Of course, we all know that understanding clients helps improve the services you provide.

The tricky part is, how do we get to know them on a deeper level? There are strategies that help you get there. For example, there are one-on-one interviews, surveys, focus groups, and other research methods that help you understand your customers better.

Here’s a quick story

There’s an old quote that’s said to have originated from Henry Ford (you know, Henry Ford, behind Ford Motor Company) that says, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. Faster horses, eh? Picture if cars were never invented and we were stuck riding horses for transportation. That would be kind of cool, actually (let me take a moment to daydream about this). Yee-haw.

If you take a second and really think about Ford’s quote, there are some interesting insights

If people were saying they wanted “faster horses”, they might have meant that they wanted to get from Point A to Point B at a quicker rate. So, thanks Ford Motor Company for thinking outside the box to understand what their customers really wanted and eventually creating the 1908 Model T for our great, great, great grandparents to enjoy. This same logic can be applied to how we understand our customers today

Here’s one of our favorite tools we use to understand customers better

When we perform customer experience research for clients, there’s some tools we use to understand customers better. One of our favorite tools are our trusty Collabo Kits, which are basically boxes full of nifty prototyping materials that help people build out solutions to their problems. When we watch people build solutions to their problems, we can actually understand how they think and learn what their immediate needs/values truly are. Pretty cool!

Check out this week's video to find out:

- Our lead researcher’s techniques to understanding customers

- More about our nifty Collabo Kits

- Why understanding your customers is so important