A customer visit offers a unique and invaluable opportunity for direct engagement with customers. Product teams can gain deep insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and challenges by observing and discussing customers’ interactions with the product in real-time. This hands-on approach can inform ongoing product development and support the “why” behind product roadmaps.
Why are customer visits important?
Customer visits are valuable for several reasons. In the modern workplace, customers are getting requests left and right – they may be solicited by your sales team for feedback, or they may be getting pitched by your competitors.
The human touch of a customer visit is invaluable. Instead of hearing from a sales team that is trying to make a sale, a customer visit allows you to explore their problems and preferences in detail.
What are the goals of a customer visit?
Customer visits can help product teams achieve several different types of goals.
- In-Depth Customer Understanding: Visits provide firsthand insights into customer behaviors, needs, and challenges. This can occur by seeing the customer using the product in real-time, or by gathering richer data through in-person communication. Ultimately, this customer understanding enables product teams to tailor products more effectively to the target market.
- Improved Decision-Making: Regular customer interactions offer real-time feedback and data, aiding in making more informed and customer-centric decisions throughout the product development cycle.
- Enhanced Product Innovation and Development: Observations from these visits can spark innovative ideas and identify opportunities for improvement. This can drive the development of features and solutions that more closely align with customer demands.
- Strengthened Customer Relationships: Engaging with customers directly helps build trust and rapport, leading to more open and valuable feedback, and fostering long-term customer loyalty.
Tips for a Great Customer Visit
There are two types of visits: The first type focuses on ideation, which is to brainstorm and gather high-level information. In ideation visits, the goal is to keep an open-ended conversation flowing. The second type of customer visit focuses on implementation, with a focus on understanding workflows and how the product is used to complete specific tasks.
Before you begin your visit, identifying what you want to learn will inform the type of visit you have, the people you meet with, and the data you gather. You won’t have time to learn everything, so start by focusing on the information you need to capture.
How to prepare for your customer visit.
Before you arrive for your visit, review the customer’s account with their customer success manager, account growth manager, and any other relevant team members. Who does the customer usually talk to? Have they submitted customer support requests recently? If so, what were those tickets about (and were they addressed appropriately)? Customer service issues will come up during your visit, so it’s best to be prepared.
Beyond your customer’s account, understand what is happening in your customer’s market. Are there any major industry trends that affect them? What are their threats and opportunities? Showing that you are knowledgeable about their industry indicates that you put in the work before your visit.
Confirm the guest list before you go.
Your time is limited during a customer visit. That means you want to get the best interactions you can with relevant team members, on a tight schedule. Before you go, schedule a meeting with company leadership. That may include the CEO, founder, or VP of the team you’re meeting with.
Data to gather during a customer visit.
During your visit, you can capture different kinds of qualitative data about your customer’s experience.
- Description of experiences with the product: These may be written or verbal. If you are gathering this data verbally, be sure to document any nonverbal cues, like the customer’s tone of voice or body language, as they describe their product experiences to you. Be sure to ask probing follow-up questions to gather more insight if needed.
- Workflows: How does the customer use the product? How are different functions used between teams? Your customer visit is your opportunity to see this in action.
- Pain points and challenges: While you are with your customer, you can identify specific problems or challenges your customer faces in their daily work that your product (or a new product feature) can solve or alleviate. On the other hand, you may observe pain points the customer has while using your product that can be addressed.
- User segmentation and personas: Learning who is interacting with your product during a customer visit can inform your user personas. Understanding that information about your users can inform detailed user personas for targeted product development and product marketing strategy.
- Customer journeys and use cases: By visiting customers and seeing them in action, you can gain a detailed understanding of the customer journey and use cases for seeking product features and solutions. Ultimately, this may inform your product roadmap and feature prioritization, as well as marketing messaging to ensure that current and prospective customers know about those features.
Follow up with your customer.
After you complete the visit, be sure to create a summary report for your internal teams. Recap who you spoke with, what data you gathered, and what insights you gleaned. Also, note any NDAs or other confidentiality agreements so information is only shared with appropriate parties.
Then, follow up on any promises you made during the visit (such as escalating a customer service ticket). Send a copy of your report to your customer to show that their time was valued and will be used. Finally, don’t forget to thank them for spending their valuable time with you.
How often should you do customer visits?
As a rule, to understand a topic deeply you should conduct 5-12 customer interviews around that topic. Since you are gathering qualitative data, you will need to carefully review your notes from these customer visits to glean insights. You have completed enough customer visits once you start to see the same themes emerge across different customer interviews.
Customer Visits and Product Development
Customer visits provide a wealth of insight into the “why” behind customer experiences. That insight can power product roadmaps and provide compelling storytelling for your stakeholders.
The Continuous Discovery Theory of Customer Visits
There are two approaches to customer visits. First, you can do a formal project that includes an in-depth plan for each of the customer segments you plan to visit. Then, you can outline how many interviews you will do for each segment. This is a time-intensive approach, but it is excellent for thoroughly exploring new opportunities.
Continuous Discovery Theory, taught by Teresa Torres, suggests doing more unstructured, shorter, and more frequent interactions with customers. Continuous discovery lets you get real-time input into the product development process.
This theory argues that maintaining a consistent stream of visits with customers is the best way to create market-driven products. These visits should be driven by the team who are building the project. This theory argues that product teams are making many small product decisions every day, asking questions like “What should the logic be?” or “Where is the best place to put the ‘Buy Now’?” If you are in weekly contact with customers, you can ask your customers these questions. Ultimately, this lets you co-create your solution with the customer.
Defining the “why”
During product roadmap presentations, product managers may be asked “Why are we prioritizing this feature over that feature?” Or “Why is this release going after that upgrade?”.
Customer visits can provide the backstory to explain those timelines and priority decisions. Quantify the anecdotal information you gather, such as “5 of the 8 VPs of Marketing we spoke with during customer visits noted this as a pain point”, to provide valuable insight to your teams into why a decision was made.
Furthermore, referencing your customer visits can help humanize your product decisions. Referring to your actual customers or personas moves the conversation away from numbers and deadlines, and helps teams focus on the human aspect. Soon, you’ll deliver solutions that matter to customers you care about.
Revisit the “Why” of your Product Roadmap
Since your roadmap documents don’t clearly state the “why”, it may be good to schedule monthly or quarterly updates with your team to remind everyone of why you are pursuing these solutions. Tying the roadmap to your team and company goals can also support long-term buy-in and enthusiasm for the project.
