The cost of not doing discovery

The five dimensions of Customer Centricity

Our Customer Centricity Model helps organisations to gauge how customer centred they are. The five dimensions include:

• Process
• Governance
• Facilities
• People
• Communication

We surveyed over 100 organisations and as well as asking them about their practices and process, we also looked at some success metrics. We looked at revenue, speed to deliver and employee satisfaction, to see if there was a correlation between those who scored highly on this model and positive business outcomes.

Organisations that were highly mature in Customer Centricity achieved average year-on-year revenue growth rates that were 9 times higher than less mature organisations.

65% of the more Customer Centric organisations were simply faster, more nimble, and better able to change because decisions were made faster.

High performing organisations understand the value of gathering user insight

In the Process dimension, one of the biggest gaps we saw between high maturity organisations and low maturity organisations was around how they utilised user research.

One of the questions we asked was how they made decisions around strategic direction. Most organisations, regardless of their maturity or performance level, made use of quantitative data. One of the key differentiators between high performers and low performers was the use of qualitative data. We found that high performers were almost twice as likely to make use of qualitative research.

That was also the case for decisions around what goes into their product backlog and what gets built. It was quite common for people to prioritise management’s concerns and stakeholder priorities. But it was more likely in the low performing organistions.

Then we thought about who includes research in their product backlogs. We found that those who were performing really well were eight times more likely to do research to inform their product backlogs.

So there’s quite a vast difference there. It shows that there’s a link between performance and Customer Centricity. And in Process there’s a gap between those that do and those that don’t value having a really deep understanding of user insight.

The problem with Discovery

There’s a great deal of value in doing discovery but we still see a lot of organisations not making use of it. I think the most common reason we hear is, they simply feel they don’t need it. In big organisations with lots of clever people who have many years of experience within the industry, people make the assumption that they know a lot about their customers’ needs.

It can be easy for budget holders to question why so much is spent on discovery or claim that it’s too expensive and too slow. But it only looks expensive if you think you don’t need it. They might also feel that you should just get on and start building things. So as budgets get tight, discovery seems like an easy part of the process to skip and save money. But that might end up costing you more in the end.

It’s also hard to measure the value it brings. By making a tweak to a checkout process, for example, you can see the conversion rates go up as a result. However, the return on investment of discovery work doesn’t appear until the product is released and the numbers start coming in. It might be more helpful to think about what the cost of not doing it is. What are you missing out on if you don’t do it?

Helping a supermarket spend less to be more successful

A useful way to illustrate that is to tell a story about an online supermarket in Switzerland that we worked with a few years ago. They wanted to redesign their website to keep up with a hyper-competitive market.

The brief for this project contained a long list of problems that they were adamant they needed to solve for customers. These were problems they wanted to solve with features that they felt were ‘must haves’ in order to be successful. But why did they want to solve these particular problems? Because it was what their competitors were doing. The online grocery markets were in an arms race of features. For example helping people remember what to buy with shopping list management and favoriting tools or helping them decide what to make with recipe suggestion tools.

What do customers really need?

Nobody had asked if customers actually needed these features. They were all working on the assumption that their competitors had figured that out already.

We were quite worried at this point as we were fairly certain nobody would be able to build all those features for the budget they had, to a quality that we, or they, were satisfied with. So we needed to be certain these things were needed.

We managed to convince them to invest money in discovery before building anything. So we watched people shop for groceries online and in-store to understand their goals, the behaviours they exhibit to achieve their goals and the problems they face along the way.

Where’s the stuff?

What we found were two different core problems that needed to be solved. The first was findability of products.

How do you enable people to search from a broad catalogue of 30,000 products when people don’t always remember the right name of what they are looking for?

How do you organise a vast range of products and categories in a way that makes sense to people?

Think about the pasta aisle. They have hundreds of different pastas. Budget, luxury, different sizes, different brands, different types. Online they had organised it by popularity or by price. We showed them a photo of what that same thing looks like in their store – laid out in a logical way where things were placed in relation to their similarities to other things.

So what we learnt quickly was that a lot of time and energy needed to go into findability. And also to ensure that the metadata that sat underneath all of these products was the right metadata to enable people to find the things they want, even when they don’t actually know the exact name of the thing they’re looking for.

How discovery can make you perform better

Bringing thinking back to those success metrics that highly customer centered organisations achieve, you can see how good discovery and research can lead you to better outcomes.

Improved growth:  if you’re solving the right things, you’re going to have more customers and therefore higher revenue. And you’re saving money by not building the wrong things or things that don’t work.

Delivering faster: When it comes to being fast at changing, you can see how discovery will help you do that. And it certainly did for coop. It enabled us to make decisions faster because everyone understood why we were doing what we were doing. We were able to convince high-level stakeholders much more easily because we had evidence to show our reasoning.

Better employee engagement: If you’re doing discovery and it’s really clear why you’re solving the problems you’re solving, everyone is going to be much more satisfied. If you fully understand the problems customers are facing, and take steps to solve them, then your customer facing staff will be much happier as they wont be dealing with the same problems over and over and they will feel listened to.

You can read more about the work we did with coop in our case study.

Making the case for Discovery

Paul introduced himself and told us a bit about his role as Commercial Director of Transformation at British Council, which is a UK charity and public body operating globally.

Paul joined the British Council with the remit to improve capability within sales and customer management to support business recovery and growth, after being hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. Existing proposals for change were narrow in scope proposing only solutions for customer-facing interactions within customer service teams. It didn’t present a plan to address failure demand across the customer journey beyond highlighting some of the failure points.

As part of his induction process, Paul met people across the organisation and heard about the many projects and initiatives underway or planned. Again, individually they were all sound. They spoke about customer needs and usually had some research that backed the need. However, like many organisations, he didn’t hear how projects linked to other projects, how data would come together, or how a system might be integrated into another. This wasn’t in the remit of product-focused delivery projects but was recognised as a gap that needed to be solved. Without solving this Paul wasn’t convinced they’d make progress.

He went back to the senior leadership team highlighting these early findings and proposed running a discovery phase to go back and look at the problem they were trying to solve.

In this case, Paul wanted to look across the end-to-end customer journey and uncover customer experience but also the colleague experience to make it easier for their colleagues to deliver a great experience to customers.

Running a good discovery

One of the most important elements in running a successful discovery is building a team of cross-functional stakeholders. They had to break out of organisational and product silos, and include all the projects planned as well as teams that were responsible for aspects of product delivery.

Additionally, recording customer interviews and stakeholder workshops so you can share specific points later is key to a good discovery.

Benchmarking

As part of the discovery, they took part in the Customer Centricity study. This allowed them to benchmark and reset expectations of how Customer Centric they are against external measures.

They gained insights into the traits and behaviours of top-performing companies which helped to make the case for some of the softer benefits, but also made them consider the cultural change required to support holistic Customer Centricity. Although they’re not at the bottom of the scale by any stretch, it shows they still have a way to go.