I find this all so hard to believe, but it isn’t the first time I’ve heard it: most business leaders/owners don’t spend much time watching and listening to their customers. I was a little shocked when Spout’s research firm – Tec-Ed – told us that they were "pleasantly surprised" when we wanted to sit in on user testing of the site. Surprised? If you are serious about the testing, shouldn’t you be there to hear directly from your users/customers? In a recent newsletter from Mark Hurst of Good Experience, he outlines his reasons you should watch your customers and the value it brings to the entire team:

"Why should we hire you?"

A potential client recently asked me – in not quite those words – what sets the "customer experience" method apart from other user experience and usability vendors she was considering.

I went over the basics of the method – setting business context, conducting customer-led research ("listening labs"), creating a customer-focused strategy – and then I added one more thing.

"While I firmly believe in our method," I said, "our ’secret sauce’ is something really simple. It might even sound trivial, if you haven’t tried it."

The potential client said she was all ears.

"OK," I said, "Here it is, the one thing that most vendors ignore, but we insist upon."

And then I told her:

"We get the stakeholders to watch the labs."

In other words, we get all the decision-makers for the website, or product, or service, to take a full day away from the office to sit in a quiet observation room to **watch customers using their service**. They all watch together, and then they discuss what they observed, after each session.

After more than ten years of customer experience consulting, I’ll tell you confidently that there is no better way to build consensus about improving the customer experience than to get stakeholders to observe customers first-hand, in person, in real time, right in front of them.

Consider some of the barriers that come down, just by getting people to sit in a room together to watch customers:

- "Fiefdoms" disappear. No one argues for their pet feature when they see customers failing (or succeeding) in the same way, session after session.

- Departments talk the same language. IT, marketing, executives, designers all see their customer – in the flesh – the person who pays their salary! – as the person to learn from.

- Everyone sees that customer experience is a *strategic* issue to address, across the whole organization, not a collection of tactical tips ‘n’ tricks for Web developers.

- Perhaps most importantly, stakeholders across the organization understand – from first-hand experience – how important it is to conduct customer research. (It continues to amaze me how few companies ever have any contact with real, live customers.)

Of course, not all customer research is equally effective. My experience is that non-directed research (not highly scripted traditional usability tests) gives the customer the best way to show their experience; and one-on-one research is much more effective in getting honest feedback than focus groups, which are subject to group dynamics and the bias of the facilitator.

But *whatever* method one chooses to use – and they all have their place and their effective use – it’s surprisingly helpful to get the stakeholders there to watch.

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