Blog 2: Being the customer
In this second blog, I want to share some thoughts on why, as an innovator, literally being the customer is so important to successful product development in today’s world. It all starts with curiosity. Being curious about the products and services customers are actually experiencing. In the pre-digital era, this curiosity manifested itself for me in popping into the branches of different banks. It was instructive to see what products they were offering, how the staff were serving customers (were there greeters at the front, for example?) and how the customers were using the branches. During the transformation of retail banking in Romania in the early 2000’s, I learned that the results of this kind of mystery shopping could be surprising - but vital to understand what was really happening on the ground! These days, this curiosity takes the form of signing up to every new digital experience, simply to try them out. Just for banking, on my iPhone, alongside my main app, there a