How to foster a culture of customer obsession
By: Samir Javer
Tags: Product Management, Product Design, UX, Customer Experience, Startup

It’s a common refrain nowadays that companies need to be customer-centric. This often manifests itself in routine activities such as user research, customer interviews, and surveys.

However, I believe product teams can go much deeper than this.

Being customer-centric isn’t just about talking to your users; that’s table stakes. To truly be customer obsessed is to fully immerse yourself in your customers’ world.

And there may be no company that better operationalizes this than Amazon, who is highly renowned for its list of Leadership Principles; a set of tenets that guides its overall strategy and decision-making process.

The most important one, any employee will tell you, is Customer Obsession. They define this as:

Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leader s pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Every Amazon employee is expected to lead with this value, and it is a central piece of their interview process — whether you’re an engineer, marketer, or part of any other department.

Many other companies have since followed suit in adapting this as one of their values, and I’d like to share a few actionable ways that you can implement this in your teams.

Build relationships with your customer-facing teams.

(Yes, I realize the irony here)

Your customer support (and others like enablement, onboarding, account management, etc.) teams are some of the most valuable, yet often under-utilized assets. Get to know them, and engage with them regularly by:

Inviting them to your customer interviews

Sharing out your roadmaps with them

Showing them prototypes to get feedback

These teams have the strongest pulse on what customers are saying; why they’re dissatisfied with your product, what problems they have in their day-to-day, what alternatives they’re using, and so on.

The same goes for your Sales team. These folks have an incredible amount of competitive intel, can speak to blockers that commonly come up, and always know what moves the needle in closing a deal.

Walk a mile in your customers’ shoes.

News flash: your customers (likely) aren’t all using $2000 MacBook Pros and $1000 iPhones with HD Retina displays or blazing WiFi speeds.

To truly understand the norm for some of your customers, especially those in developing markets, try some of the following:

Access your website via Internet Explorer

Download your app on a low-end PC laptop

Load a large volume of data while on airplane WiFi

Moreover, if your product is a common utility, try using it as your go-to for your own day-to-day.

Whether it’s a calendar app, note-taking software, or any other tool you’re building, implement the products you’re building into your day-to-day routine. Check that calendar throughout the day for all your events, take all your meeting notes on that app, and so on.

Then you’ll really know what it feels like to put up with the potential bugs, UX flaws, or workflow constraints your product has. This is referred to as dogfooding.

Consume every customer interaction you can find.

There are so many tidbits of customer interactions that may not be reflected in feature requests, NPS comments, or tweets.

I call these ‘breadcrumbs’; bite-sized in nature, they leave a telling path to a land of promise, ala Hansel and Gretel. Try implementing these as a weekly routine:

Read customer support tickets

Listen to Sales calls

Read interview transcripts

Get a Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, etc. account and spend 30 minutes each week on there searching for keywords or terms that you’re interested in, find relevant chat transcripts or call recordings, and take notes on what you feel.

“Hi Company. Thank you for nothing. You made my daughter cry for 30 minutes yesterday, because we couldn’t login to stream Dora The Explorer. Switched browser, which seemed to solve half of the issues :-(”.

Unless you are a soulless robot, the above statement will probably trigger more emotions and requirements for actions than:

“Week 27 — Users experiencing issues on service: 57%”

We often put too much stock into quantitative data; users are people at the end of the day. Emotional sentiment is an incredibly strong signal, and that will never be reflected on any analytics dashboard.