“Working Backwards” to Drive Customer Experience and SMB Innovation Forward

“The customer is always right” was attributed to and popularized by department store pioneers Marshall Fields (in the US) and Harry Gordon Selfridge (in the UK). It’s a principle that’s aged well. Customer experience was recognized as the cornerstone of a successful organization in the 20th century and it’s an approach that still benefits small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) today.

For Fields and Selfridge, understanding customer needs was a simple case of listening and reacting to demands to improve the customer journey. Fast-forward to the present day, and digitization transformed this into a process that requires collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data from and throughout the customer journey.

As a result, understanding the customer’s needs—and offering appropriate solutions to their needs—is far more nuanced. Advances in technology have increased the number of touch-points in the customer journey and subsequently, the volume of customer data. Alongside this, however, we’ve also seen advances in cloud technology to enable better, faster, and more cost-effective gathering, processing, and analysis of this data.

Cloud technology is empowering SMBs by providing the resources traditionally only accessible by larger enterprises. This enables them to better understand their preferences, unlock innovation, drive growth, and have a more comprehensive customer centric approach.

Putting customers at the heart of your business

The ability of an SMB to prioritize customer needs and preferences can set it apart from the competition.

There are many ways to put the customer at the center of a business. Taking the time to listen, gather feedback, and truly understand customer pain points and aspirations is a great starting point.

At Amazon Web Services, we use “Working Backwards” and a systematic approach to vet ideas and create new products. The key tenet to Working Backwards is to start by defining the customer experience, then iteratively work backwards from that point until teams are clear on what to build and the value it will add to the customer’s experience. More simply, it involves three elements:

1. Putting customers at the heart of the business
2. Embracing a customer-centric approach to innovation
3. Harnessing the power of analytics and cloud computing to solve common business problems

Being customer-obsessed enabled us to tailor our offerings to match the customers’ needs and build long-lasting relationships that drive customer retention and loyalty.

QsrSoft is an AWS SMB customer that took these principles and activated them.

The company’s applications provide back-office support while also simplifying reporting and analytics for businesses within the hospitality, restaurant, and retail sectors. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, QsrSoft’s customers faced challenges in retaining and motivating workforces. The company wanted to provide resources that helped to fill this gap.

Understanding and using this customer need as a starting point allowed QsrSoft to improve on its legacy solution: a restaurant dashboard that facilitates its customers’ messaging across the front lines in near real-time. The company then reinvented the solution to create QsrSoft TV.

Many restaurants have adopted QsrSoft TV and some have experienced a significant reduction in employee turnover. Others have also seen up to a 25 percent improvement in key performance areas, such as sales and service times. One McDonald’s franchisee, for instance, saw an increase of over 1,100 percent in funds raised for its Ronald McDonald House Charities using QsrSoft TV’s gamification features.

QsrSoft showed the combined power of placing customers at the heart of decision-making with cloud technology. Let’s take a look at how SMBs can do the same.

Working Backwards

We believe every business should have a method that can be applied to the innovation and ideation process, which puts the customer front and center.

At AWS, the focus on our customers isn’t an empty idea; it is the very root of our approach to innovation. The “Working Backwards” method is both a mental model and an innovation process, and it works for us. It requires deep thinking about the customer, about the persistent problems they face, and what their long-term needs are.

SMBs can choose to focus on the customer in a variety of ways with this approach. It helps to prioritize customer centricity, respond faster to unexpected challenges, take advantage of new opportunities, stay close to customers’ ever-changing needs, and invent on their behalf in response to direct customer feedback. This is full cycle working backwards.

Harnessing the power of advanced analytics and cloud computing

Using cloud-based analytics and infrastructure can enable SMBs to better understand their customers. It’ll also allow businesses to scale operations, access real-time data, and experiment with new ideas without the need for significant upfront investment.

Using this data can help identify patterns, uncover hidden opportunities, and make data-driven decisions. Rather than launching a new product or developing a new service because customers might like it or because “everyone’s doing it,” businesses can base decisions on data and mitigate risk.

E-marketplace Tradeling, for instance, put its customers’ challenges (regarding importing products to the Middle East and North Africa region) at the fore of innovation. It was able to realize a customer-centric approach by employing cloud technologies, turning customer challenges into opportunities.

Migrating to the cloud enabled the company to reduce the resources its customers dedicate to managing infrastructure. Its customers can now remain compliant and spend more time on innovation, saving money, bolstering security, and scaling to meet demand.

Adopting advanced technology combined with putting the customer first by “Working Backwards” transformed the customer experience and growth of the business. It attracted over 200,000 business customers and rose above the competition to emerge as the region’s largest B2B marketplace.

Embracing customer obsession to innovate

“Working Backwards” is just one approach that SMBs can adopt to take a step closer to becoming a more customer-focused business—it’s important to establish an innovation method that reframes the problem-solving and ideation process best for the company.

Once a business chooses how to focus on the customer, using cloud technology alongside this strategy, will help garner new insights into the customers’ needs and pain points. These insights can help identify gaps and opportunities to develop new offerings and drive growth.

The importance of customer-centricity has a long history. Although there’s still truth in Selfridge’s motto, prioritizing customers today involves a far deeper understanding of their needs and the challenges they face. The ability to do this—enabled by cloud technology and the implementation of a customer-first approach to innovation—presents a real opportunity for SMBs. Approaches like “Working Backwards” are not just helping to create new products and solve customer problems, they are also helping businesses drive growth, profitability, and gain a competitive advantage in their market.

To learn more about Amazon’s culture of innovation, explore on-demand learning on our AWS Connected Community. On the Connected Community, you can also register for events, find customer stories discussing how they’ve used the Working Backwards mechanism, and connect with cloud experts. If you’re still new to the cloud, learn about the value it can bring to your SMB.