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One number to grade any executive
Seems like everyone wants to be customer-centric these days - or so they claim. "You're our number one priority." "Your call is very important to us." "We love our customers."
Often this is just lip service, but there are some executives, and even entire organizations, that actually do live up to their commitment to customers. There's an easy way to evaluate anyone who makes such claims.
I call it Tesla. No, not the measurement of magnetic flux density (so beloved by my fellow Course VI majors). It's actually a very simple measurement that gets to the heart of what customer-centered business is all about.
Tesla stands for "time elapsed since labs attended." In other words, your Tesla is how long it's been since you've spent time directly observing customers as they use your product or service.
I generally recommend research to take place via listening labs (the non-directed, customer-centered research methodology that my company Creative Good pioneered); but really it can be any method that your team finds effective - as long as it involves decisionmakers watching, in person, real live customers flail around with the product.
There's no substitute for having stakeholders physically present during customer research. If stakeholders are there, they buy into the process. No one needs a master's degree in human factors to understand that three customers in a row failing at the same place is cause for immediate improvement.
Conversely, if the UX team just delivers a report or some Powerpoint bullets about research that no one attended, executives have no buy-in, and things stay the same.
So: get stakeholders to attend customer research. This lowers the average Tesla in the organization, which is good for everyone.
The key question is whether executives are clued in enough to invest some time observing customers. It's easy to find out. Just ask, "What's your Tesla?"
Sadly, many executives have never taken time to do this. "I read survey results," they might mutter. Surveys are fine, but they're absolutely no substitute for direct observation. Or: "I get the reports my people hand me." That's not a ringing endorsement, either. If the average Tesla in your organization is "never," you have your work cut out for you.
Get stakeholders to lower their Tesla, and you may just see a lot of other numbers - acquisition, revenue, profits - go way up.
See also:
• Tips on moderating listening labs
• Creative Good's listening labs
8 Comments:
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Meetup's Dead Simple User Testing
Boing Boing — Dec 13, '08 – 5:30 PM
Ed. Note: Boing Boing's current guestblogger Clay Shirky is the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he works on the overlap of social and ......
What if your stakeholders are not versed in the web (as is often the case at companies with broad interests). Much of what YOU might conclude from observing UX testing is likely far from what they might conclude themselves. My own personal experience with this is that direct observation can easily spin into bias confirmation (e.g., "yeah, see, he said he liked the logos -- let's add more logos") or other unintended consequences, far from buy-in to your idea.
How do executives become so removed? Didn't they, at some point, move up the ranks...presumably with some position where they interacted with customers on a regular basis? Perhaps a measure related to TESLA might be the career path of the executive...those with internally focused jobs, such as corporate finance, may not see the value of simple observation...others, with perhaps sales careers, had no choice but to understand and observe customers.
Applying this measure to executives is a good idea. You might start with something simpler, though. How about engineers and other people who actually build the product?
I know an Org certainly has their work cut out because there is no "customer centric" model here.
Our Sales teams are taught to close a deal and move on down the pipeline. It's extremly frustrating that there is no concern for maintaining the relationship. Of course Client retention is down the tubes, but one can't express this concern to the Uppers though, it could cost them your job.
Funny: the same idea was proposed by Jared Spool last month (http://www.uie.com/articles/the3qs/). Hopefully this is an indication that this approach gets more momentum.
I agree wholeheartedly with this approach. My marketing firm has developed a customer-centric form of market research called OpenMind(R), where we learn directly from all end users at the same time, how they want to be "told and sold". This ensures that all customer/audience groups will receive communications that speak to them. And we encourage senior executives to participate so that they engage with their audience first hand. The end result, is a form of communications that gives the customer what they want in the manner they want it in. The marketing materials look different which also helps to differentiate your brand from the competition. This form of research also helps build ongoing customer relationships as opposed to just selling them the old, hit and miss, way. It is definitely a qualitative form of market research but if you consider the 20th century methodologies -- putting pre-conceived ideas in front of the customer -- you're telling them that you really don't care about their opinion, you just want them to select a creative execution you've already done. That's not listening to the customer. It's biased. And perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this methodology is the end results look like the same ol, same ol.
any good product developer will do a UAT phase. I mean, how radical is that? Is the age old UAT any different that this tesla?
UAT (see wikipedia) is akin to quality assurance. Tesla is a measure of time (rather than the tests itself) since more strategic research (rather than tactical QA) is attended (not necessarily conducted).