Practical Ways to Develop Customer Intuition

Improve your ability to anticipate customer needs and deliver it before they even ask for it.

Photo by Paula Schmidt from Pexels

“Being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

As an experience designer who spends a lot of time working directly with my client’s customers, I can tell you that customers may tell you what they want but are not always going to tell you exactly what they need — it’s not because they don’t want to tell you, but because sometimes they themselves don’t even know what their needs are.

Customer insights allow companies to predict and anticipate their customer’s future behaviours, highlighting where customer pain points exist so that they can work to improve their products and services. When companies examine their customer insights however, they find that customers will most commonly ask for either discounts or free rewards. This is why customer experience research is necessary, in order to allow companies to develop customer intuition.

What is ‘customer intuition’ and why is it important?

“User research takes us out of our desk jobs, and asks us to see things through the eyes of someone else. By getting into this space deeply, we create customer intuition. It’s that intuition that we bring with us into the daily decisions we make, whether we’re coding, writing business requirements, or creating roadmaps.”

— Beth Leibovich, Director of User Research at Mindbody

Intuition is a ‘gut feeling’, when something feels instinctually appropriate or correct but is difficult to articulate or explain why. Customer experience is everyone’s responsibility, and whether it happens directly or indirectly, everyone at a company makes choices that affect their customers. Developing customer intuition is important because it reflects how much you’re able to trust your instincts when it comes to those choices and actions you take in your role.

This is not exclusive to the people who are closest to the customer, such as customer service, sales, or relationship managers. The more confident your staff, managers, leaders, and executives are in relying on their customer intuition, the better your organisation will be at anticipating and delivering to customer’s needs — to that end, here are five techniques I use in my practice to help my clients develop better customer intuition.

Customer Safari

The first technique for developing customer intuition is to do what is known as a ‘customer safari’ or ‘customer observation’. When I want to know how customer-centric the leaders and executives of a company are, I ask them when they last spoke to a real customer. Often times the more senior you are in a company, the further you are from direct interactions with customers. Jeff Bezos is an example of some who bucks that trend however, as the richest man in the world and Founder/CEO of Amazon keeps his Amazon email account public so that customers can email him directly, keeping him directly tied to his customers and allowing him to discover where opportunities to improve may exist.

Customer safaris require you to be in their natural habitat so that you can observe the interactions between customers and your company’s products/services. The objective is to see what customers do before, during, and after a particular point in a customer’s journey. Seeing how customers behave in context can reveal more than what they might say to you during an interview or focus group, as sometimes their actions speak louder than words.

What’s equally important is to notice what doesn’t happen. Why has the customer defaulted to a certain action or preferred one thing over another? Make sure that when compiling the portrait of your customer’s experience that you take in to account the things that are unseen, or that occur behind the scenes.

How to do a Customer Safari:

1. Go out to the field where real customers are. It could be listening in on customer phone calls at the customer call centre or going to a retail location where your customer would buy your product and watching what they do.
2. Take notes on what you see and hear, including specifically what they are saying (capturing their language). Take note of what spurred the customer to begin the interaction, and what they did once it was completed,
3. If you get the opportunity to talk to customers ask them why they might have done or said a certain thing — it’s usually a rare opportunity to see how customers behave in real-time.

PRO TIP: Make sure you prepare incentives to give to customers so that they may be more willing to participate in your research — it doesn’t have to be monetary but customers will always appreciate a nice gesture in exchange for their time.

Photo by Burst from Pexels

Walk in your ‘Customer’s Shoes’

The next technique for developing customer intuition is to test your own products or services as if you were a customer — sounds like a no-brainer doesn’t it? Yet it still surprises me when employees of organisations have never tried purchasing the product or service end-to-end. When you go through the journey from start to finish as a customer, what do you notice in terms of:

• Ease of use — How simple or convenient was it to find information and make a decision?
• Convenience — Can you achieve what you set out to do easily and accurately?
• Customer Service — Is support available where you expect it to be and when you need it? How responsive are they?
• Technology — What was the onboarding experience like? How long did it take to sign up?
• Troubleshooting / Returns — How quickly was your issue resolved? Were you satisfied with the result? What happens if you escalate the matter?
• Feedback — Is there an avenue for you to provide feedback?
• Cancellation — How was the cancellation process? How long did it take? Were there any incentives offered to retain you as the customer prior to confirmation?

How to walk in your ‘Customer’s Shoes’:

1. Imagine you’re a mystery shopper who is conducting a review on a product or service. Prepare some common customer scenarios or customer journeys that you want to test or validate in this exercise.
2. Make it as real as possible by using the same channels as customers would right now. You might naturally want to make internal arrangements to let different departments know about your research or have an internal staff member show you how things are done. I believe the most authentic representation of customer experience is where you don’t alert staff about the research to avoid the opportunity for people to apply ‘quick fixes’ prior. Staff may feel particularly defensive if they feel as though they are being tested or that someone else is scrutinising their work!
3. Make notes on any highlights and pain points you experienced along the way. Dig deeper and go beyond what happened to how it made you feel. What impact did that interaction have on your experience?

Customer Personas

Sometimes it is not practical to test how you would interact with your organisation if you were a customer (e.g. when you’re in the business of selling heavy machinery or cosmetic surgery), so the next best thing is to develop a character that will represent your customer for you, which is our next technique for developing customer intuition — designing customer personas.

