“Yesterday I pointed to five dangerous myths about Steve Jobs,” Steve Denning writes for Forbes. “Here’s another one. Apple doesn’t listen to its customers.”
“Thus Alan Deutschman said yesterday in the New York Times about Steve Jobs: ‘He doesn’t market-test anything. It’s all his own judgment and perfectionism and gut…. Again and again, Mr. Jobs has gambled that he knew what the customer would want, and again and again he has been right.”
Denning wonders, “Gambling? Instinct? Gut?”
“Bullshit,” Denning states flatly.
“The reality is that Apple listens very closely and systematically to its customers. Apple is one of the premier exponents of the Net Promoter Score for systematically listening to customers and managing its business in response to what they hear,” Denning reports. “Fortunately, with the wonderful new book being published in September 2011, The Ultimate Question 2.0 (Revised and Expanded Edition): How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World by Fred Reichheld with Rob Markey, we have a blow-by-blow account of exactly how Apple does listen to its customers. Listening to customers is at the center of Apple’s business processes.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Dale S.” and “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
Yeah, what Denning said!
I side with Alan Deutschman on this one. The courage to reach forward, take chances, think different, sweat the details. That is what Steve Jobs brought to the game. Fortunately, I believe that Jobs has indeed been able to instill this into Apple’s DNA at this point.
Apple listens to customers needs and problems but has the patience and creativity to wait on solutions that most customers would never dream of. Some of those solutions come through third parties–ARM chips for slates–and some come from their own genius–iOS UI. The latter solutions usually are miles away from anything a focus group could figure out.
Also Apple ruthlessly tries to avoid half-baked solutions just to say “we fixed it.” iPHone copy/paste being a prime example.
I think the author is conflating two meanings of “listening to customers”. Of course Apple doesn’t ignore its customers. But neither do they base new products solely on what customers tell them they want.
——RM
Agreed.
Also, there is a difference between listening the customers and paying attention to their actions and studying thier behaviors and needs. Not a fan of “focus groups” and I think it was Henry Ford that said, “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.
If you very good at paying attention, you can give the customer something they didn’t know they needed. Apple has many, many successful examples of this but no better examples in my opinion then the iTune, iPods, iPhones and the iPad.
I can’t imagine where we would be without them.
This is exactly what got GM into producing such crappy cars in the 80s and 90s – WAY too much reliance on consumer focus groups.
When you ask consumers what they want, they can only answer in one of two ways:
1) Features from other competing products they like;
2) Something they want to do but cannot because the feature isn’t included
There isn’t any real forward thinking involved in consumer focus groups. There’s no daydreaming. If Apple had used consumer focus groups in building the iPhone, we would have thinner phones, physical keyboards with better buttons, no touchscreens but some kind of built-in stylus that you couldn’t lose, and no apps.
The brilliance of Apple’s products is that Apple listens to what its customers want/need to accomplish as tasks, and also to what customers really would enjoy. Then Apple designs products that accomplish that but also leap forward to make usage even easier and more enjoyable than previous devices.
Pretty sure this Apple myth will persist for quite a while yet, sadly. I mean, there are still people out there who maintain the myth that Apple *stole* its Mac UI ideas from Xerox, apparently unaware of the fact that Apple *paid* Xerox to tour the Xerox PARC facilities and use the ideas they observed during that tour.
And let’s not forget that they were given PERMISSION by to do everything they did!
Every time I’ve made an iTunes enhancement request within a year it’s either been added, or a much much better item has been implemented.. So they either listen very carefully or they already are in place to make their products better and simply wait until the right time to introduce it..
But for every apple product they seem to implement most of the “I wish it did this..” features over time.. You won’t get all the goodies all at once, but if you stick with them they will give them to you.
I hope they listen about doing away with Ping.
The trouble with listening to customers to introduce new products would be a continuous cycle of minuscule improvements to the Windows platform, not the quantum leap required to move things to the next generation.
Take for instance the tablet. Before the iPad came along and broke all the rules, tablet manufacturers would take baby steps and shoehorn full blown Windows OS into a tablet. I can just pick up an iPad, load it with apps and I’m immediately productive – the learning curve is so shallow that I can master it in minutes. I don’t have to worry about the file system.
