existing firm, a field sales force can often provide names of customers, although the team must be careful about biasing the selection of customers toward those with allegiances to a particular manufacturer. The Web or a telephone directory can be used to identify names of some types of customers for some classes of products (e.g., building contractors or insurance agents). For products that are integral to a customer's job, getting someone to agree to an interview is usually simple; these customers are eager to discuss their needs. For consumer products, customers can also be located by making telephone calls or e-mail inquiries. However, arranging a set of interviews for consumer products generally re quires more inquiries than for industrial or commercial products because the benefit of participating in an interview is less direct for these customers.
The Art of Eliciting Customer Needs Data
The techniques we present here are aimed primarily at interviewing end users, but these methods do apply to all of the three data-gathering modes and to all types of stakeholders. The basic approach is to be receptive to information provided by customers and to avoid confrontations or defensive posturing. Gathering needs data is very different from a sales call: the goal is to elicit an honest expression of needs, not to convince a customer of what he or she needs. In most cases customer interactions will be verbal; interviewers ask questions and the customer responds. A prepared interview guide is valuable for structuring this dialogue. Some helpful questions and prompts for use after the interviewers introduce themselves and explain the purpose of the interview are:
• When and why do you use this type of product?
• Walk us through a typical session using the product.
• What do you like about the existing products?
• What do you dislike about the existing products?
• What issues do you consider when purchasing the product?
• What improvements would you make to the product?
Here are some general hints for effective interaction with customers:
• Go with the flow. If the customer is providing useful information, do not worry about conforming to the interview guide. The goal is to gather important data on customer needs, not to complete the interview guide in the allotted time.
• Use visual stimuli and props. Bring a collection of existing and competitors' products, or even products that are tangentially related to the product under development. At the end of a session, the interviewers might even show some preliminary product concepts to get customers' early reactions to various approaches.
• Suppress preconceived hypotheses about the product technology. Frequently custom ers will make assumptions about the product concept they expect would meet their needs. In these situations, the interviewers should avoid biasing the discussion with as sumptions about how the product will eventually be designed or produced. When cus tomers mention specifitechnologies or product features, the interviewer should probe for the underlying need the customer believes the suggested solution would satisfy.
• Have the customer demonstrate the product and/or typical tasks related to the prod uct. If the interview is conducted in the use environment, a demonstration is usually convenient and invariably reveals new information.
• Be alert for surprises and the expression of latent needs. If a customer mentions something surprising, pursue the lead with follow-up questions. Frequently, an unex pected line of questioning will reveal latent needs-important dimensions of the cus tomers' needs that are neither fulfilled nor commonly articulated and understood.
• Watch for nonverbal information. The process described in the chapter is aimed at developing better physical products. Unfortunately, words are not always the best way to communicate needs related to the physical world. This is particularly true of needs involving the human dimensions of the product, such as comfort, image, or style. The development team must be constantly aware of the nonverbal messages provided by customers. What are their facial expressions? How do they hold competitors' products?
Note that many of our suggested questions and guidelines assume that the customer has some familiarity with products similar to the new product under development. This is al most always true. For example, even before the first cordless screwdriver became available, people installed fasteners. Developing an understanding of customer needs as they relate to the general fastening task would still have been beneficial in developing the first cordless tool. Similarly, understanding the needs of customers using other types of cordless appli ances, such as electric razors, would also have been useful. We can think of no product so revolutionary that there would be no analogous products or tasks from which the develop ment team could learn. However, in gathering needs relating to truly revolutionary products with which customers have no experience, the interview questions should be focused on the task or situation in which the new product will be applied, rather than on the product itself.
Documenting Interactions with Customers
Four methods are commonly used for documenting interactions with customers:
1. Audio recording: Making an audio recording of the interview is very easy. Unfor tunately, transcribing the recording into text is very time consuming, and hiring someone to do it can be expensive. Also, audio recording has the disadvantage of being intimidat ing to some customers.
2. Notes: Handwritten notes are the most common method of documenting an inter view. Designating one person as the primary notetaker allows the other person to concen trate on effective questioning. The notetaker should strive to capture some of the wording
of every customer statement verbatim. These notes, if transcribed immediately after the interview, can be used to create a description of the interview that is very close to an ac tual transcript. This debriefing immediately after the interview also facilitates sharing of insights between the interviewers.
3. Video recording: Video recording is almost always used to document a focus group session. It is also very useful for documenting observations of the customer in the use en vironment and/or using existing products. The video recording is useful for bringing new team members "up to speed" and is also useful as raw material for presentations to upper management. Multiple viewings of video recordings of customers in action often facili tate the identification of latent customer needs. Video recording is also useful for captur ing many aspects of the end user's environment.
4. Still photography: Taking photographs provides many of the benefits of video re cording, but is usually less intrusive and therefore easier to do while observing customers in the field. Additional advantages of still photography are ease of display of the photos, excellent image quality, and readily available equipment. The primary disadvantage is the relative inability to record dynamic information.
The final result of the data-gathering phase of the process is a set of raw data, usually in the form of customer statements but frequently supplemented by video recordings or photographs. A data template implemented in a spreadsheet is useful for organizing these raw data. Exhibit
5-6 is an example of a portion of such a template. We recommend that the template be filled in as soon as possible after the interaction with the customer and edited by the other develop ment team members present during the interaction. The first column in the main body of the template indicates the question or prompt that elicited the customer data. The second column is a list of verbatim statements the customer made or an observation of a customer action (from a video recording or from direct observation). The third column contains the customer needs implied by the raw data. Some emphasis should be placed on investigating clues that may identifY potential latent needs. Such clues may be in the form of humorous remarks, less serious suggestions, frustrations, nonverbal information, or observations and descriptions of the use environment. The symbol (!) is used in Exhibit 5-6 to flag potential latent needs. Tech niques for interpreting the raw data in terms of customer needs are given in the next section.
The final task in step l is to write thank-you notes to the customers involved in the process. Invariably, the team will need to solicit further customer information, so develop ing and maintaining a good rapport with a set of users is important.
Step 2: Interpret Raw Data in Terms of Customer Needs
Customer needs are expressed as written statements and are the result of interpreting the need underlying the raw data gathered from the customers. Each statement or observation (as listed in the second column of the data template) may be translated into any number of customer needs. Griffin and Hauser found that multiple analysts may translate the same interview notes into different needs, so it is useful to have more than one team member conducting the translation process. Below we provide five guidelines for writing need statements. The first two guidelines are fundamental and are critical to effective translation; the remaining three guidelines ensure consistency of phrasing and style across all team members. Exhibit 5-7 provides examples to illustrate each guideline.
EXHIBIT 5-6 Customer data template filled in with sample customer statements and interpreted needs. SD is an abbreviation for screwdriver. (Note that this template represents a partial list from a single interview. A typical interview session may elicit more than 50 customer statements and interpreted needs.)
• Express the need in terms of what the product has t