Henry Ford is alleged to have said, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” His point was that customers do not always know they want or need something until someone invents it—in Ford’s case, a motorcar. Many great entrepreneurs and inventors have subscribed to this theory. Steve Jobs, for example, rejected focus groups because he couldn’t imagine that consumers would know what products they wanted until Apple showed them.
Once, I stopped in a small shop in Vail, Colorado, to buy a pair of fingernail clippers. As the fellow at the cash register was ringing me up, he asked if I would like a cup of coffee. I didn’t know I wanted a cup of coffee until he planted the idea in my head, and the aroma from the freshly brewed pot behind the counter sealed the deal. Turned out I did want a cup of coffee after all. I made a point of returning to that shop several times.
Whatever your company offers, whether it’s high-end computers or nail clippers, anticipating your customers’ needs is one of the best ways to gain a competitive advantage. And in the realm of customer service, anticipation is even more important, because it allows you to solve problems before they arise. It also sends a strong signal that you understand your customers and have given serious thought to what will make them happy.
Here’s another example of how anticipation can surprise and delight customers. One night I was having dinner at the Four Seasons Resort in Dallas with my business associate Vijay Bajaj, his wife, Reshma, and their ten-year-old son, Armaan. They had just flown in from London and were tired and jet-lagged. Understandably, as dinner progressed, Armaan got sleepier and sleepier. He was just about to plop his head down in his plate of food when out of nowhere our server arrived with a blanket and a pillow. Then, before we could even utter a word, he put two chairs together to make a bed that was just the right length for Armaan to stretch out on. What anticipation! The server saw how tired Armaan was and anticipated that he would need to lie down before his parents finished dinner. And somehow the restaurant had anticipated such moments by keeping blankets and pillows readily available.
One of the best ways to hone your anticipation skills is to observe (or listen to) customers interacting with your co-workers or employees. See what goes wrong, or almost goes wrong, and ask yourself how it might have been prevented. Notice when customers get impatient or sound frustrated. How could that have been avoided, and how could your colleagues have responded better to the upsets?
I recommend that a few times a year you sit down with your team for the sole purpose of brainstorming what products or services your customers might want in the future. Every person on the team should have permission to shout out every idea they can think of, and someone should write them down on a flip chart or a whiteboard. Welcome each idea without judgment, criticism, or evaluation. It might not be practical or prudent to implement all or even most of these ideas right away, and that’s fine. But be sure to keep them on file and review that file periodically. A weak or outrageous idea today may turn out to be a powerful innovation a year from now.
Remember, you are never finished anticipating customer needs. Customers have short memories, and their desires are always changing as circumstances, technologies, and public expectations evolve. Often, once a need is met, customers get used to it and replace it with a new one. If you anticipate and honor your customers’ need for a motorcar—even when they say they want horses—you can anticipate that they will honor your need to keep their business.