Find business opportunities in silence

At a ski resort called Stevens Pass, a regular customer survey always yields two answers. Ask skiers what they want, and the answer is: "more chair lifts"; when they're most disgusted, the answer is: "The price of chair lifts is too high."

This ski resort is responsive to these The light-hearted answer is not satisfactory. Now, they survey customers almost anytime, anywhere. Investigators may be sitting on a chairlift with a tourist, helping a tourist unload equipment from a car, or helping a skier get off a chairlift, taking every opportunity to ask: "What do you think about the idea of a season pass?" How about it? Apart from the season pass, what else would you like to order? That problem you just said, how would you like to solve it?"

An idea to sell a non-weekend pass was born out of interviews like this . Since the runs are always full on winter weekends, the ski resort has special discounted packages for off-peak hours, with 6,500 sold in its first release.

If customer interviews can be done on the ski slopes, why not try it in a bank lobby, warehouse dock, or the home office of a user downloading software? Observing and listening to a customer's potential needs in actual service will give you very different feedback than a group of people in a conference room to conduct a survey.

If you want to get ideas for improving an existing product, you can use traditional methods to research customer needs. But if you want to explode sales and gain a lasting advantage, you'll have to go the extra mile. You have to innovate to provide solutions to customers' underlying needs. In other words, giving the customer something that has not been appealed to, but actually needs.

The dangers of listening to customers

It's dangerous to give customers what they say they need. The most dangerous of them all is that you rely on your customers to come up with innovative ideas for you. When customers who were invited to the survey described their needs, they often asked for improvements to existing products, such as faster, cheaper, better. However, if you want to ask for some unconventional ideas, this approach does little.

If the development of a company's strategy is a "customer-friendly" activity, then the company is actually participating in the strategy-setting of the customer. If company executives obey customers, they will become "rubber stamps" for customers.

Another danger lurking in developing business strategies based on the stated needs of customers is that companies may mistake early customers for rejection of the company's new product as a symptom of failed innovation. Trend-setting companies are well-prepared for new products that are not accepted by customers during the introduction phase, but end up being a blockbuster. Twenty years ago, phonograph record users rejected the CD player, and the ATM was considered a personal banking service.

There is also the danger of asking today's customers for future customer needs. Identifying what customers need today is not the same as knowing what they will need five years from now. When surveyors are asked "how do you understand current customer needs", the answer is often "suggestion boxes, customer workshops, and customer satisfaction surveys." The next question, "How to predict future customer needs," was embarrassed to discover that these methods were flawed before giving the same answers to "suggestion boxes, customer workshops, and customer satisfaction surveys." Using the same method to gather information, how can you expect to draw differences in the needs of today's and future customers?

Therefore, these dangers must be recognized first when probing the potential needs of customers. Evaluating an existing product is a completely different approach than conceiving an innovative product, and strategic planners must recognize the customer's role in a company's innovation.

Capturing latent needs with intuition

Anticipating customer needs requires fresh thinking, not simply listening to superficial suggestions and complaints and coming up with obvious solutions. Trend-setting companies have a unique ability to identify needs in the "off-the-cuff".

Most of the business-customer conversations revolve around the apparent customer needs. However, it is hard to imagine that the greatest potential for stimulating innovation lies in the intuition of a latent need that is unwittingly revealed.

One form of this casual message is that customers know what they need but no company offers a solution. Either there are no service providers, or the existing services lack important elements of value such as quality, speed and convenience.

A savvy entrepreneur is always on the alert for obvious problems for which there is no solution. For example, the CEO of Laptop Lane found his business idea inspired by a well-dressed manager at the airport looking for a socket for his laptop. He also noted three trends: the growing number of business travelers, more people carrying laptops, and many of them wanting to stay in constant contact with colleagues and customers. So the CEO realized that the company's business travelers had an unmet need -- travel communications support.

So he set up a comfortable, full-service workstation at the airport, including photocopying, overnight courier, meeting room rental, fax and printing services. Each location has 4-12 offices with 36-48 square feet in size and 7 feet high walls. Venue rental is $2 for the first 5 minutes and 38 cents for each additional minute thereafter, including local and long distance calls and faxes.

Listen to the complaints and discover the business opportunities behind them

Complaints are a great way to understand potential needs. There are two main types of complaints: complaints about a product's lack of functionality and complaints about revealing underlying needs. When faced with the former complaint, it is enough to improve the error without further digging the requirements. The second complaint is quite different. When customers impatiently say "why don't you guys do this", they actually reveal a vacuum in service that no company has yet stepped into. Such complaints present excellent business opportunities.

A FedEx general manager once said, "We do hear customers complain that we're delivering packages to their mailboxes. They want mailboxes removed and packages and letters delivered to their desks. "

The company may consider this desire unreasonable, unrealistic, and too costly. However, the manager said: "If we ignore this desire and our competitors take it seriously and solve the logistical issues, what will it do to us? Where will we be left by our competitors at that time?" "

If the problems that customers are complaining about a lot now go unresolved, the companies that come up with effective solutions first will likely find a gold mine.

Do Not Fit, Lead the Service Trend

Another effective way to learn about potential customer needs is to be vigilant about "fit" practices. In an improvised result, neither the customer nor the merchant can understand the dissatisfaction with the service and the hope for service improvement. For example, taxi drivers don't accept credit cards, and passengers don't expect them to; airlines don't seem to be able to accurately get passengers' special food orders, so flight attendants expect customers to accept standard foods like chicken nuggets and noodles without complaint; Patients wait helplessly in waiting halls because doctors' time is at a premium and they are busy caring for other patients.

Can you see an opportunity in providing solutions for customers who are used to make-believe services? For the huge profit potential, trend-setting service providers are interested in being the first to "eat crabs".

Innovative companies hone their skills by discovering tradeoffs in a variety of environments. So train your thinking about make-believe scenarios in your daily life, and you can apply this skill to your work. Consider these make-believe things carefully: Nationwide cell phone service that doesn't make it; hospital bills that you can't read; unanswered calls at the doctor's office from 12-2pm; electric shavers that shave your face ; mutual prevarication in technical support to customers: the software supplier says "it's not our problem, it's a hardware problem", while the hardware supplier says "it's not our problem, go to the software supplier"; airlines are very Provide less food that customers special request.

Being vigilant about life's improvisations will help you develop the habit of spotting customer dissatisfaction with your company's products or services. This habit will make you more likely to spot their latent needs.

Companies that are unable or unwilling to identify potential customer needs will fail to identify new business opportunities. Only by mastering a large number of more skills can you discover the latent needs of customers, not just listen to and meet their spoken needs.

Original text excerpted with permission from Invent Opportunities No One Else Can Imagine by Art Turock, Career Press Inc. (Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA) Copyright 2002 by the author . Translated by Zhu Jie.