How I get my customers to open up about what they need

I’m a people person, and that’s a good thing because a big part of my job is customer relations.

I learned long ago that you can’t just wing it when you deal with people. You’ve got to be deliberate about making sure that the relationship you create with your customers is both pleasant and mutually beneficial.

In this blog, I want to talk about how I create and nurture good relations with my customers by getting them to open up to me about their needs.

I subscribe to the NIHITO principle

Years ago, I got certified in pragmatic marketing through a group called The Pragmatic Institute. One of the principles they teach is that ‘nothing interesting happens in the office,’ which they have formulated into the punchy acronym NIHITO.

What that means is that to get any meaningful information about your customers, you have to get out from behind your desk and go see them in their environment. That’s the only way you can gain insight about what matters to them.

I have always been a fan of the NIHITO principle. It’s the best way for me to find out what my customers need from me.

So my first rule in customer relations is: Get out and meet the customers.

I go after ‘small data’

I recently read a great book by David Scott Duncan. It’s called The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story About Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior.

There were many things in that book that made a lot of sense to me, but the one that really resonated was the concept of ‘small data.’ Duncan put a name on something I have been doing for a long time – going after small data about customers.

What’s small data?

It’s the opposite of big data.

Big data is the information businesses collect from all sorts of sources – business transactions, social media activity, web traffic, customer interactions and the like. This information can then be analyzed to uncover patterns, trends and correlations that will allow businesses to do everything from personalizing the customer experience to forecasting demand.

Big data can tell you a lot. But as Duncan rightly points out, it has its limits.

I have found that the really important learnings about customers come from the small bits of information I collect from them. It’s the information you gather when you sit down with a customer over coffee and listen to what they have to say. It’s useful because it is usually directly related to you and your company.

To get at the small data, I’ll ask questions like, ‘What’s Knak doing for career?’ or ‘What do you personally get out of Knak?’ or ‘What do you think could be better with the platform?’ Any question that brings it back to Knak and them.

The answers to these questions can be very focused. They usually provide great insight into the people I’m dealing with and how they use our product – insight that you can’t get from big data.

I try to get into the customer’s world

I believe that the magic really happens in terms of customer relations when I am able to get into a customer’s world.

My best insights don’t come understanding our product better, or from reviewing data about how customers use Knak. Things click for me when I am able to understand the customer’s world – their concerns, their challenges, their pain points, all the way through to personal issues they might be facing.

I do that by asking broad questions.

One of my favorites is this: ‘What’s taking up most of your mental energy right now?’

I love that question because it’s so open-ended.

The customer can give me a personal answer – maybe they’ve just become a parent or bought their first house or experienced some life-changing event – or they can give a work-related response about how their team is doing or how they’re struggling with strategic priorities.

Personal or work-related, emotional or analytical; no matter what kind of answer they give, I get crucial insight into where they’re at – what’s stressing them out, what’s making them happy.

I understand them better – way more than I would if I asked: ‘Hey, in our platform, when you click on this button, how’s that working for you?’

That kind of question is too specific.

A broad, open-ended question immediately makes the conversation more strategic, because you’re not asking for product feedback, you’re asking about them and their life.

And those insights from those open questions are important if you want to get into a customer’s world.

I tailor my approach to the environment I’m in

I interact with customers in all sorts of different ways. We exchange emails. We hold Zoom calls. We have quick exchanges at noisy, bustling trade shows. We have one-on-one get-togethers over coffee or dinner. We have group meetings – some formal, some less so.

Each environment is different, and each provides different kinds of information.

If I ask ‘What’s taking up most of your mental energy right now?’ in an email, I can guarantee I’ll get a very different response than if I ask the same person that same question over drinks in a quiet bar at the end of a busy workday.

The email response would likely be one line, something like: ‘Here are the five projects I’m working on right now.’ Whereas if I sat down with a customer, if we broke bread together in a quiet setting, the response would be more thoughtful. And on the off-chance that they still said, ‘Here are the five projects I’m working on right now,’ I could probe for more information.

So if I really need to talk to a customer, I will try to do so in a setting that is the most conducive to an open exchange.

If I’m at a trade show, for example, I don’t try to talk to them at our booth; I’ll invite them for coffee so we can have a one-on-one.

One of my favorite things to do is meet with the customer at their office. This way, I see them in their environment and I can meet the people they work with. It helps me understand them better.

The setting, in other words, shapes the response.

I get personal

The best way to get to know a business colleague or a customer is to exchange personal information. Why? Because when you feel comfortable with someone personally, you are more likely to open up about business matters.

Here’s an example.

I recently hosted a dinner for 10 customers. We had some serious work matters to discuss, but the people in the group didn’t know each other well, so I wanted them to become acquainted first.

After welcoming them to the dinner, I posed a single question and invited everyone around the table to answer in turn.

My question was pointedly personal: What was the first concert you ever attended?

It took about 30 minutes to hear everyone’s response. No one gave a one-line answer. People were animated. Everyone told a story, and each story told me a lot about the person telling it.

I learned that one person hadn’t been allowed to listen to music as a child, for example, while another grew up in a family of musicians and plays in a band.

In story after story, and through a lot of laughter, I discovered details that brought depth and life to business colleagues who had been strangers to me until then.

People were eager to tell their stories, to open up about their personal lives. They went deep.

And that changed the atmosphere of our gathering.

Because after a few more rounds of off-the-wall questions, I posed a serious business question: What are your biggest friction points in your job right now?

People jumped right in, providing deep and thoughtful insights – more so than if I’d asked that business question first.

Sharing details of their personal lives had primed them to open up. So when they were posed a business question, they were happy to keep on sharing.

I share the information

Speaking of sharing, my last rule for customer relations is that I share the information I’ve gathered with my colleagues inside Knak.

We have monthly meetings that bring everyone across the entire company together. This is how we keep all the teams up to speed on what everyone else is doing, so that we can all be in alignment.

I make sure to share at these meetings whatever we’re hearing from our customers.

That information can be useful for everyone, whether or not they work directly with our customers.

For people who don’t – the people on inward-facing teams like finance and development, for example – it gives them an idea of what’s happening outside the company walls.

And for people who do work directly with customers – people on outward-facing teams like sales and customer success – it provides critical information that helps them position products and address customer concerns.

A customer success manager may know 10 customers quite well, in terms of what they are up to and what their pain points are. But chances are that manager has never had a chance to explore bigger issues with their customers. They’ve never asked the customer what’s on their mind, or what are the friction points in their business. And they’ve probably never gotten 10 customers together in one room.

And that’s where I think the insight I gather helps.

So the next time a customer wonders why I’ve asked them to tell me about the first concert they ever went to – well, now they know.