 Hello, everyone. Thank you for tuning in. In today's session, we will talk about customer empathy as a product manager. I will start with an introduction before we dive into our topic for the day. I am Meha Sharma. I am a senior product manager at Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft, I have worked in fintech and banking industries. So a lot of here that I will talk about has been my personal journey, discovering and learning how different customers interact with your solutions. Also, I would like to state that the information presented here today are my personal opinions and do not represent views of my current or my past employers. So what do we have in store for today's discussion? Today, we are going to talk about what is customer empathy and how important it is for a product manager. How can you embed customer empathy into your designing of solutions and how can you bring awareness amongst your team members? And lastly, we will look at some of the success stories. Also, throughout the presentation, I will use the word solution, product, service interchangeably. But essentially, it all means the solution that your organization offers, which could be a tangible product or an intangible service. So let's define what customer empathy is. It means feeling and looking at the world through your customer's lens. The approach to empathize with your customers can widely vary from the industry, the type of the customer, type of the problem that is being solved. Customer here means anybody who interfaces and consumes your solution, that could be internal or external to your organization. Customer empathy is largely an acquired skill, something that we need to keep practicing and sharpening as a product matures, as we learn more about our users and as we mature ourselves as product managers. Now, let's look at the ways to approach customer empathy. We can do this by thoroughly listening to our customers, what do they do, what they don't do. And this is tricky because you have to wear a hat of someone that's totally different from you, look at problems from their perspectives, then devise an approach to help resolve their problem with the limited resources that you have. What we are really trying to do here is make customers feel heard, that you value their feedback and that you deliver accordingly. And the reason I mentioned here to focus on what customer does not do is take an example. If your audience is not tech savvy, you are a product manager for a banking website for Bank A. Your website's design is super simple, so much so that the customer remembers, hey, the last time I transferred the money with Bank A, it was super easy. I was able to get it done in three minutes. Let me use their services again now. At times, even if the transaction cost of Bank A may be higher than a Bank B, the customers are ready to forego that over a smooth customer service and the speed of execution. So let's see why empathy matters or being more specific, why designing a solution with customer empathy as the focus matters. It truly helps you ensure customers will have an effective product experience. I'll add some statistics to the example that I just mentioned in the previous slide. According to a research done by NetSuite, 74% of people are likely to switch brands if they find the purchasing process too difficult in a consumer retail experience. It also helps you drive the sales up because customers keep coming back, your brand recognition improves, and eventually it helps with customer retention for the same reasons that we discussed that customers will recall a happy experience they had with your solution. And this is also a good moment to increase our product offerings to the customers, which can be done via the usage information that we gather that can help us tie things back of what are the other offerings that can be valuable to a certain user beyond their current choices. And a good example here is how people get tied into the ecosystems of Windows, Android, or Apple. And adding another statistics here is there was a research done by Bain where they said increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits anywhere from 25% to 95%. I'm sure this number will largely vary depending on the industry that we are in, but at least it helps us give some ballpark to work here. Next, take a look at how can you embed customer feedback and sentiments while you're designing your solutions. And first off, we can do that by user research surveys. And this can be also looked at from two different facets. One is the information that you gather from your interactions from surveys or if you have regular check-ins or some kind of open call forums with your customers. And the other way to do the user research is by analyzing the usage data and understanding the behavior, what are the peak times in the activity, what are some patterns amongst your users and there are certain features where a lot of time is being spent. This could again mean two things, either the nature of the feature is such that it takes longer to execute it or perform an action or the users find it difficult to navigate that bit. So these are some vital stats that you can gather through user research. Next up is market analysis. So where we try to understand how the user landscape is changing, what are the key drivers that are influencing the usage here. And this could very well be done by reading blogs of your users or following news articles to understand where the user behavior is leaning towards since social media influences a lot of ways that customers interact with products. Various TikTok trends that we've come across around pandemic are prime examples of this. And also I'd like to point out that not every time it makes sense for every company