Interrogating 'the customer'

One of the most interesting conversations you can have with colleagues is to talk about who your customer is.

Most of us talk about 'the customer' as if this mythical character is standard and understandable.

The theory is that if we are to somehow able to capture the essence of 'the customer' then we will know exactly what to offer this person (and how to offer it) so that they will offer unbridled love and support.

But the truth is that our efforts to pin down a single customer-archetype are not practically sufficient. And in our desire to neatly package an oversimplified classification of 'the customer' we actually end up fooling ourselves into an illusion that can serve as a wickedly flawed platform from which to make decisions.

Instead of trying to capture a one-dimensional view of the customer, a more thorough approach is to rather interrogate the many layers that make up the customer system.

Within the make-up of this system there could be:

• The Buyer: The person (or people) who chooses your offering instead of the competition.
• The Payer: The person who hands over the money for the thing that was chosen by the buyer (important to note here that The Buyer and The Payer may, or may not, be the same person).
• The User: The person who gets to consume / use the thing that was chosen by The Buyer.
• The Beneficiary: The person that benefits from the use of the thing.
• The Adjudicator: The person who judges whether or not the thing that was bought performed in accordance with the required standard.

If you are selling goods and services to another business (for example...if you are selling medical supplies to a hospital) you can easily see that trying to understand the 'needs of the customer' is a far more complex task than listing a set of preferences linked to just one of the many gatekeepers that make up the customer system.

Each touch point in customer system will have criteria and different metrics of success that need to be satisfied in order for that 'customer' to be happy with the value that is being selected.

No business survives without customers. Interrogating the customer-system that allows a business to survive is important in the development of good strategy.

The opportunity here is to explore these complex customer systems with care and lots of critical thinking in order to build a clearer picture of what is valued when it comes to 'the customer'.