What is a Customer Need in a Journey Map?
Understanding customers' needs is key to business success. I'll highlight Viking Range, a company using deep customer insight to sell luxury kitchen appliances successfully.
What is a Customer Need?
Different Types of Customer Needs
- Functional Need: Refers to the practical requirements customers have about a product or a service. Businesses address these needs by building products that include customers' requirements.
- Emotional Need: Emotional needs are about how a product or service makes a customer feel. Customers will fly to Paris to celebrate an important anniversary because it makes them feel romantic and excited. Businesses cater to these needs by repeating messaging that certain activities will generate specific emotions that customers want.
- Social Need: This is the desire for social acceptance or belonging. Customers will buy products or services because they believe it will enhance their social standing or because they've seen people they admire or aspire to be like using them. Business address this need by using celebrities to market their goods.
- Financial Need: This is about whether the customer feels they can afford to purchase a product or service. They expect value for their money. Businesses address these needs through sales, discounts, loyalty rewards, and other pricing strategies.
Example of Customer Needs
What Are the Risks of Misunderstanding Customer Needs?
When customer needs are misinterpreted or misunderstood, a business runs the risk of the following scenarios:
- Investing in the wrong improvements of a customer experience.
- Investing in software product features that customers don't need.
- Unable to meet customer goals because they didn't understand the context of the goals and the underlying needs.
- Unable to sell to customer groups and their goals because their needs are unmet.
- A marketing campaign to attract new customers won't resonate because it doesn't match social and emotional needs.
Why are Customer Needs Important to Understand?
Customer needs are important to understand if you want to be able to sell products successfully, whether you are selling software products or products from Lowes or Home Depot.
For example, the company Viking Range sells luxury kitchen appliances. By understanding the customer's needs, Viking Range can successfully sell luxury kitchen appliances to a specific customer segment that drives a lot of revenue for the company.
The Viking Range business team understands that selling a kitchen is more than just stainless steel appliances. It's an experience and not just any experience.
It's The Viking Culinary Experience
They mastered customers' social and emotional needs when buying a Viking range kitchen.
Remember customer goals? Well, a simple goal a potential Viking customer has is that they could be renovating their kitchen and will have the goal of putting new kitchen appliances in that renovated kitchen. Now let's look at the customer needs Viking Range has understood and applied to its product and the customer experience.
- Functional need: Viking kitchen appliances are superior to regular kitchen appliance brands. Any requirements a customer has, Viking will meet those requirements.
- Emotional need: If you are serious about cooking, about hosting parties, you will buy a Viking kitchen. Because the customers know this is a serious brand that has elevated itself above the competition.
- Social need: Customers who buy a Viking kitchen set themselves apart from homes with regular kitchens. It says something about the customer's wealth and focus on eating healthy food.
The Viking business team can package its product and tell a powerful story to its potential customers. They can tell a great story because they took the time to understand their customers, the customer needs to build an enjoyable product that produces powerful emotions and feelings.
Why are Customer Needs Displayed in Journey Maps?
- Customer goals have customer needs linked to them. You can't just show the goals and not show the needs. Or vice versa.
- Customer goals have different customer needs linked to them. If you decide to display certain customer goals, you will need to show the corresponding needs with them as well.
Why Do Customer Needs Matter to a Business?
A business cares about customer needs because it ultimately leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth.
- For example, the product team will not be able to build the next capability of a product without knowing the needs of the customer's goals. They will need to know the needs to plan their roadmap accordingly.
- The sales team must be in tune with the customer's needs to successfully transact and sell that product or service.
- The marketing team wants to package its story to cater to a customer's broader needs and goals. They will need that understanding of customer needs as well.
There are numerous examples of why the customer needs to be universally understood among customer-facing teams within a business. As a business, close the gap between yourself and the customer and get to know them more intimately.
When Should a Business Identify Customer Needs?
During ongoing customer research, a business should be constantly asking the question. Are the needs of our customers changing, and what does that mean for us? How does this impact the customer's goals? When customer support or service teams are helping customers, they can constantly check in with the customer and ask whether the product or service meets their needs.
A business will want to avoid launching new products or services without fully understanding the customer's needs or risk throwing a lot of money into investments that could turn into costly mistakes.
The fastest businesses do their prep and understand their customers before investing in new products and services. During their development phase, the slowest businesses determine the customer's needs and try to figure it out.
Who In a Business Identifies Customers Needs?
Sales, marketing, and product teams must stay on top of the customer goals and their corresponding customer needs. I expect those teams to talk with customers and continuously identify current and new customer needs for products and services.
The challenge with multiple teams collecting feedback is how you organize that feedback across an entire organization. As your company scales, you must find software solutions that aggregate and group customer feedback in one central location. I know this is a timeless problem that all businesses confront.
But be aware that this problem will grow as your (system) business grows, and it will cause serious operational problems when you want to build out a voice-of-the-customer (VOC) pipeline to drive your CX strategy.
Who Is Responsible to Meet Customer Needs At a Business?
Customer-facing teams in a business are all in part responsible for meeting the customer needs of their customers. But without a coherent customer experience strategy, all the teams would be doing their own thing, trying to meet the customer's needs.
It starts with the CX leadership at a business to create the strategy and then get the teams to execute the initiatives and improve the CX and UX of the products and services offered to customers.
Never before have there been so many products to choose from as a consumer. As a business, it's important to stand out to your customers so they will choose you, not your competitor, to purchase their products and services.
As a Principal Designer, when I journey map, I make it a point to learn about customer needs and ask myself if they are represented in my journey map. What makes customers' needs trickier to manage is that they are numerous and very specific. So when I am mapping, I am constantly asking myself, do we have all the customer needs connecting to the customer goals and, ultimately, the key moments?
A good journey map that accurately paints a picture of how customers interact with a business has to include detailed customer needs. For more practical information about journey maps, read the Triangle Offense post, where I provide an overview of journey mapping and why it's an important CX method to capture customer interactions.
Summary
Customer needs are closely linked to specific customer goals. Customer needs are not standalone data points in a journey map. When journey mapping, ensure your customer goals have the right needs mapped. The different customer needs, such as functional, social, emotional, and financial, impact many teams in a business. It's a good reminder that business is a team sport, not a solo act, and requires very good coordination among the teams tasked with improving the customer experience of their business.
Written by Leo Vroegindewey, B2B CX Consultant
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