to follow the new shiny trend but it helps you stay abreast with the trends and helps you course correct or plan your roadmap accordingly. And next are the focus sessions and this is the most valuable face time that we can get with our customers. One way to approach focus sessions would be to break down your users into power users. The second subset could be the users who don't use the product as much. The third could be the ones who are in the middle. So they're not there where you want them to be but they're not there where they're not using the product or your solution as much. This will help you curate ways or on understanding why the lesser usage users are not using the product as much. And focus sessions are important because they make the customer feel valued. You get to build that first hand authentic connections where the customers can be honest about their feedback and such successful interviews will draw out some really good stories to help you go back and plan your roadmap. And us the interviewers, the product managers have a very vital role to play here. And also the recommendation is always to see quality over quantity. So it's always good to have those really five good interviews over 10 where we are still trying to scramble or understand all the information that we now have gathered. I will share one of my past experiences where we visited a power user and spoke to different people within that org who use the product differently. This gave us a good idea of what are the features that are used by them on a day to day basis versus what are the pain points. And the biggest thing that we found out was there was a lot of homework that we had to do in terms of user education. So one more thing that we sometimes do is let's say if we are working on a UI design, we would randomly ask someone from an extended team to look at the design, execute a series of tasks. And while they're doing that, we would observe their eye movements, their hand gestures, what are the areas they're struggling, are they finding it difficult to find a data point? Were they able to find the button easily which does the final action? And how long did it take for them to execute the task? And of course there are a bunch of softwares that do that for you and monitor the gestures, but it's totally different to see that firsthand reaction as a product manager. And the next are issues which taps into the customer service area which no wonder is an industry in itself because of all that it takes to ensure a smooth customer support experience. And I'm not really only referring to the calls, also training the chatbots to capture the sentiments to ensure customer isn't getting a disconnected experience when they choose one over the other to when they connect with you. And there are various other ways to gather this feedback besides what I just mentioned here. You have your internal channels, sales teams, your marketing teams. Everybody has valuable feedback that they bring back from the customers. So how do you synthesize all the information? So imagine we gathered information from various channels. Next step is how do we synthesize to make it more meaningful? So first step always is to identify themes from all the feedback that you've gathered. And also we need to be robust in our approach since the feedback will continue to come in and we have to make sure how do we design our solution to help us continue to grow or course correct when needed. And next to identify factors that will influence your design decisions. At this moment, the problem that you're trying to solve is it where you're trying to increase your customer base? Are you trying to bring in more revenue? Are you trying to improve the customer experience? Or do you want to address tech debt because as a product manager in addition to being a customer advocate, you're also your development team's voice. So you have to strike that balance of prioritization. And next is what I call is our reality check. So we have to prepare a communication plan on how you plan to address the feature launch. What will you be launching? What gets exed out? Is the cut happening due to budget or resource constraints? Identify the customer base that will get affected. How are you going to do your external communications? And some tools that can help here are product thinking and design thinking. Again, these definitely need a session of their own. However, I can briefly describe what each does. So with product thinking, we need to look at the business drivers and goals, the competitive landscape, cost of the feature, how to market the product to your existing users versus your potential new users. And design thinking is going a step further into the detail where you're trying to resolve a specific problem at a feature level. And you can very well have a third tool of your own. It is always a good idea to use these best practices as a base principle on top of which you create your own working tools that work well with your team dynamics or your organizational situation. So how do you bring awareness amongst your team members? So in the interest of time, I'm highlighting these three teams, since these are the three teams that product managers interact with most frequently. However, we all recognize there are various other teams that you interact with before you ship out a solution. So first up is our development team. So the best way is to have them include them in focus session. This will help the development team get a firsthand understanding of what the different customers are. What are the different motivations for using a feature or the solution as a whole? What is different customers definition of success? It will help them get an understanding of the factors that influence the user experience