Here’s Why You Don’t Know What Your Customer Needs

Does everyone in your company agree upon what a customer need is? I’m not asking what do your customers need I’m asking do you know what a need is? Go ahead; ask a few of your co-workers. Ask your management team. Ask yourself. Without a doubt, you will get wide-ranging responses; and this should concern you. After all, you are in business to serve your customers, and if you can’t identify what a need is, you have little hope of understanding your customers unmet needs. This common lack of understanding is exactly why we reflexively latch on to concepts such as Voice of the Customer (VOC) which add little or no additional precision to our ability to predict what customers want.

I’m rehashing what has already been said because it needs to be stated more often, and it needs to be understood by more people. I will give you a list of resources at the end of this post for those of you who would like to explore this topic in more depth.

We Live in a Solution-First World

Since it’s clear that v…