Sean McNulty - Mapping Our Customers

Mapping our Customers

By Gearóid McKendrick

This week (20 October), Sean McNulty, CEO of Dolmen was a guest lecturer. Sean shared some of his experience with us about making ideas work and developing new products.

This session was really interesting for us and as part of the session we began working on a needs discovery map for our customers, along with empathy maps and need statements.

Needs Discovery Map

We found this was a great way to look at our potential customers and was not something we had thought of before. It involved mapping out a process in which the customer is involved and looking at the emotions (positive or negative) associated with each step in the process.

This was very interesting as it made us focus on the customer pain points. For our examples we used two different types of users: One was a loyal customer of a restaurant going for a meal and the other was the process of restaurant changing their menu. You can see our needs discovery maps for both customer types below:

Regular Rory – Loyal restaurant customer needs discovery map:

Owner Olivia – Restaurant owner needs discovery map

Empathy Map

After looking at the need discovery map we focused on the empathy maps. This was another useful and interesting too which focuses on the different type of user or stakeholder that might come across our product.

The main aim of the empathy maps is to discovery user needs that are under-met or not met at all. This is done by choosing individual pain points and determining what would be a great outcome for each pain point.

Need Statements

We worked on need statements for the last part of the class. These are statements that focus on the outcome or goal for the customer and how the outcome can be measured. These statements which are redrafted multiple times and are informed by the insights gained from our customer interviews and should be:

• Focused on the outcome rather than a solution
• Specific
• Looked at from a broad perspective
• Use positive and relevant language

The need statements for our business are:

1. Easily gathering useful insights about their customers' spending habits and preferences, and understanding how to use this data to develop/expand their business in a practical and meaningful way

2. Maximising the benefit of existing/proposed loyalty schemes, to both SMEs and their customers, by capturing data to improve customer experience and inform business decisions

3. Making smart business decisions in a cost-effective way, through identifying the needs of their customers