Stay Relevant: Adapt to Your Customer, Not Your Rival

A product becomes obsolete when it fails to adapt to the pace of evolving customer expectations. That typically happens when an entrepreneur obsesses over the competition rather than the customer.

Customer expectations move a degree or two each week. Three months from now, your customer's expectations have moved three to five degrees to the left or right.

If you have your eye on your competitor rather than your customer, you fall into the trap of, “Oh, my competitor’s adding this feature. It must be important to the customer. I’d better add it, too.”

Your benchmark becomes your competitor, not your customer.

And often, I find both parties have forgotten who the hell the customer was in the first place.

👉 Remember: your product or service does not live in a vacuum.

Every day, there are hundreds of influences on your customer outside of what you offer. How they bank, listen to music, watch TV, communicate, read, relax, play, and work out. Those different experiences shape how the customer perceives you.

Everything else for the customer has shifted a bit.

Their expectations have shifted a bit, but you haven't shifted at all. When that happens, you open the door for someone else to come in who IS responding to those shifts in expectation.

If you aren't aware of all the other stimuli your customers are getting, of what great service and experiences look like TODAY, you can look obsolete within six months to a year because you just stood still.

Here's an good example in US medicine:

Traditionally, when you need to see your doctor:

• You call your doctor's office, then;
• You wait on hold for 15 minutes, then;
• You're on the phone with them for 5 minutes, then;
• They set an appointment time, and you show up, only to wait some more for your 15 minutes with the doctor.

There are now three solid alternatives to that stale experience:

• Some doctors allow you to self-schedule online. You can see all the open times and pick the one you want. That's an innovation not driven by medicine but by all kinds of other businesses influencing the customer's mindset.
• There's a very new style of medicine in America. We call it concierge medicine, which is named after having a great hotel concierge. Your doctor is available 24/7 on speed dial. So, if you need a prescription for a medication or wonder whether this rash is a problem, you can speak with your doctor live in a matter of minutes. You pay a premium for that, but many folks choose that because they want instant access to medical advice when they want it.
• We also have a whole new category of businesses called urgent care centers that are alternatives to your doctor's office. If you can't see your doctor, there's an urgent care clinic down the street. Just walk in, no appointment required, and you'll probably get seen within 20-30 minutes. That'll be a different doctor every time, but you can get instant access for non-emergency care.

Those three innovations dramatically disrupted the industry and made many traditional doctor offices obsolete. And they're all at different price points along the spectrum.

So how do you stay ahead of changing expectations?

There are a few things you need to do.

First, you need to constantly scan the market for other innovations and industries affecting your customer. What’s the average day in the life of your customer persona? What does she read and buy? If I have clarity on my customer persona, I can scan the market and get a good understanding of what other organizations are doing to serve my customer’s needs. As an entrepreneur, that gives me insight into what I need to adjust.

The second is that I will pull together my top three to five customers as a customer advisory group:

• We'll meet once or twice a year, but part of that commitment is we talk frequently.
• If I've got questions about impact or shifts in thinking, I'll go try something out on them.
• It's the same way you do market testing. You give people two alternatives. Do you prefer A or B better?
• With that, I can quickly understand what resonates more with the customer. And I don't have to just do A/B testing with a website or marketing material. I can do it with products and services where I'm giving customers two alternatives of a future.

How they respond to that gives me a massive insight into what I need to do next because I've given them alternatives.

And my thought leader customers will actually offer back a third alternative I hadn't thought of. “Well, I kind of like this in option A. I like this other part in option B. But if you really want to make me happy, here's a third thing you should try.”

The third way is to get to know people who work for the competitor and ask them what's not working with their customers. I can always find people who recently left a competitor, were unhappy, and joined another firm. By talking to people who've recently left, I can learn a lot about what they're missing from customer views.

I can’t allow my product to become obsolescent, and neither can you.

Instead of obsessing over competitor updates, obsess over (evolving) customer expectations.

If you like this article, feel free to "follow me" here at LinkedIn. You can also find more of my musings at my personal website www.michaelburcham.com