Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? by Michael Schrage

Author:Michael Schrage
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781422187852
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2012-07-16T14:00:00+00:00

Deviant Asks and DIY Furniture

Microsoft’s early embrace of complex, feature-rich, user experiences evokes a difficult conversation I had with the leadership of a top statistical software company. These executives were smart and successful and knew their product had potential beyond its analytics niche. Already a favorite in the academic community (although facing serious competition from emerging open source rivals), the company sought to expand its enterprise clients beyond its hard quantitative core.

In terms of data visualization and statistics, there was little the product couldn’t do. But the company struggled internally to make its interface more accessible and its user experiences less overwhelming. Providing customers with the best possible statistical software tools was the declared market mission.

At the end of our second design session, I stopped asking about lead users and product evangelists. The traditional marketing and positioning conversations were proving worthless. Instead, I asked, “What do you want your new customers to become?” Their answer was immediate: “Statisticians. We want our customers to become statisticians.”

They were completely sincere; indeed, most of them were statisticians. I politely observed that this would be a very difficult sell. Their prospects surely wanted the business benefits of statistical tools and analyses. But that didn’t mean they wanted to become statisticians. In fact, I argued, chances were the majority of their target market didn’t even want to learn statistics. They wanted to get meaningful business value from the software without acquiring statistical expertise. My clients were appalled.

The Ask laid bare a schism in core values. This company had never defined innovation in terms of creating user “competence,” only in facilitating best-in-class excellence. Yes, the firm offered extensive—and sophisticated—training that had won solid customer satisfaction scores. But no one formally monitored actual software usage six months or a year after training was complete. The company didn’t know what kind of statistically numerate customers it was creating.

Upon review, the company’s innovation investments made the most sense for customers wanting to become world-class statisticians. They were less appealing to less ambitious users who simply wanted to become more statistically numerate in their decision making and design. Realigning the firm’s micro- and macro-asks to broaden the software’s appeal to nonstatisticians proved too hard. The company still struggles with its statistical schizophrenia.

IKEA, by contrast, eventually resolved its ambivalence in innovatively investing by helping its customers help themselves. The world’s largest furniture retailer took cheap, simple, and culturally compatible steps to align its most difficult micro-ask with its aspirational macro-ask. For many years, IKEA was justly famous—notorious?—for providing do-it-yourself (DIY) furniture documentation that alternately baffled and infuriated its purchasers. Customers complained about the challenges of assembling IKEA’s Besta Burs TV bench, Krabb mirrors, and Pax wardrobes by simply following the instructions.

While IKEA’s declared mission is “to offer a wide range of home furnishing items of good design and function, excellent quality and durability, at prices so low that the majority of people can afford to buy them,” the company says next to nothing about providing excellent quality documentation for building them.23 That proved a source of perennial anger and frustration.

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