A customer persona is an archetypal research-based representation of your customer based on various attributes, attitudes, and characteristics. It goes without saying that becoming ‘intuitive’ and having empathy for someone requires that you know who they are first. It also helps teams have a common understanding of customer’s behaviours, motivations and tendencies so that they can keep it top of mind in whatever they do.

Your marketing departments might refer to customers as ‘market segments’ but it’s important to make a key distinction between segments and personas. Broadly speaking a market segment is a grouping of customers based upon a quantitative analysis of demographics, purchasing history, indicated preferences, and market size. Personas on the other hand capture qualitative aspects of customers, such as motivations, influences, beliefs, and attitudes, which helps you to understand them on a more human level.

The mere process of researching and developing your personas will already set you on your way to understanding who your customers are.

How to design Customer Personas:

1. Undertake rigorous quantitative and qualitative research to gather insights about your customers. You may like to use market segments as your guide in terms of the category or group of people to which your persona belongs.
2. Get to know your Persona/s by talking to them! This may mean running focus groups with customers by recruiting them from your different market segments where you’ll undertake activities like Empathy Mapping, Customer Journey Mapping, Customer Value Proposition, and probe with questions about their behaviours and motivations throughout the exercise.

Develop a narrative: “This is Maggie, 22, an animal-lover and activist. She’s a freelancer and heavily relies on her digital devices and digital tools to run her business any time, any where. Therefore, when she makes her purchase decisions, she ensures there is excellent customer support available 24/7.” (Photo by Karolina Grabowska from Pexels)

3. Bring your persona to life by giving them a name (not a description like ‘early adoptor’), creating a mood board, develop a fictional narrative, and make an avatar for them. Better still, find a stockphoto of a real person that best represents what your typical customer persona looks like. Having a visual representation of your customer helps internal teams imagine what the customer would do in hypothetical situations.

4. Socialise your personas to everyone in your organisation and make them visible around the workspace (physical and virtual). True customer-centric companies make sure that each individual understands how their roles and the decisions they make impact the end customer directly and indirectly. Therefore, all Personas need to be communicated, highly visible and integrated into all teams. This may be to have your personas physically on the walls around the office, on the staff intranet, or if you want to be even more creative then you may even want to create wallpaper image so that your staff can use it as their background in Teams.

PRO-TIP: Try role-playing scenes where you and your team are the Personas. Imagine walking in the shoes of your Personas and draw out their journeys to capture what they are doing, thinking and feeling throughout their experience.

Customer in the Room

Before you dismiss this for reasons of confidentiality and impracticality, what I mean here is to have a ‘figurative’ customer in the room. That is, dress up a chair in the room that’s reserved for your customer and pretend they are in the room — observing, listening, and participating in your meetings about them. This is a visual cue that prompts staff to always consider the customer’s point of view in internal conversations and encourages the question “what would the customer think if we (insert business decision).” It might seem silly at first, but it is a powerful technique that brings the customer’s voice into the day-to-day and helps staff develop empathy for customers so that it becomes second nature.

How to have a ‘Customer in the Room’:

1. Ensure your Customer Personas are well socialised and accepted by the organisation. Having your Personas down pat is a prerequisite, otherwise your ‘Customer in the Room’ will just be an empty chair with stuff on it.
2. Dress up your chair (or chairs if you want to represent multiple Personas) so that it stands out from others. Be as creative as you can by using props and old clothes that portrays the customer you’re trying to represent.
3. Whenever you have meetings that relate to customers or has the potential to impact on customer’s experience, make sure you have the customer’s chair in the room. The more you integrate this technique into your meetings, the better you’re able to develop the habit of being customer-focused in everything you do.

Customer Validation

In many of the Customer Experience Strategy projects I’ve worked on with various organisations, the internal staff will come up with hundreds of ideas in brainstorming workshops. With this volume of ideas, how do we know which ones to work on? Before heading down the path of business cases, management approvals or requesting quotes from vendors, a truly customer-centric organisation would ask “do my customers actually want this?”.

The key objective for Customer Validation is to help you figure out the customer’s desirability for your ideas so that you can determine the order of priority, and how much you should invest your time and effort into it.

How to perform Customer Validation:

1. Unlike Customer Safaris (mostly passive observation), Customer Validation requires your customers to actively participate and give their opinion on your idea/product/service.
2. Select customers that your idea/product/service was design for. This is where having robust customer personas would really help you be more specific as to how to run a validation session and tailor the types of questions you ask.
3. Determine the best format to use: 1-on-1 or group? In-person or online? Interview or activity? All this will depend on the type of idea/product/service you want to validate.
4. Set the objectives and be clear on what you want to test and validate with customers. Is it to get customers to rank the ideas according to what they’re most likely to use? Is it to have customers give feedback on new features? Is it to measure ease of use of an app?
5. Run a session that both meets your objectives and is an interactive and fun experience for your customers participating in it.

Most organisations nowadays talk about being customer-centric, customer-focused, customer-led, customer-obsessed, and having a ‘customers first’ mindset. While the end goal is clear, the hardest part is for each individual to change their behaviours and form habits in their day-to-day work that contributes to this goal.

It is through activities like the Customer Safari, creating Customer Personas, having a Customer in the Room, and doing validation with real customers that you’ll gradually develop the habit of putting customers front of mind. This leads to having greater empathy for your customers and improving your customer intuition, which will ultimately help you to better anticipate their needs.

I am a Human-centred Experience Designer, photographer and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. Follow along for more of this content as well as my thoughts on various personal development, creativity and psychology topics.