In Their Eyes

Home / Publications / Online Library / In Their Eyes

Understanding the customer experience

By Andrea Hill

I’m giving myself a JAVA Bootcamp experience for my birthday this year. No, I’m not learning how to be a barista; I’m learning to program in the JAVA code language. Of course, I employ two excellent JAVA programmers, and I don’t need to personally perform any JAVA coding for my job. So why am I doing it? For the same reason I learned to make patterns and sew when I ran an apparel company, and why I pursued goldsmith training when I ran a large jewelry manufacturer: Because understanding the customer (business customer and end consumer) experience of any business is essential to business success.

More than 70 percent of small businesses fail within the first five years, and that staggering statistic owes a lot to the failure to understand what customers need, how they need it, and why they want it.