I used to have a Windows Mobile 6 PDA and let me tell you transplanting the full Windows experience to a handheld format is absolute disaster. Have you tried clicking a Start button on a 3″ handheld? It’s stupid.
Steve Jobs has this mentality of never daring to fail. Ok some products were absolute disasters but that didn’t stop him from perfecting the next great thing. It’s not failure that counts but learning from failure that teaches us life’s lessons. But the trouble with most executives today is the CMA syndrome – cover my ass logic which at most means incremental steps of not daring to fail and thus not daring to bet big. So one iteration looks much like the next.
Say what you like, Android never got touchscreen until Eric the Mole was shown a working model in Apple labs. For all of Google’s engineering smarts, they would never have figured out touchscreen if the Mole had not fed them privileged information. Look at the Android tablets – pathetic attempts at making tablets work where geeky concepts of multitasking and Flash playback trumps usability. Customers want Flash so Google gives it to them. That’s a false garden path if ever that was one.
Listening to customers means that you’re responsive to their needs such as giving them good service when their machine breaks down or answering queries when they have one. Not listening to customer means you have the guts to go with what you think works to push the envelope forward. There’s no better past master at this than Steve Jobs.
Apple listens to customers and incorporates their feedback. But in developing new products, Apple is usually thinking way ahead of its customers, and has a strong understanding of what is or is not achievable. I think Henry Ford described it best: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Anyone who has worked in new product development (I have) should know that a program guided solely by guidance from customers will always be defensive. Most customers speak only from experience, so they are always fighting the last war. That is why companies run by executives from sales are so backward, and that is the main reason that MS is doomed. Input from sales staff is valuable in improving and upgrading existing products, but is largely useless in developing exiting new products.
google listens to its customers too.
it’s customers being the carriers and the advertisers: look at the crapware etc happily loaded onto Android phones…
Listening to customers: There is at LEAST to possibilities to do this:
Hearing: Asking customers.
Skills required: common marketing & research skill
Understanding: This is FAR more difficult (i.e not a common skill) which is trying to live in the customer’s world, being able to see the challenges the customer faces. In short making a INTERPRETATION about the customer.
Apple listens through understanding.
It should be listen and “watch” customers. Even at the stress expense of the Apple employees.
Steve has been known to and has been caught spying on stores to see how customers reacted. Now how many CEO’s are in the bushes outside their corporate stores to get, first hand, customers experience for negative or positive response. At the moment I can not think of any except Steve Jobs.
Steve has moved the bar so HIGH even the media is at a loss to get all the facts out.
Yup, he will probably re-invent the chairman position while he has the time.
I dunno about this “Apple listens to customers” bit. About some things, maybe.
Apple long ago joined the swelling group of companies who make it difficult to reach them. PGP Inc is the gold standard but Apple and too many others refuse to put real email addresses on their web site, setting up spammers as the straw man. There are one or two of those horrible HTTP MailTo forms on Apple’s web site, loved by lazy or incompetent webmasters, hated by all others, but by and large it is extremely difficult to reach Apple. So listening to its customers? I don’t know.
When they took a large sum of money from my credit card in February without permission (someone stole my card details and used it at Apple) I had to send some hard copy snail mail letters and still received no reply. This has left me extremely sad — my formerly-favorite company really doesn’t give a shit about me.
Rationalist bullshit article, IMO.
Of course Apple listens to what customers want (IE: iphone wanted for years), but unlike very other company, Apple doesn’t let that interfere with their desire to build one, or the features they see fit to put in place. Steve has selected a group of designers with a clear understanding of what is *really* necessary as opposed to what sounds good at the moment. Steve says he knows a product is great when he himself LOVES it. He didn’t love the Rokr phone with iTunes. Obviously the board thought it was a good idea, but not Steve, who tossed it angrily away in the supposed keynote demo when it failed. Apple rebuffed the desire to build a phone until the moment they knew they could blow the market away. Steve went on record saying he turned down at least two designs (without OSX), before gambling on what we see today, but he wasn’t going to sell an Apple branded phone he didn’t love. What they didn’t do is ask focus groups what they want and try to cram every feature under the sun just to be able to crow over vain stats (Like *Android does*). The secret to Steve’s Keynotes is rooted in the fact that the products actually are really great (unlike competitors) and therefore are easy to love. The crowd picks up on that difference very quickly.