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 are now apps from eight new digital banking services. I love exploring these product experiences to see how one interacts with them as a customer - not only on a professional level but also on a personal and emotional level. One way to get past much of today’s hype is to use an experience, because it forces us to confront the questions that everyone implicitly asks when they choose a new service: how easy is it to sign up to? Does it do what I want? Is it a pleasure to use and interact with? Sometimes these questions yield new knowledge that goes beyond how much a bank is spending on marketing or how many top line users it claims to have. For example, signing up to N26 last year, it was surprising to see the length and complexity of onboarding, which seemed at odds with the extensive marketing campaign at the time on London Underground and not competitive for UK customers used to quick sign-up from established and neo banks alike (N26 announced last week it is closing in the UK).

This mindset led me to find myself on the Eurostar a few weeks ago - not to Paris with much of the FinTech community - but instead on a personal trip to Amsterdam. One of the digital banks I signed up to last year was bunq, and for some months I’ve been a happy customer. It has a strong easy-to-use product, and bright positioning as the ‘bank of the free’. Seeing that bunq was holding an ‘Update 13’ release customer event, this was an opportunity to find out about this bank.

The Update 13 event itself was an evening in a large theatre in the centre of Amsterdam. The new features were charismatically demo’ed on stage by CEO Ali Niknam. In style, it was very Apple-esque: we were waiting, and there was, ‘one more thing’. From a customer perspective though, I took away three observations. First, one of the features announced was developed directly in response to a question raised by a customer. Micha had asked about how he could distinguish between different cards loaded into the Apple wallet – which had been solved through neat colour coded UI with different card art. It was a nice touch to see Micha in the audience, looking a little embarrassed and proud that his feature has made it into the app. Second, the theatre was full, apparently the second time this has happened for an Update launch. Even if bunq had required all of its employees to be in the audience (and I have no reason to think this was the case), the event showed there were several hundred people keen to come and spend their evening hearing about the new features in a banking app.

Third, those customers were a diverse group including Gen X professionals. Over drinks in the theatre bar I chatted with medic who runs his own clinic. He enthused about how everything ‘as a service’ was changing the business model of medicine as much as in software, payments and banking. Asked why he uses bunq for both his personal and business finances, he replied that it was simply “easy and cool”. I know what I would like my customers to say about the products I create if asked…

Likewise, the event promoted me to update my app and try out the new features directly. As I’ve seen when my and my team in Barclays built next gen experiences such as shopping-without-checkout solution grab+go and restaurant solution dine&dash, if you can get customers to try an experience, and you can see light in their eyes afterwards - that it’s doing something they want in a way they really like - then the potential to convert that person into a regular user, maybe even a passionate advocate, is greatly increased.

Equally the visit to Amsterdam brought home to me yet again that as an innovator there is no substitute for being the customer yourself. Not just ‘listening to the customer’ or ‘putting yourself in the customer’s shoes’ - but actually being the customer of the service yourself and knowing how that feels. Sometimes in the corporate world I’ve seen colleagues develop a strange disconnect between the products they use and the service expectations they have as customers in their personal lives, and the ones they expect to sell to ‘the customer’ professionally. I’m sure I’ve done this myself at some stage too. Yet in reality there shouldn’t be any daylight between the two. If you work in a bank or payment company, you should want your colleagues to want to use your company’s products. If they don’t, there may be something wrong.

All this becomes so much more important when we think about how the process of creating new products and services is changing. I believe, fundamentally, that customer needs remain the same or evolve relatively slowly over time. However, what increasingly rapid changes in technology enable is the ability to create, design and develop new products and services to meet those needs – faster, cheaper and better than ever before. The current buzz around APIs simply means that a provider can connect together more services and present them together on a platform. In fact, customers now expect to have great solutions to meet their needs and increasingly import expectations from other part of their lives over into their financial lives. If my power company can enable me to control by heating, billing and payments through the app, then why can’t my bank enable me in the same way? In this context, meeting both the quality of experience and speed of delivery expected by the customer places vastly increased burdens on product development. Linear, waterfall product processes and (on their own) traditional research methods won’t be enough. The answer is for teams to acquire a deep professional, personal and emotional understanding and empathy of what a product needs to do to and feel like for customers, and then deploy that knowledge using an innovation process that enables them to ‘design-test-learn-iterate’ at pace until they reach the desired solution.

In this much more demanding context, to be successful, we all need to become innovators and, as innovators, we all need to be customers.