Know: Who are your customers?

Margareting looks at things from the individual’s perspective. The person’s journey towards the support you and your organisation can offer. 

If you trace someone’s journey backwards from accessing your support, where did it start?

The ‘know’ stage is all about how people first recognise they need support and how they interpret their problem.

So how well do you know your audience?

The key questions I like to ask at this stage are:

• Who are your customers, or who are you aiming to support? 

• What are the different ways they might see their problem? 

• What do they want to achieve?

a) Who are you aiming to support?

At first glance, this question might seem ridiculously easy to answer, but it’s worth giving it some thought. Especially if this is usually defined by demographics, because that tells us characteristics our audience tend to have in common, but doesn’t often help us to differentiate between people who need your support and people who don’t. There’s usually a situational element, for example a youth service for people aged 16 - 24 might be mainly beneficial for young people who have difficult home lives, or are struggling to form healthy friendships. It’s open to everyone in that age group, sure, but what gets us out of bed is when we can really make a difference for the people who need us, isn’t it? So think about the difference you’re making. The people who most need it are your audience.

b) What are the different ways they might see their problem?

Are people finding something difficult, and looking for ways to learn the skill? Like how for some people a barrier to healthy eating can be learning how to cook with healthier ingredients.

We’re all different, and I’m sure we’ve all experienced a situation where we saw a problem a different way to someone else. To someone else it might not be a problem at all, or it might be a problem in a different way. It depends on what’s important to us, and sometimes that changes with the circumstances.

And you can’t provide an effective solution without understanding the problem.

Sometimes in commissioned or grant-funded services the problem we’re solving is defined by funders and we might not have that much flexibility over the solution we’re providing either. But it’s still important to consider things from the customer’s perspective and be guided by them - we can’t help at people.

For example, I worked with a service aiming to support people with diabetes to achieve healthy lifestyle changes. When we thought about how people might see their problem, it was around finding it hard to make lifestyle changes they’d been advised to make by their doctors. After a little workshopping, we teased out that actually that’s not just one problem. Different people might experience this in all sorts of different ways -

• Feeling overwhelmed and needing help to make lifestyle changes feel more achievable

• Facing practical barriers, and needing help to make lifestyle changes fit in with their family or social life

• Becoming burnt out, and needing a break from the relentlessness of managing their condition

• Not seeing a problem at all and wanting to enjoy life, not worry about their health

Have a chat over a cup of tea, and listen to how people describe their experiences

So they’ll be looking for different things. And it’s always worth remembering that some who need help the most might not be looking for it at all.

The key to this stage is talking to people, have some chats and listen to how people talk about their experience. Do different people have a different way of looking at the problem your service helps with? The more people you talk to, the more perspectives you can gather, and the clearer picture you get of your customers.

c) What do they want to achieve?

When you talk to people about how they see their problem, it’s also important to find out about what’s important to them in a solution.

Is the most important thing that a service is flexible to fit around looking after the kids or grandkids?

Sometimes it’s not as obvious as it seems, and it’s easy for services to fall into the trap of thinking the important thing in a solution is that it simply solves the problem.

If you’re wondering what else could be important, think about decisions you make in your own life. Think about when you bought your shoes, or coat - they’re functional things, so did you buy the ones that work best? The waterproof, well-made ones that fit well? Or were other less rational things important to you, like the colour, whether you felt the style represented your personality, whether the brand was for people like you, or if it was on sale and you thought you were getting a bargain. I bet all of us have been drawn towards a service or product for each of those reasons at some point.

But we’re not always aware of why we’re drawn towards a certain service, or put off a certain product so it can be difficult to find out. When we ask, people might not be able to explain. Or if it’s something quite personal or sensitive, they might not feel comfortable sharing it.

So formal ways to research don’t always work well with this type of question, at least to begin with. Direct questions like in a survey need a direct answer and having to put things in writing can put people on guard.

Interviews or small informal focus groups can be a good way to get to know what’s important to people

I find informal chats can work better for this, where you can create a space for people to talk freely around their experience. Often the things they mention casually as an aside can be a clue to what’s important to them. For example someone might not say they’ve avoided asking for help because they didn’t want to worry their family, but if you’re chatting around their experience and they mention their family worry, it’s a little pointer in that direction. The more people you speak to, the more little pointers you’ll find, and the more likely it is that you’re on to something.

Then if you need more robust evidence, you could test those clues with a survey to see if they’re true for many people, or just the few you spoke to. People can feel more comfortable quietly ticking a small box to say whether they agree with a statement, than making the statement themselves.

So aim to be able to answer each of these 3 questions, and you’ll know your audience well!