My last post focused primarily on a problem that can arise when there’s a central team that sits between a team responsible for delivering solutions, and teams that have problems to be solved. The advice in that article is valuable^[1], but it’s also very general. It also introduces a problem without providing any advice to solve the problem, beyond the not-very-helpful “keep an eye open for this problem behavior playing out.”

In this article I’m going to share some more specific advice to help overcome this challenge if you’re part of that central team. In this article I’m going to share my advice for communicating the voice of the customer.

In my experience, there are four key success factors for effectively communicating the voice of the customer when you’re not really the customer yourself.

Success Factor 1: Understand both the problem domain and the solution domain. Since this is what most of the last set of articles have covered already I don’t plan to re-cover this familiar ground, but it’s still important to mention. If you’re going to act as a bridge between two worlds, you need a meaningfully deep understanding of both.

Success Factor 2: Don’t have an agenda. More specifically, don’t have an agenda other than enabling the success of the the solution team and the customers you enable. In order to speak with the voice of the customer, the people you’re communicating with need to understand that you’re really speaking for the customer, and not for yourself. This doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion – it means that you need to share the customer’s truth even when it might not support that opinion.

Success Factor 3: Tell a story. If you only share numbers and statistics, you’re leaving the interpretation of those numbers up to your audience, and that audience doesn’t have the context that you do. You’re from the team that understands the needs of the customer – and you’re the one that doesn’t have an agenda. These two facts make put you in an ideal position to tell a story that captures the customer’s scenarios, goals, priorities, and challenges and to ensure that it is received in a way that inspires your audience to action.

Success Factor 4: Include numbers and statistics. If you only tell a story, your audience will often assume that you’re telling your own story to forward your own agenda. Having data available to back up the story, including specific data to back up each key story point, helps overcome any skepticism and ensure that your story can be received, believed, and acted upon. The amount of data you need will depend on factors including how much trust you’ve already earned with your audience, and how well the actions you’re hoping to inspire align with their current goals.^[2] 

Somewhere between telling a story and including data^[3]  lies including the literal voice of the customer. When you’re meeting with customers, take thorough notes. When possible, record your customer conversations. Then, when preparing to tell your story, have verbatim customer quotes prepared to reinforce they key points of your story. This lets you say “here’s a customer problem I think you need to prioritize solving” and “here’s how these customers have independently described their experiences in their own words.” It’s easy for someone to say that you don’t really understand the customer’s problem, because you’re not really the customer. But it’s hard for someone say that the customer doesn’t understand their own problem.^[4] Bringing the voice of the customer to a story is like having another five or six aces up your sleeve, but it’s not technically cheating.

These four behaviors have proven indispensable in my work on the Power BI CAT team, and I see them as success factors in many of the teams I’ve worked with that also operate between the problem domain and the solution domain. If you’re part of a center of excellence or another team that follows this pattern, look for opportunities to incorporate these behaviors into your work. They’ve served me very well, and I suspect they’ll do the same for you.

^[1] In any event, I think it’s valuable, but my opinion here may not be coming from a position of neutral impartiality. You can reach your own conclusion.

^[2] In my experience, earning and retaining the trust of your audience is a much more important factor than the story or the data. Right now the only advice I can think of here is “act consistently with integrity and transparency” but maybe I can find a blog post on this topic at some point.

^[3]  I could call this “Success Factor 5” or even “Success Factor 3.5” but then I would need to go back up and edit the post introduction and I’m far too lazy for that sort of work.

^[4] If you do find the solution team you work with saying that the customer’s problems aren’t real, this is a massive red flag that needs to be confronted. In my experience, if this attitude persists it’s time to start escalating or looking for a new team.