Complex and big organizations often rely on numbers and measurable metrics to assess their success. This data, while measurable, may not always represent the customer mental model with all its idiosyncrasies and nuances. It is pertinent that large organizations panning world geographies have systems and an internalized culture of keeping the customer first.
Working Backwards
Working Backwards (WB) is Amazon’s own, customer-centric product and service development process. We believe that it pushes us to think deeply about our customers’ needs and invent on their behalf. A typical WB process involves asking five questions:
- Who is the customer?
- What is the customer problem or opportunity?
- What is the most important customer benefit?
- How do you know what customers need or want?
- What does the customer experience look like?
This Working Backwards philosophy is at the core of leadership principle of ‘customer obsession’ that runs through every decision making process and our day to day functioning. This leadership principle expects every Amazonian to become the custodian of their customer’s unique needs and work backwards from there. Earning customer trust is given more importance over obsessing about the competition.
While there are multiple mechanisms and processes in place to drive this customer-first thinking, there is a significant emphasis given to the first step of ‘Empathy’ here in our organisation. We ensure a human-centred approach in creating processes that drive the need to ‘empathize’ and understand our customers and their needs which further fuels the direction of the product and business.
Some of the key processes that enable us to be customer backward are worth a mention and would give everyone a glimpse of the customer-obsession principle at play.
The Empty Chair
A physical embodiment/presence of our customer is ensured by a very simple yet powerful practice. For every business meeting, one keeps an ‘Empty Chair’ that reminds and represents the customer in that room. It’s both brilliantly simple and effective and a constant reminder that everything a business does, must be done to enhance their customer’s life in some way.
Walk the Store
Before even meeting our customers, as a process Amazonians are encouraged to ‘walk in the customers’ shoes. To Walk the Store is to use Amazon’s apps, websites and devices the way customers do, from the customers’ point of view. Walk the Store (WTS) is designed to be a fast, lightweight, and an iterative process and often prepares everyone with some customer context and pain points even before we meet them.
WTS is a self-service process that enables Product Managers, Designers, Engineers, and other disciplines to identify and eliminate likely customer experience issues with a product/feature. This means stepping back from our focused areas of responsibility with a fresh pair of eyes and taking on the role of a customer who is shopping on Amazon’s end-to-end experience. Teams do this as a part of their regular design and development cycles using mock-ups, working prototypes, and launched experiences.
Listen & Observe: Get out of the office
A program through which the key business & design stakeholders, including leaders, spend time directly with the end-users and customers, uncovering the needs that drive their behaviour and decision-making. This program provides Amazon employees with an opportunity to interact with potential users and observe for themselves on how well our system and our processes are helping users. These are regularly organized across teams. Even today, when physical proximity with our users is challenging, we are proud to continue this practice through remote dialogues with our customers, keeping them in our decision making despite social distancing constraints.
Customer Anecdotes and Videos
We believe that true empathy is generated by humanizing customer needs and making them easily available for quick access and reference throughout the organization. As a practice every User research is video documented and all byte-sized video clips are well categorized, making them easy to access and consume. These video bytes often find a place in leadership level product/ strategy documents advocating for our customers, further indoctrinating the customer in every stakeholder’s mind.
These human-centred practices and mechanisms have strengthened our customer understanding and internalized a behaviour of keeping them first. Given current unprecedented times, we believe that the customer obsession philosophy that is so strongly instilled in each one of us would give us the leverage and the right means to understand the changing landscape of our customers’ needs. This would further enable us to recalibrate our products and experiences and adapt our self to the new normal, which is still unfolding.
Like we say in Amazon: It’s still Day 1, which suggests one never becomes complacent and continues working backwards. We are confident that our customer-centric culture would help us steer the COVID-19 crisis in a positive direction by empathizing with our customers and providing them with products, services, and experiences that make an impact on their lives.
Interested in finding out more on how client organisations operate successfully in the current landscape? Join ESOMAR Client Summit at Home broadcast 11 &18 June (ed.).
