How to discover unmet needs and create wonderful services
Apply active listenings skills in order to tap into your customers’ deeper motivations
At <grow>, Egmont’s conference for growth and business development, Morten Danielsen (Head of Commercial Department at Egmont Publishing Norway) and I organised a workshop on how to improve one’s listening skills.
We wanted to help our colleagues to
- exercise how to ask questions opening up for surprising customer insight, and
- experience how difficult it can be to truly listen to the customer
Our starting point: It takes an effort to explore customers’ needs outside the box. Exploring customers’ behaviours and preferences, as well as what are their worries and delights, can offer useful understanding of real needs. Next, this can guide service providers in their quest to develop more relevant and attractive services and products.
How can we do this?
1. Ask open-ended questions in order to capture customers’ unmet needs
In Egmont Publishing, where we come from, we are fairly used to collecting insight about our users through methods such as online surveys, focus groups, and readership panels. All of these offers useful insight about our users’ preferences. However, there is at least one drawback: We ask closed questions, such as ‘did you like the article about tap dancers?’, rather than open-ended questions, i.e. please name your greatest passions in life. Closed questions capture insight inside the box. They are easily quantifiable. But that is it. They do not capture what is outside the box.
Open-ended questions is a better way of identifying unmet needs among our users. That is, discovering knowledge about our customers that we were not aware of. Also, customers may discover needs they were not aware of missing in the first place. Simply by offering the opportunity to let their mind go wandering, surprising reflections may occur to them.
This kind of insight is highly valuable for anyone trying to gain a better understanding of what kind of lives our customers are leading, what they value, their aspirations, fears and worries.
So, is it useful to us as business developers? Yes! When we are looking for new ways of creating value for our customers and users, this is exactly what can set us apart from competitors.
2. Co-create with workshop participants
Before the workshop I was in contact with a few people across Egmont’s subsidiaries and people who were planning to join the workshop as participants. I shared my initial problem statements with them. These people helped us end up with the following questions to select:
- Case 1: How can we enrich the cinema experience for grown ups?
- Case 2: How can we increase the loyalty of E-commerce customers?
- Case 3: How can we tap into the deeper motivations of readers?
3. Ready, set, go, workshop!
Each team was split into two parts:
- 2 customers
- 2–3 business developers
Both of the roles were given a description of the ‘role behaviour expectation’: Customers joined in pairs and got into their role. Business developers prepared questions and tuned their mindset.
Workshop flow in five steps:
- Customers were to reflect aloud upon the problem statement. Business developers were encouraged to refrain from stopping customers in their flow of reflections. We emphasised the value of accepting awkward silence as moments were interesting ideas can occur.
- Business developers could ask questions, dig deeper, and clarify
- Business developers sat down together and tried to recap what they had heard (while customers were sitting aside listening in silence). Then developers created a scenario of 4–5 sheets of big paper, outlining the potential offering to the customers. Hard work.
- Business developers pitched their solution to the pair of customers
- Customers offered feedback on to what degree the developers had managed to listen well, ask good questions, as well as capturing their needs, and of course, whether they experienced that business developers had suggested an offering that addressed relevant needs.
Embrace ambivalence!
Can you practice this on uour own? Yes, of course! All it requires is to spend some time on
- articulating questions that are open-ended
- testing them on real people
- tune participants’ mindset into explorative mode rather than ‘let us fix it right now’
- offer sound and understandable advice in the workshop context
You will come a long way by accepting ambivalence. That is, accepting that there are things in the lives, hearts and heads of our target groups which we need to unleash via exploration rather than closed questions. This starting point will guide you safely onto the road of not knowing. You do not need to have the answers right away. Your role is to help the customer or user to discover their own reflections on what they do and think and what is behind it all.
Sounds philosofical? Well, it does not need to be. It is more about being curious about other people who we, after all, are trying to turn into passionate users, customers, followers and promoters.
Unleash people’s storytelling skills
We asked business developers to share their solution as a five part cartoon. They didn’t all end up doing this. However, giving participants a visual framewor for shaping their story helps a lot, and lowers the threshold for sharing their message.
Our storytelling template:
A fairly similar version of this text was initially published on Egmont’s intranet in September 2018.
Egmont is a leading media group in the Nordic region. Our media world spans films, TV, cinemas, magazines, books, streaming services, educational materials, e-commerce, digital marketing services, gaming, and e-sport. Every year we donate a portion of our profits to initiatives aimed at children and young people who need a helping hand in their lives (pasted from the ‘about Egmont’ section on our web pages).
