"invest time in listening to your customers"

Nem de propósito, bem na linha da parte II do antropologista que entra num bar:

"Founders need a way to make great design become automatic, and there’s only one way I’ve found to do that reliably: invest time in listening to your customers.
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You’ve probably heard this advice a hundred times before. Whether you call it “user research” or “customer development” or just “getting out of the building”, we all know that hearing directly from customers is one of the fastest ways to learn and improve our products. But when I ask founders how long it’s been since they’ve watched a real customer (not a family member) use their product, they usually look embarrassed and admit they haven’t tested anything in months.
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It’s so much fun to make things that it’s often hard to stop and listen.
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No one expects customers to design the product for you. That’d be way too easy! But customers can absolutely tell you their goals and frustrations. Customers can show you what they like or dislike about products and you can watch when they get stuck or confused. So if customers say they want faster horses, what you should hear is that getting around is too slow. It’s the team’s job to take all that raw input and build products to delight customers."

Trecho retirado de "Braden Kowitz: Why You Should Listen to the Customer"

Um antropologista entra num bar... (parte II)

Parte I.
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Lembro-me do posicionamento que a marca Volvo tinha há uns anos no meu referencial. Imagino que a sede de crescimento a todo o custo terá sido um dos factores que os impulsionou a construírem SUVs e, assim, diluírem aquilo que a marca representava e a quem se dirigia.
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O artigo referido na parte I, "An Anthropologist Walks Into a Bar" de Christian Madsbjerg e Mikkel Rasmussen, tem um relato que me fascinou, e que mostra como é possível uma alternativa de crescimento, não alargando o âmbito da oferta, mas aprofundando a relação com os clientes e aprofundando a percepção de qual é a experiência vivida.
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O artigo descreve o percurso da Coloplast, líder no sector da colostomia. Qual era o desafio?

"Sensemaking starts with learning to think of a problem as a phenomenon—that is, to see it in terms of human experience. (Moi ici: O fundamental é a experiência) This conceptual shift requires companies to stop looking at the market, the product, and the customer from their own perspective and examine the customer’s perspective instead. (Moi ici: O fundamental é olhar para o mundo sob a perspectiva do cliente, ou dos pivôs do ecossistema da procura)
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Thus, Coloplast recast the question “How do we capture new sources of growth?” as “What is the experience of living with ostomy?” (Moi ici: Esta pergunta muda completamente o foco, a orientação da pesquisa. Em vez de apontar para o alargamento da oferta, começa pelo ponto de chegada, pela vida do cliente) Its managers knew a lot about customer metrics—who bought how much of which products when, and so forth. But they realized they knew less about their customers’ worlds. What was it like to be an ostomy patient? How did it afect your self-image? Your social life? What was a good day, or a bad day? The company’s product development and marketing strategies had been driven by two assumptions about customers and their needs: that within two years of leaving the hospital, people had their ostomy care under control and were living essentially normal lives; and that product innovation should focus largely on improving the various features of an ostomy bag, one by one."

O que fez a equipa de antropólogos ao serviço da Coloplast? Foi para o terreno observar os clientes no seu habitat natural, foi conversar com eles, foi viver com eles. Sem ideias pré-concebidas, sem hipóteses explicativas. A equipa registou um conjunto de recortes em primeira-mão da vida dos clientes : narrativas; fotos; confissões; ...

"This eye-opening feed can be tremendously inspiring for business leaders used to thinking about their customers as abstractions—as segments, need states, or consumption occasions.
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In addition, the researchers spent a day with stoma-care nurses (Moi ici: Ter em atenção o ecossistema da procura) in order to understand the way they choose products for their patients, how they prepare patients for discharge, and their concerns about patients’ ability to manage at home."

Esta metodologia foi a que seguimos, por exemplo, num projecto de 2011. Visitamos cerca de 20 equipas, falamos com mais de 70 pessoas distribuídas por várias zonas do país. Recolhemos as suas reacções, transformámos-las em pequenas frases e construímos um modelo causal:

Depois de reconhecido o fenómeno, o passo seguinte é procurar padrões para identificar causas-raiz que têm de ser eliminadas... ou percebidas, no caso da Coloplast

"The key to uncovering patterns is to find root causes—in this case, the fundamental explanations
for patients’ and nurses’ behavior. The process is like peeling an onion. The outer layer contains directly observable facts, such as how often patients change their bags and what inconveniences they experience while doing so. The next layer contains the habits and practices informing patients’ behavior and choices. And fnally there is the center—the underlying causes of those habits and practices."

