Anticipating Needs
Why do we do this and how can we do it well
My first job was as a hostess for a large restaurant chain. One of the greatest take-aways I gained from this job, is the importance of recognizing and anticipating customer needs. The idea of anticipating need was something identified as a ‘key to success’ during my training - to anticipate what the customer wants before they have to ask for it. The positive impact of this was pretty simple to understand — customer gets what they want and expect, which leads to a more positive customer experience, which in turn improves customer retention, which meant the restaurant was getting more business ie. profit (the tips weren’t bad either). Everyone wins. The restaurant is busy, customers are happy and everyone is successful.
Businesses have always been deeply impacted by the experience of their customers, but in the age of online reviews, the necessity is amplified. The reviews and star ratings from past guests, play a huge role in how someone determines if they will spend their hard earned money here. The experience of a customer needs to be intentionally considered when designing the services.
So how do we know what people want?
This is where we start to see the crossover of anticipating needs and the intentional design of experiences. When you work with customers day in and day out, you start to see their habits and understand their patterns, but where your customers or users are not in front of you every day or where the service delivery needs to scale, a more intentional approach is likely needed. When we try to scale this, understanding customers’ context, culture, abilities and habits become the key to anticipating need, and leveraging a breadth of observations and customer experiences can greatly enhance your opportunity to create a lasting positive experience.
A few years ago, Airbnb launched a new service on their site called ‘Experiences’ where hosts can build experiences for guests and promote them like they would a guesthouse. A guest can select the type of experience they want based on what they enjoy doing and get a curated list of activities to choose from. This concept takes the original concept of Airbnb of connecting hosts and guests in vacation accommodation rentals and expands to influencing and supporting the overall experience of someone visiting a new place. This concept creates a single point of contact to potentially plan out their entire holiday, making it very convenient for the customer / guest. The other benefit from this is gaining more control over the entire journey and experience of a guest, depending on the scope of what they select, their entire time in the new location could be curated to maximize their positive enjoyment, and like the example from working in a restaurant, positive experiences lead to returning guests. This new service offering ultimately broadens AirBNBs user base, provides a new way for local business to engage in the Airbnb economy, and anticipates the needs and desires of travellers when visiting a new location.
This example is one of so many, where businesses get to know their user base (customers), build an understanding of their habits and their needs and create solutions to meet that need. This act of anticipating needs in hospitality is part of the job, but when we take this idea and apply it to other businesses, it isn’t quite as innate and takes deliberate effort and understanding of user experiences to be able to design these experiences and ultimately design products and services that are desirable to their customers. This is what we call User Experience Design (UX).
So back to the question — How do we know what people want. Well… plainly… we watch. we listen. we analyze. and then we innovate. In our company, we use a framework called Design Thinking to take us through the steps of this work and use it to communicate the way we learn about people’s needs and experiences and translate those into positive experiences and then we watch, listen and repeat. It is a continuous evolution of learning what people want and need to create a positive experience, one that is highly dependent on the cultural landscape at the time. For instance, the way that someone experiences your business or service might be greatly different if they are no longer able to go into the storefront, or if they now need to stay home for a prolonged period of time and are reliant on the online interactions of your business.
In a diversifying world and an ever evolving cultural and social context, understanding users is a continuous exercise. People are demanding a new level of awareness and participation from businesses and the standard for inclusion and equity is rising with changes that are impacting ingrained patterns. Keeping up to this evolution takes effort and being able to respond effectively takes intentional design. It is evident then that a concerted effort to truly understand the people accessing our services is essential to success, where if companies fail to meet the evolving expectations, that customers will move onto another service offering. There is a great deal of diversity in our communities and it is becoming more and more obvious that there is a lot more that we need to understand in order to anticipate peoples’ needs.
Inclusion and Equity in design — anticipating diverse needs:
In UX there is often a sticker or a tagline that gets tossed around from Nielsen Norman Group “YOU are not the USER”. While the designer and the individual perspective is important at some level, the humility to understand that your individual experience may not be representative of your customers. In digital design, ‘accessibility’ is commonly acknowledged, but not always thoughtfully implemented. We acknowledge things like using plain language, larger font sizes, increased contrast, tagging images… but there is a lot more that can be done to ensure that the breadth and diversity of the population can successfully use your service.
Back to Airbnb — Just last month they are highlighting a new element to their experiences service stream, “highlighting a collection of 12 new Online Experiences designed by Hosts with neurodiverse guests in mind.” (Airbnb News Online, March 24, 2021). This approach is identified as being in response to the changes in lifestyle as a result of social isolation from Covid 19 restrictions. Many individuals from this community have been impacted by the isolation.
“Neurodiversity refers to variations in the way brains function, process and learn information, and includes individuals with autism, dyslexia, and attention deficit disorders, among others.” — Airbnb News Online, March 24, 2021
This example of emerging services that anticipate the needs, or just plain identifies the needs of a population that might otherwise be lumped in with the masses. You may not be the user. By understanding context and by understanding the diverse needs of their customers, the hosts on Airbnb can meet and exceed their customers expectations.
To be successful in this, you first need to know who your customers are and then you need to understand how they do life, what their pain points are, what brings joy, and how they interact with your service. The result might be a small tweak or a completely new service, either way, the result is a happy customer. Doing the research and spending the effort to discover your customers will positively impact your customer’s experience which as we discussed earlier, will result in positive reviews and recommendations, which in turn leads to more customers and more revenue.
In closing
It sometimes feels simple to anticipate needs when all we see is individual interactions as the influencing factor of the experience. It seems that we know the needs of our customers because we see them day in and day out, but what is evident, is that there is so much more that we don’t know and still need to learn about the people we serve. With the continuous growth and change of our culture, the needs of yesterday are not the same as the needs of today. If we approach service delivery and product design with an attitude of humility and curiosity, and intentionally seek to understand the people we serve, our ability to meet and exceed our customer’s desires is limitless. Being intentional in the design of experiences is the foundation to successful product and service delivery and will ultimately be what keeps people coming back.
