A Lesson for Digital Transformation: Chase Helping People

“When you chase kindness and you chase helping people, that is when the real magic happens.” I heard this line recently in a podcast discussion between a mindset coach and a cyber security expert, and while it was said in the context of running a business, I think it’s a great lesson to translate to digital transformation.

Kindness and helping customers may seem a bit alien to the profiteering corporate world, but we get closer to it if we listen. Listening is hard, and it is sometimes difficult to put aside your own expertise. We’ve spent years building careers on the basis that we have the answers, but the customer isn’t always going to have a reference point or know what is possible.

We should not be asking customers to come up with solutions, sometimes our skills lie in the process of finding the answers. If we ask the right questions and really listen to the research, we’re going to be more focused on solving the right problems and helping the customer. This is where the magic happens, and this is where you find innovation.

Companies are often pretty bad at designing research that really listens to customers. The point is to ask the right questions. If you ask a customer what features they’d like to see, you’re not going to find an exciting answer. Instead, try asking them what they find difficult, try understanding what about your product might help them. Stop focusing on the insipid word “satisfaction” and instead ask what would make them happy and change their lives.

There are many well-known examples of companies who failed to listen to customers and paid the price for it, from once-dominant phone makers to video rental chains. My favourite example is the music industry, which tried to sue enthusiasts for sharing files illegally online, failing to realise that this activity was turning people into fans who wanted to consume more and more music and have instant access to entire catalogues of songs from home. That consumer behaviour never went away, it simply found a legitimate home in streaming.

So let’s not just do research on our customers, let’s really listen, let’s understand what really matters, what moves our customers emotionally, and how we can help them. That’s where we will find the magic.