Video transcript:

Customer discovery is the process of gaining customer insights through things like surveys, focus groups, and interviews in order to analyze the need for your product and the state of the market. Businesses can ask potential customers questions about what inconveniences them and what types of solutions they would be willing to pay for. This will guide future product creation and the way businesses talk about their offerings. Instead of making assumptions about what customers may want, it’s more worthwhile to go directly to the source before spending money developing a product that isn’t truly needed in the market.

When asking potential customers about problems they face and potential solutions, it’s important to keep from explicitly mentioning your particular solution or business idea. You will want to ask open-ended questions and probe further into responses. The goal here is to gather information about the problem and market, not necessarily how it fits to your preconceived solution. Focusing on the solution rather than the problem can limit businesses from seeing the true market need.

The reason for this is that you risk biasing the customer and not getting an accurate idea of their true thoughts if your solution is already planted in their minds. Many people will be willing to say an idea is good, but they may not be willing to actually pay for it when it comes down to it. The types of questions you ask depend on the stage your business is in. This includes whether or not your product is already created, if you have created similar products in the past, if you are in the idea phase, etc. The questions should focus on assumptions key to your business that you are trying to verify. For example, do customers really face a particular problem? What solutions have they tried? What is most inconvenient about the problem? Is it severely impacting their lives? Will they pay for a solution? How do these customers typically live their lives? What do they most need?

After gathering such responses, it is time to decide how your product fits into customers’ lives and if it’s really solving an important problem. Similar customers may be able to give you feedback on a prototype in the future to help you validate your concept and answer questions like if the design is user-friendly, priced right, and solves the problem. If focusing customer discovery on surveys instead of interviews, it is best to make it so that the customer has as little inconvenience as possible. To do this, you can include more close-ended questions, have ranking scales or multiple choice, and make questions more direct-to-the-point so as to limit the amount of questions asked. Online tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey can make creating surveys easier and quicker for businesses.

Once a product is unveiled, customer reviews can also serve as a source of feedback to help iterate or improve the product and brand. It’s important to be able to answer the questions: who am I helping? How am i helping them? How is my product better than competitors? Customers can be reached for interviews in a variety of ways including email, going up to people, and online groups including social media.

The way businesses handle customers should align with the five customer life stages. These are awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. Awareness is when customers first learn about the business. To cater to these customers, businesses need strong advertising skills to spread the word about the business. Consideration is when the customer is deciding whether or not to purchase the product or service from your business rather than from your competitors. This is where your business’s unique selling point comes into play as well as your business’s branding to make your products distinct. Purchase is the customers deciding to buy the product or service from your business. At this point, you will want to make the purchasing process as seamless and pleasant as possible for the customer. This will help with the next stage which is retention. Retention is the act of making customers repeat customers when they decide to purchase from you again. This comes from good marketing, engagement, customer experience, and a good product.

The importance of quality in the product or service especially shines through in the last stage which is advocacy. Customers who like the product or service will spread the word about it as an advocate for the brand. This serves as word-of-mouth marketing stemming from how good the product is. Customers may leave good reviews, post about the product on social media, or tell their friends and family about it. This is why at the root of a successful business is a good product customers are happy to purchase.