Is the client always right?

Should I make a big bet on the user's opinion? On the one hand, the well-known phrase “the buyer is always right” certainly has a reasonable basis. The client knows what he wants, but is he aware of what he needs in reality?



Recall Henry Ford's familiar phrase, “If I asked people what they needed, they would ask for a faster horse.” We cannot be sure that Mr. Ford truly owns these words. But if he had interrogated his potential buyers (using some service for feedback, such as Qualaroo) - the likelihood is high that a “fast horse” would be the most popular answer. Steve Jobs is credited with a similar view of the problem "The buyer does not know what he wants until we show it to him."

There are many examples of successful products in history, the basis of which is not the “answer to the client’s request”, but the understanding of what the client really needs, often, unconsciously. If you have ridden all your life on horseback, will it come to your mind to ride without a horse at all. When interviewing customers, you need to understand that they think in categories that they already know.
')
Understanding what the customer wants is not so easy .

To begin with, let's admit to ourselves - we are not very good at the task of understanding what exactly our client wants. Otherwise, service providers would have no end of customers, and the range of online stores would have been sold out in a matter of hours. The founders and developers of online stores all over the world would not have puzzled about trying to understand why shoppers leave without making a purchase. According to statistics, this is 2/3 of the site visitors. E-mail newsletters, discount coupons, “two for the price of one” , etc. The whole world grew up on the problem of unpaid baskets.

What does the client want? We have no answer for two reasons:

1. Among the visitors a considerable share is accounted for by competing competitors and shopaholics “on the hunt” in search of a bargain price.

2. People do not always know exactly what they want. In other words, what they think they need is not necessarily their real need.

How to identify customer needs?

Trial and error method, one of the best ways to solve customer needs. The problem is that any attempt to change something right away, even if we are talking about an MPV (minimally viable product), is faced with hostility from the audience. What to say about the release of a new logo from such mammoths like Facebook or Instagramm, remember how much discontent the public had.

Thomas Larnitsius argues: “No need to be strictly related to the work of designers. Attempting to change something and get feedback is at times a more fruitful way to understand the customer’s needs than theoretical speculations about what is missing in a particular product. ”

Although, more often, a change in the company's logo design is associated with updates to the functions of the application itself. This makes it possible to attract more attention from the audience to create hype.

We will not dwell on such an insignificant attempt to tease the public. The idea is that we, as consumers, often have no idea what the ultimate goal was to update the design of a particular brand. But we can assume that the basis was the desire of developers to somehow recognize and satisfy our need.

And do the clients themselves know what they want?

UPS Pulse conducted research among visitors to online stores trying to understand why customers leave without making a purchase. The results are as follows:

50% are not yet ready to buy
20% get distracted by something else.
16% just came to watch. That is, 2 out of 10 visitors, initially, come to the site, not intending to acquire something .

Michael Suoka writes: “In everyday life, people can't say exactly what they want, they can only guess. As it comes down to it - they may want something else. And even more so they can not imagine what they want tomorrow. " Remember the hype around the new VKontakte design? And where are all these critics now?

It is not excluded, the audience just obediently gets used to the new design, and, perhaps, the new design is what was really necessary for her, but she did not give herself an account of this.

In inbound.org blog, Jeff White expressed his opinion on the instagram new logo design: “What a nonprofessional seems to be working for 5 minutes actually brings months, and even years of hard work, experimentation, improvement and professional skills. I was always amazed at how much the public is not aware of (or, rather, does not have respect) for the titanic work done to create a new icon or function for the application. Not to mention the courage that you need to have to announce the update for the application, which is used by millions of people. Is this an urgent need? Not. But this is the first step towards modernization. ”

When consumers criticize something , they forget about it in a split second. Decisions on any changes are made after lengthy discussions, research and definitions of various consumer groups. And if someone doesn’t like the result, this is normal and quite expected.

The client may be wrong in their desires.

A couple of recent popular applications - they perfectly show us: giving the audience what it wants (or thinks it wants) is not always the direct path to success.

- Twitter was originally created as a platform for Odeo podcasts. - Instragram, originally created as Burbn, was a local application that allows you to add friends, mark geolocation and post a photo.

If we imagine that each new product is created as an answer to the audience’s request and an attempt to satisfy its desires, then judging by how successful applications started today, it turns out that the creator doesn’t understand what the consumer wants ... or the consumer himself doesn’t understand his needs.

You can talk about this for a long time, but the fact remains: successful brands / applications / products did not solve the problem voiced by the client, but offered something fundamentally new. Something about which the client himself may not have guessed. It happens that companies offer products that are only subsequently evaluated by the public positively.

Summarize

Is it a good idea to allow customers and potential buyers to dictate in which direction your company should develop? Not. As the English saying goes, "a camel is a horse appointed by the community." In other words, if you try to satisfy the needs of everyone, then, as a result, you will not be able to satisfy anyone.

On the other hand, to see a good idea in front of my eyes and to rest on the fact that it does not correspond to the original plan is equally reckless. So is there a "golden mean?". Of course. But finding it is very difficult. In fact, if we knew how to find the very “perfect balance” between customer needs and what your company needs, we would work on the “new approach” of some Big Brand for at least $ 500 an hour.

Trying to give customers what they need (and this is not always what they really want) is a good start, but you need to focus on what actually makes a profit. Remember, your most ardent critics may not be your customers. Yes, it is not easy to take the risk and go “against the crowd”, but, as Armin Vit states in his article about the new Instagram logo, “people have a very short memory”: “It's just a matter of time - about three months, approximately as people begin to recognize this and count it as the Instagram logo. ”

If you can catch even a tiny bit of such success, you can understand how it works, even if your customers think that they do not need your innovations at all.