and also having a path of what I'm doing now and how it affects the grand picture is quite fulfilling and would motivate any individual to strive for quality in what they do and the byproduct of it is you have an effective customer experience. And next is our sales team. So sales team definitely knows the best way to empathize with customers and as a product manager, all we can do is encourage them more to have open-ended conversations where you uncover some hidden requirements. The customer might already have a solution for one of their existing problems, but we can look at ways how we can step in and increase our offerings and help them with that. And not discounting the fact that the feature-driven sales conversations are always helpful, but at least it helps us get out of the silo. And as always, we all know the theory of making sure to ask your five buys during the sales conversations and I guess understanding has now shifted to having six buys is always wonderful to understand what motivates a customer to use your product. Next are the stakeholders. They could mean folks on the leadership team or they could be folks on your cross-dependent teams. So the best way to resonate your solution or road map with stakeholders are the real customer stories, your usage data and metrics, since the numbers speak for themselves. And even the real experiences will help you drive a better conversation around why you are requesting or why if you've planned for a launch, why do you have that feature versus maybe some others on your roadmap. So let's take a look at some of the success stories where recognizing customer empathy helped create an effective product experience. So I'm pretty sure everyone here is familiar with what buy online pickup in store means and pandemic has more so made us familiar with these contactless pickups or curbside pickup terminologies. This concept was already being offered by a bunch of retailers or a few in fact discontinued it pre-pandemic because that's not what their customers wanted. However, with pandemic since safety was the number one priority for everybody, the buying experience shifted overnight and order fulfillment through Omni Channel became mainstream for most retailers who started now offering curbside pickups. However, it is still and it was an expensive investment especially if that's not what something that was on your roadmap. Even then it is quite amazing to see how the retailers quickly managed to ensure customer safety and at the same time ensure that their business is also not suffering. And to really facilitate contactless pickups, stores had to step in multiple areas. They had to provide a convenient online user experience, speed of their delivery methods, even upgrade their payment systems especially for the countries where cash is still the dominant way to make payments. And there are a bunch who did not have the capital and the resource to make this shift a reality and we've seen their businesses suffer which again goes to say where whole the customer experience has shifted and for the folks who are not able to keep up they genuinely had their businesses genuinely suffered. And now the retailers who have started offering these curbside pickups they've extended their offerings to more curbside features such as curbside returns. And so it's all about how the retailers have been able to keep up with the changing customer landscape here. So let's look at example number two which is how do you make your team experience what your customers are feeling. So I came across this very interesting article back in 2016. This was a Harvard Business Review article while I was researching about design thinking. This included a study done by IDEO for the consumers energy in Michigan which is a utilities company based out of Michigan. And consumers energy noticed that there were a certain subset of consumers who were not able to pay their utility bills especially during peak winter months. So when consumers energy reached out to IDEO and IDEO then decided to do a case study and reach out to their customers in Flint, Michigan they made some interesting discoveries. So what IDEO thought the way to communicate their discoveries to consumers Michigan is they decided to take a creative approach to instill empathy within the leadership team of consumers energy. So in one of their meetings IDEO gave the team members of consumers energy a fixed number of goldfish and the folks from consumers energy had to pay via goldfish for the choices that they would make for that day such as do you want to take stairs versus elevators? Do you want to sit down and take a chair while you're in a meeting? Do you want to order food? So by the end of the day the folks from consumers energy were trading goldfish struggling to fulfill their task and making some interesting choices. So this gave them a good idea of how it feels when you have limited means and you have to make hard choices and this gave birth to an innovative billing program paired with energy audits to let users make low-cost high impact improvements. The innovative billing program was called Clear Control where the new participants accumulated no new debt and the pilot customers used 20% less energy and their bill reduced by $200 per year and 95% of the participants were able to pay the bill in full and on time. And on the other hand the utility company also benefited by avoiding blade payments, electricity shutoffs. So let me know if you folks found the session helpful and we've come to the end of the session. So thanks a lot for tuning in once again and please feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn and if you just want to connect or if you want to explore more on this topic I'm happy to have a conversation. Thank you very much.