used or on the features and attributes a product or service normally possesses.  Functional fixedness can make it almost impossible for people to imagine new features or functions.  In short, most customers have great difficulty imagining and describing products or services that they have never experienced.  Few of us, for example, would have said we needed or wanted a Sony Walkman or a pad of Post-it? Notes before those products were invented.

　　Most customers have great difficulty imagining and describing products or services that they have never experienced. Customer suggestions only rarely lead to the truly innovative products or services that differentiate your company from its competitors.
 

　　Relying on customers to come up with new products or services creates several problems.  For example, customer suggestions only rarely lead to the truly innovative products or services that enable you to differentiate your company from its competitors.  Because of their limited frame of reference, customers often describe products or services that offer only modest, incremental improvements over what already exists, or, even worse, they ask for products or services that your competitors already provide.  In either case, giving your customers what they ask for won’t produce meaningful differentiation.  Another kind of problem arises when a company listens to only a narrow group of customers.  When this occurs, the company can receive an inaccurate picture of how attractive a new product or service will be in the overall market.

　　That’s Your Job, Not Theirs

　　Therefore, to successfully and consistently develop innovative and profitable products and services, companies must not depend on customers to conceive and describe specific solutions.  While this principle applies to all kinds of companies, it can be especially challenging for printing companies.  That’s because relying on customers for product definition and description is ingrained in the printing industry’s history and culture.

　　For decades, most printing companies have functioned as custom manufacturing operations.  In this role, the printer takes detailed product specifications prepared by the customer, figures out how best to manufacture the product, estimates production costs, and quotes a price to the customer.  While printers would occasionally recommend changes to the specifications to make the product more attractive or less costly to manufacture, they were not usually involved in determining what products to make, and they usually didn’t know specifically what the customer was trying to accomplish with the product.

　　The custom manufacturing model served printing companies well for many years, but it doesn’t work well today because basic print manufacturing has become a commodity that earns only commodity-level profits.
 

　　The custom manufacturing model served printing companies well for many years, but it doesn’t work well today because basic print manufacturing has become a commodity that earns only commodity-level profits.  Even some of the most popular “value-added services” offered by printers, such as basic mailing services, are rapidly becoming commodity-like.  To avoid the effects of commoditization, many of today’s most successful printing companies are offering customers broader communications-related solutions.  But to succeed in this new competitive arena, printing companies must become adept at designing attractive and effective solutions.  Customer input can play a vital role in this effort, but it has to be the right kind of input.

　　The key to listening to customers the right way is to shift the focus of customer input from specific products or services to desired outcomes.  Customers may not be particularly good at describing specific solutions, but, with a little prodding, they can usually do a great job at describing what they want to accomplish and what problems they face.

　　Outcomes, Not Attributes

　　When using this approach, you need to make sure that your customer input describes real outcomes and not product or service attributes or features.  For example, if your customers say they want “faster job turnaround,” they are really describing an attribute of your service, not an ultimate desired outcome.  By probing further, you will probably learn that the real desired outcome is to reduce the lead time required to get current product information to customers and prospects.  That’s important to know because it may enable you to design a broader solution that reduces lead times more effectively than faster manufacturing could achieve on its own.

　　Customer input has to be the right kind of input. The key to listening to customers the right way is to shift the focus of customer input from specific products or services to desired outcomes.
 

　　Once customers have described their desired outcomes, it then becomes important to ask your customers to rate how important each outcome is and how well each outcome is being achieved.  These ratings enable you to perform a “gap” analysis that will reveal where the greatest opportunities to create attractive and profitable solutions exist.

　　Focusing customer input on desired outcomes enables you to better understand what customers really value, and this understanding will help you design solutions that customer will be anxious to buy.  The outcomes-based approach places the responsibility for designing effective solutions squarely on your shoulders.  That’s where the responsibility should be since you, and not your customers, are best suited to perform this task.  So by all means, don’t stop listening to your customers.  Just be sure you are listening in the right way and with the right objectives.

 

[时间：2006-12-22  作者：David Dodd  来源：信息中心]