Customers Know You Suck

Book Review

How often are we guessing at what customers want and then delivering mediocre experiences in the name of “moving fast?” We all like to say we’re customer-centric, but too often we fall well short of our customers’ expectations because we prioritize “good enough” or “MVP” or many other excuses.

Of course, customers aren’t fooled. And that is the underlying premise of the book for this month by Debbie Levitt—Customers Know you Suck.

I had the opportunity to speak briefly with Debbie a few weeks ago and we had an amazing conversation. Her passion for user experience was palpable. So I was excited to dive into her book in preparation for a podcast episode that we recorded recently. I’ll have the full episode ready in the coming weeks, so look forward to hearing more from both of us about UX and many other topics.

But in the meantime, let’s dive into the book:

Overview

As Debbie describes on her consulting site, DeltaCX:

Customers Know You Suck is the how-to manual for customer-centric product-market fit. Its highly actionable models, maps, and processes empower everyone to improve the Customer Experience (CX). Learn how to investigate, diagnose, and act on what’s blocking teams. Gather the evidence and data that better inform decisions, leading to increased satisfaction, conversion, and loyalty. Use our governance model for implementing and monitoring the progress, success, and failure of internal process changes and experiments.

It is an in-depth exploration about creating a customer-centric approach to product development. It alternates between how-tos and interviews with industry experts in a variety of fields. So it isn’t a quick read if you are hoping to go cover-to-cover. But you can also focus on specific topics that you may need, such as “Research Mistakes” or “Desiging CX Teams.”

While we can’t cover everything, let’s focus on a few important points for me.

Key Takeaways

Customer-Centricity is Key

We all like to say that we are customer-centric. Every company says that they value their customers. It is part of the hold music when you have to wait for an hour to talk to someone. It is part of the survey you get sent after UberEats messes up your order. But how much do we really value our customers and how customer-centric are we and what is customer-centricity?

According to the Levitt:

Customer-centricity puts the Customer Experience at the center of strategies, goals, initiatives, projects and more.

Our business and strategy should revolve around the customer experience. This can be a massive change for many organizations, and can feel like it will hurt business. But that isn’t the case.

Customer-centricity isn’t anti-revenue, anti-business, or against lifts in metrics. It’s about finding ways to boost what the business wants to improve while putting real customers’ needs and opportunities first. It’s about creating positive outcomes because we created positive customer outcomes.

One of my favorite parts of the book includes the 11 Pillars of Customer-Centricity. These pillars are a framework for gauging how well a business is focused on the customer experience. I’ll include four of my favorite here:

1. Evidence-based decision-making

2. Quality and value are defined by customers

3. Teams are given the time and budget to do their best work

4. Quality over speed

Start with Research

Research is one of the most important part of product product development, but also one of the most overlooked or shortchanged. It is easy for us to say that we don’t have time or resources for proper research. I know I’ve been in that situation many times. But how much more costly is it to go down the wrong path? How much more does it cost in time and resources to make bad guesses?