Quotes About Customer

Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

The key to getting hired is to understand the narrative of the customer's life in such rich detail that you are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request. In hindsight, breakthrough insights might seem obvious, but they rarely are. In fact, they're fundamentally contrarian: you see something that others have missed.

Companies focus too much on what they want to sell their customers, rather than what those customers really need. What's missing is empathy: a deep understanding of what problems customers are trying to solve.

railroads fell into the trap of letting the product define the market they were in, rather than the job customers were hiring them to do. They

This is what processes aligned with customer jobs do: they shift complexity and nuisances from the customer to the vendor, leaving positive customer experiences and valuable progress in their place.

Through a jobs lens, what matters more than who reports to whom is how different parts of the organization interact to systematically deliver the offering that perfectly performs customers' Jobs to Be Done. When managers are focused on the customer's Job to Be Done, they not only have a very clear compass heading for their innovation efforts but they also have a vital organizing principle for their internal structure.

once the performance level demanded of a particular attribute has been achieved, customers indicate their satiation by being less willing to pay a premium price for continued improvement in that attribute.

Excuse me. Can you help me understand what job you are trying to do with that milkshake?" When they'd struggle to answer this question, we'd help them by asking, "Well, think about the last time you were in this same situation, needing to get the same job done—but you didn't come here to hire that milkshake. What did you hire?" The answers were enlightening:

There is no one right answer for all circumstances. You have to start by understanding the job the customer is trying to have done.

Every successful product or service, either explicitly or implicitly, was structured around a job to be done. Addressing a job is the causal mechanism behind a purchase. If someone develops a product that is interesting, but which doesn't intuitively map in customers' minds on a job that they are trying to do, that product will struggle to succeed—unless the product is adapted and repositioned on an important job.

What this implies at a deeper level is that many of what are now widely accepted principles of good management are, in fact, only situationally appropriate. There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

But this book is not about companies with such weaknesses: It is about well-managed companies that have their competitive antennae up, listen astutely to their customers, invest aggressively in new technologies, and yet still lose market dominance.

Every successful product or service, either explicitly or implicitly, was structured around a job to be done. Addressing a job is the causal mechanism behind a purchase. If someone develops a product that is interesting, but which doesn't intuitively map in customers' minds on a job that they are trying to do, that product will struggle to succeed

When the performance of two or more competing products has improved beyond what the market demands, customers can no longer base their choice upon which is the higher performing product.

Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.

There are times at which it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and right to aggressively pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.

You can only shape the experiences that are important to your customers when you understand who you are really competing with.

There is a simple, but powerful, insight at the core of our theory: customers don't buy products or services; they pull them into their lives to make progress.

Companies should strive to make the competition irrelevant by offering buyers a leap in value.

Get focused on (..) understanding how to deliver a leap in value to buyers

What trends have a high probability of impacting your industry, are irreversible, and are evolving in a clear trajectory? How will these trends impact your industry? Given this, how can you open up unprecedented customer utility?

Moreover, when you ask existing customers, "How can we make you happier?" their insights tend toward the familiar, such as "Offer me more for less." But this focus almost always drives you to merely offer better solutions to your industry's existing problem, keeping you trapped in the red ocean.

An employee is told that the customer is always right and, in fact, the customer is usually a moron and as asshole

The best advertisement you can have is a happy customer with a big mouth. The worst advertisement you can have is an unhappy customer with a big mouth.