Consumer Centric

How often have you found yourself doing exactly what you counsel others not to do?  I’m a parent of four kids, so I have to admit I’ve experienced that awakening once or twice at home.  But yesterday I found myself, and our team, facing the issue at work in a way that was ironic given our trumpeting the consumer-centricity horn.

Since we launched PURSUIT one year ago, we’ve put a lot of effort into the look and feel we wanted to maintain, project, and deliver as a brand.  We decided it was critical to convey a simple, modern, and elegant, but not aloof, feeling in everything from our logo to our letterhead.

Early on we made the switch to Mac over PC so we could use the presentation prowess of Keynote, Pages, and the like to be able to incorporate a higher order design into our work.  And we figured we’d deal with compatibility issues by always giving our clients nicely packaged PDF versions of our work.  No problem.  Well, not always a true statement.

Most times this has worked well.  And we’ve received the feedback about the look of what we do aligning with the value it provides many times.  But with one of our biggest clients we’ve continued to run into difficulty when we prepare our “deck” in Keynote and then convert to PowerPoint because this client wants to be able to view and manipulate files in the collaboration process.

It came to a head again yesterday when we had spent weeks getting what we thought was one of the best project deliverables yet.  The team even worked around the clock in the final hours the days before to make sure we posted the working draft for the client ahead of the scheduled time.  That’s when the “fun” began anew.

First, the PowerPoint conversion we did had problems when they uploaded it from Basecamp because of different versions of PowerPoint on either end.  Immediately, past frustrations on the part of our client emerged again, distracting right away from the content and thinking central to our deliverable (product).  Quickly, we fixed the version issue and re-posted only to hear they were still having issues with certain slides not appearing correctly even though on our machines it was clean.

Finally, we discovered we were using a specific font, part of our initial look and feel effort we worked on to set ourselves apart, that was not on their machines.  So, a few slides in the deck were still totally messed up on our client’s side when they opened it up on their end.

The frustration was high at this point because we knew little attention could be given to the content of our work and we knew our client, who appreciates what we do for sure, was reaching a point of wanting to figuratively slap us upside the head.  I kept thinking aloud (with members of our team) that I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t just let us use the PDF version and communicate that way… then none of the compatability issues would be there.  Then they’d see the really great work we’ve done.

At some point, I heard myself talking and realized the obvious.  When have I heard a company say, “if only my customers would accept our way of doing things then they’d appreciate our work and see how good the thing we’ve made for them really is?”  Or, how about… “why do we have to make something that our customer can use?  We’ve made something that we know works, don’t they get it?”

Ok, so the obvious lesson, or slap upside the head, was the cliche “physician heal thyself.”  Our use of the tools we’ve chosen for our work meets our needs, not our client’s.  When we are able to present and control the delivery of the results it is useful, impressive, and helpful to our client because it’s clean, clear, and concise.  But, when our client needs something they can use and work with when we are not there, what we produced has considerably less value.

Relevance and utility.  That’s what we preach all of the time to our clients.

You have to consider your customer’s point of view and determine how you add relevance and utility in their life, on their terms.  If you miss that perspective you’ll push out products/services that look great to you, things that cost money, but things for which the value of is considerably less to the people paying for them.

Moving ahead… clearly we need different versions for different purposes:  (1) those in which we control the full delivery and, therefore, can use our Mac software tools to make them shine and tell a powerful story, and (2) those in which our clients need to be able to use the material on their own, so we’ll need to deliver the same quality on different software platforms.

The less obvious lesson in this experience is that companies who find themselves creating things that don’t add utility and relevance from the customer point of view are not always self-absorbed egotists.  Many likely find themselves in the exact situation we were yesterday… having created something they expect is grand, only to realize they’ve failed to truly listen to their customer.

The point:  it’s not easy to be consumer-centric, even when it seems obvious as does this example of our struggle.