The Five States of Customer “Pain”

What is a Customer Need?

Something we have learned over the years is that you can’t simply ask a customer “what do you need?” There are a few simple reasons for this:

1. They will answer the question in the context of your product or service offering — which may, or may not, be useful.

2. Different customers will view the question through their unique circumstances; which may remain unknown.

3. They will express their need in a language that makes sense to them (feature, specification, benefit, etc.); but may not be the same language used by others; making synthesis a crap shoot.

4. There is no way of knowing how large the need is in the market based on the response from a few qualitative interviews.

5. They will almost always express it in terms of under-servedness.

So, when we hear people use the term “customer need” it’s almost always unclear, unvalidated, and represents something customers don’t have that they do want…supposedly. The question that remains is whether it is a comprehensive view of needs (or “Pain”) or whether i…