Some of the most brilliant insights about your customers' unmet needs are available right beneath your “no's.”
That's a key lesson to be learned from firms that excel in customer experience (CX), a hallmark which is the fact that they're really good at understanding the people they serve. Not only basic demographic details and private preferences (though they’re important). These businesses also possess keen understanding of their customers' needs, wants and aspirations.
That insight helps drive smart, customer-centric innovation, which enables these lenders to regularly deploy small improvements in the customer experience, as well as bigger, game-changing advancements. There is a skill that's particularly valuable during disruptive periods (such as recessions and pandemics), when customer needs are quickly evolving.
Many of those growth-fueling innovations are triggered when companies uncover unmet customer needs, which is essentially the ultimate goal of researching the market. Learn how to address a person need that others haven't yet identify, and you'll be inside a market-leading position.
Organizations collectively spend many vast amounts of dollars every year on market research, a lot of it centered on revealing overt and latent customer needs. While such investments can be valuable, they should be supplemented along with other intelligence-gathering techniques, some of which are decidedly low-cost.
One of these sites is an approach that the organization can employ any day each week. All it involves is listening for one simple word if you, or anyone on your team, is interacting with prospects and customers. That word is “no.“
When someone in your organization needs to utter the term “no” in reaction to a customer request (or uses any similar, more diplomatic term), it's a signal that the customer may have the best need that your business cannot currently satisfy.
Imagine all the questions that your sales representatives, service staff, billing specialists or any other employee fields where they have to tell the client “no.”
Can your products do [x]? Can I fill out those forms electronically? Can one schedule an appointment online? Do you offer contactless pick-up and return? Can I switch to a different payment schedule? Can one control that device with my phone? Will it are available in a smaller size? What is the way I can track this order? Are you able to text me when the technician is on his way? Is there a trial so I can test out your service before buying?
At a lot of companies, customer questions that can't be answered in the affirmative basically turn into “shoulder shrug” moments. Employees say “no” to the customer, resign themselves to being somewhat unhelpful and then move on to the next inquiry.
But imagine if employees took careful note of each and every time they'd to say “no” to the customer, when they had to acknowledge they (or the product they were selling/servicing) couldn't accommodate the customer's need.
And then imagine that employees had a regular forum where those “stories of no” might be distributed to management, where themes could be spotted, where unmet customer needs could be identified where remedial innovation might be spurred.
In practice, this may be as simple as a supervisor periodically asking staff at the end of your day to explain situations where they had to state “no” to some customer. Or it may be more sophisticated, with employees actually recording that information in a centralized database that management then reviews.
The point is that each and every no, there's a opportunity to dive a little deeper – to not just deliver the customer experience, but to improve it. Not to just help one customer, but all customers. To question things as they are, and re-imagine the way the experience could be wholly redesigned, or maybe even tweaked, to higher accommodate an apparent customer need.
Instill the discipline in your organization to take this extra step, and over time it can help reveal unmet customer needs that may drive meaningful CX improvements and innovations. All with no cost of a large researching the market project.
It can be quite a challenge to produce and conserve a competitively differentiated customer experience. To make that endeavor easier, however, just be sure you “follow your no's.”
