Taking Your Customer Discovery to the Next Level

By Elyse Ball

This past month has been a series of weird watershed moments for me. For the first time in 15 months, I went out to eat at a restaurant, attended a large group gathering, spent time indoors with people who aren’t immediate family members, and stayed overnight at a hotel. 

Two years ago, it would have been inconceivable that we would spend so much of our lives maintaining physical distance from other human beings. Today, it has become commonplace. 
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For me, I-Corps has been a fascinating case study in how we can build community and customer relationships even in remote settings. I-Corps is all about customer discovery: the practice of interacting directly with prospective customers to answer important questions about a business, product or technology idea.

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The I-Corps participants I know approached the challenge of remote customer discovery with ingenuity and tenacity, using technology to turn remote interactions into an advantage by:

• Expanding their outreach to target great customer interviewees from different states and even different countries via video chat
  
• Digging more deeply into lists of conference attendees and using social media platforms to forge connections with other people who attended the same events
  
• Joining remote incubator and accelerator programs that fit their companies’ specific needs and expanded their networks 
  

Learning to leverage remote tools to work with people outside of our geographies and silos will serve us well into the future. Yet, I also think it’s time to seize the benefits that we are rediscovering as we return to more in-person interactions.

For those of you who have completed your first rounds of customer discovery (the early interviews that have convinced you that your customer might have a problem you are well equipped to solve), I wanted to share some more advanced customer discovery approaches to take your customer discovery to the next level. Even if you aren’t up for in-person meetings yet, I hope these concepts might spur other ideas for upping your customer discovery game.

1. Visit your customer on their turf. It’s easy to make assumptions about how your customer is dealing with a problem when you haven’t actually seen them working on it in person. Only by experiencing a process first-hand can you start to deeply understand the scale and complexity of the problem. When you are in your customer’s environment, you’ll see, hear, and touch the same things your customer does as they go about their process, which will enhance your ability to empathize with them. You’ll learn all kinds of little things by observation that you wouldn’t necessarily think to ask about. You might also spot some potential hurdles to adopting your new solution, saving you time and money in the long run. 

2. Spend more time with one customer. This is a heightened version of visiting your customer on their turf. New products succeed when they make people really, truly and incandescently happy. It’s hard to know if you can do that if you don’t know your customer really well. To get to know your customer better, spend intensive time (one or more days) with one customer that you feel is a good representative of your target customer group and is willing to let you tag-along with them throughout their day. This will give you broader insights into all of the challenges they are facing, not just the one problem you are trying to solve. It will also provide a deeper understanding of the customer’s process for tackling tasks, how they learn about new products and how they make decisions. Long term, ask this same customer to join a board of advisors for your company or meet with you on a monthly basis to provide ongoing feedback. 

3. Let your customer interact with your prototype. Please, please don’t skip directly to this step. It’s important to learn from your customer before they know what your product is, because knowing about your product will immediately anchor the customer into talking about your specific idea or approach. However, once you’ve interacted with your customer through the steps above, you will reach a point where you need to get some feedback on your solution. There are several ways to do this:

• Paper prototype – a series of drawings or software wireframes that you walk through with your customer to illustrate how your solution works
  
• Concierge test – a process that you do that gives your customer a sense of how your solution works, although you are doing it without any automation, working software or physical product
  
• Looks-like prototype – something you’ve built or 3D printed that looks like your product, but isn’t functional, so your customer can judge the size, weight and look of your product
  
• Working prototype – something you’ve built that works similarly to your final product, although it may be much larger, slower or more cumbersome than the intended final product
  

Regardless of your approach, you’ll learn the most if you let your customer actually interact with your solution, rather than performing some kind of fancy demonstration that keeps the customer at arm’s length. As you share your solution:

• Observe your customer’s body language. Are they leaning forward, eager to learn more? 
  
• Watch their facial expressions. Are their eyes widening with delight? Or do they look concerned or confused? 
  
• Watch how they manipulate the physical item you’ve given them. What do they look at first? Which components do they explore in the most detail? Are they so bored that they immediately put the prototype down and start asking questions?
  

Whatever your level of comfort with meeting in-person, hopefully the concepts above will bring you closer to your customer and help you learn more from customer discovery. For some awesome additional resources on customer discovery, check out Giff Constable and Frank Rimalovski’s excellent free books: Talking to Humans and Testing with Humans. Be safe, stay healthy and keep learning from your customers!