E o que é mais interessante no diálogo com os actores na cadeia da procura é o conseguir perceber a ilusão que a estatística esconde:

"As it repeatedly returned to the phenomenon—what is the experience of living with a stoma?—Coloplast started to understand the efects of diferences between care in a clinical setting and care at home. (Moi ici: A importância do contexto)
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Indeed, Coloplast realized that the problem it believed it had largely solved—leakage—in fact remained a formidable, life-altering challenge.
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The pattern recognition process revealed that the complaints had dropped of not because the problem was solved but because people had radically adapted their lifestyles to avoid the risk of accidents, accepting that their new lives were, in the words of one patient, “probably as good as it gets.”"

E assim, perceber uma realidade importante que muitos gestores desconhecem:

“There is no perfect product, because there is no perfect patient” (Moi ici: Generalizando, já existe mais gente fora da caixa do que dentro da caixa... sim, o Estranhistão está em todo o lado) and “It’s a good product, but it’s not right for everyone.”
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Stoma patients’ bodies are all so diferent that no single solution exists. The main challenge wasn’t the type of stoma a patient had—it was the type of body a patient had. That might seem an obvious point, but Coloplast’s innovation process had blinded management and R&D engineers alike to the possibility. Just as individuals can sufer from confrmation bias (a refexive seeking of only information that supports an existing position), so can entire organizations.
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This was a major problem—and, incredibly, no one in the billion-dollar industry had addressed it. It immediately became clear that Coloplast needed to categorize body types and create products designed specifically for each one."

Um antropologista entra num bar... (parte I)

Um artigo cheio de exemplos e mensagens para as empresas. Na HBR de Março de 2014, "An Anthropologist Walks Into a Bar" de Christian Madsbjerg e Mikkel Rasmussen.
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Antes de mais já sabem do papel que reservo aos antropologistas no mundo das empresas (recordar, por exemplo: aqui, aqui e aqui).
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O artigo começa com o caso de uma empresa produtora de cerveja que estava insatisfeita com a evolução das vendas nos bares. Por que é que as vendas não crescem? Um grupo de antropologistas foi enviado para os bares, para estudar o que se passava...
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Resultado, a percepção de que os bares não são todos iguais, por isso:

"Instead of bombarding them with one-size-fits-all promotional materials, it began customizing items for different types of bars and bar owners. It trained its salespeople to understand each bar owner better and invented a tool to help owners organize sales campaigns. It created in-workplace “academies” to train waitstaf about its brands and won over female servers by providing taxi service for employees who worked late. After two years BeerCo’s pub and bar sales rebounded"

Ehehe, algo que poderiam ter aprendido neste blogue!
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Outro ponto importante, em sintonia com este blogue, a opinião sobre o Big Data:

"According to a recent global study of 1,500 CEOs conducted by IBM, ... The research also reveals that CEOs see a lack of customer insight as their biggest deficit in managing complexity. They prioritize gaining customer insight far above other decision-related tasks and rank “customer obsession” as the most critical leadership trait.
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Accordingly, many companies are turning to customer research that is powered by big data and analytics. Although that approach can provide astonishingly detailed pictures of some aspects of their markets, the pictures are far from complete and are often misleading. It may be possible to predict a customer’s next mouse click or purchase, but no amount of quantitative data can tell you why she made that click or purchase. Without that insight, companies cannot close the complexity gap.
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In the rush to reduce consumers to strings of ones and zeros, marketers and strategists are losing sight of the human element. Consumers are people, after all. They’re often irrational, and they’re sometimes driven by motives that are opaque even to themselves. Yet most marketers cling to assumptions about their customers’ behavior that have been shaped by their organizational culture, the biases of the firm’s managers, and, increasingly, the vast but imperfect data stream fowing in."

Outra preocupação deste blogue, a concentração na experiência do cliente, em vez dos atributos da oferta:

"At the core of sensemaking lies the practice of phenomenology: the study of how people experience life. Management science can tell Starbucks, for example, how many cups of cofee its customers will drink in a day; phenomenology reveals how those customers perceive the cofee experience."

Continua.