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Understanding Your GenAI Customers

Description

Understanding Your GenAI Customers focuses on identifying who your GenAI users are, what they need, and how they interact with AI-powered solutions. It involves gathering and synthesizing qualitative and quantitative insights to inform solution design, adoption strategies, and support models.

Why it's Important

Too often, GenAI solutions are built based on internal assumptions rather than actual user needs. This disconnect can lead to low adoption, user frustration, and wasted investment. By deeply understanding your customers – whether internal teams or external clients – organizations can design more intuitive, relevant, and high-impact GenAI experiences. A customer-informed approach ensures that solutions are not just technically impressive, but actually solve meaningful problems and fit seamlessly into user workflows.

Why it's Challenging @ Scale

  • Fragmented Data Sources: Customer insights often live across disconnected platforms, making it difficult to create a unified view.
  • Lack of Qualitative Understanding: Organizations tend to over-rely on usage metrics and miss context-rich, qualitative feedback.
  • Rapidly Evolving User Expectations: As GenAI becomes more familiar, customer expectations shift quickly – and inconsistently across segments.
  • Overemphasis on Technical Features: Teams may focus on AI capabilities instead of solving for actual user pain points.
  • Limited Customer Research Capabilities: Many GenAI initiatives are led by technical teams with limited UX research experience.

Complexity

High: Maturing this capability requires cross-functional collaboration, iterative user research, and continuous refinement of both insights and solutions.

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Taking Action

Though most organizations begin their GenAI journey with significant knowledge gaps, there are targeted actions that can be taken to accelerate the process. Select your group’s current maturity, based on your assessment results, and act today.

The most important part of any journey is starting… To move from “Exploring” to “Experimenting”, focus on the following key actions:
  • Explore Key Concepts & Best Practices: Complete the Exploring the Keys to Winning with GenAI workshop (2 hrs.) to understand foundational key concepts and explore applied best practices.
  • Developing a Clear & Compelling GenAI Vision.
  • Developing an Integrated Strategy & Acceleration Plan.
  • Productizing High-Impact GenAI Solutions.
  • Architecting the Enterprise Capabilities to Win with GenAI.
  • Ensuring You Have the Integrated Insights to Win with GenAI.
  • Define Your Action Plan: Outline concrete, prioritized steps your organization will take to implement your GenAI Customer Strategy.

Jumpstarting Your Plan

  • Define your accountable leads), their roles, responsibilities, and committed capacity.
  • Deliver your first 90-day quick wins.
  • Configure your Delta 7/28 Plan module.
  • Define your measures of success and insights plan.
  • Build and kick off your change and comms plan.

Targeted Activities

  • Run your target customer segmentation (GenAI-ready segments)
  • Build your JTBD and persona pack for priority segments
  • Execute your prototype and Wizard-of-Oz user testing for GenAI experiences
  • Deliver Quick Wins: Small, high-impact GenAI projects that can demonstrate tangible value in a short time frame.
  • Host Customer Listening Sessions: Facilitate structured conversations with key user groups to identify needs, pain points, and expectations.
  • Build Lightweight Personas: Create informal, rapid personas to guide early-stage GenAI solution development.
  • Map Customer Journeys: Draft simplified customer journeys that identify where GenAI could remove friction or create value.
To move from Experimentation to “Lifting-Off”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Complete one or more of our Deep Dive Courses: Begin exploring key concepts and best practices, including:
  • Nail It Before You Scale It: Assess and optimize your solution or process before adopting it at scale.
  • Assess Your Proposed Solution or Process: Validate that customer needs, motivations, and pain points are reflected in your current GenAI prototype or pilot.
  • Define in-scope Processes and Guardrails: Establish customer data privacy boundaries and UX standards for GenAI usage.
  • Close any Data or Measurement Gaps: Identify missing customer feedback loops or unclear usage signals and develop a plan to collect them.
  • Define Your Adoption & Scaling Plan: Create a structured roadmap for how GenAI solutions will be rolled out across teams, workflows, or business units.
  • Define Your Phased Implementation Plan: Design a staged rollout approach tied to specific user segments, use cases, or business units.
  • Build Awareness and Finalize Enablers: Equip frontline teams with training and FAQs to confidently support GenAI rollouts.
  • Operationalize Your Comms Plan: Create a communication plan to share success stories and next steps across user communities and leadership.
To move from Lifting-Off to “Accelerating”, prioritize the following actions:
  • Formalize Your Best Practices: Document and standardize what’s working to ensure consistent, scalable success across teams and use cases.
  • Document Insights from User Research: Summarize learnings from customer interviews, surveys, and usage analytics in a central, accessible resource.
  • Create User-Informed Design Guidelines: Develop a GenAI UX checklist based on what customers find intuitive, useful, or frustrating.
  • Build and Share Customer Personas: Formalize customer segments to guide design, messaging, and rollout plans.
  • Accelerate Your Adoption: Intensify efforts to embed GenAI across your organization by expanding use cases, increasing user engagement, and removing adoption barriers.
  • Scale Across Adjacent Teams or Roles: Identify additional teams with similar needs where successful GenAI solutions can be applied.
  • Empower Champions with Toolkits: Equip GenAI advocates with presentation decks, FAQs, and how-to guides to accelerate peer-led adoption.
  • Address Resistance Points Directly: Use customer feedback to identify remaining blockers and co-design solutions with user input.
  • Celebrate Your Wins: Publicly acknowledge team accomplishments to build and sustain adoption momentum.
  • Spotlight Customer-Centric Success Stories: Share examples where listening to users led to significantly better solutions or faster adoption.
  • Feature Cross-Functional Wins: Highlight collaboration between technical and business teams that unlocked value for customers.
  • Recognize Feedback Contributors: Acknowledge employees or customers who shared meaningful feedback that shaped GenAI initiatives.
The “Accelerating” stage represents “Target State” for many capabilities. “Breaking Away,” on the other hand, suggests that the specific capability represents a clear competitive advantage for your business.
  • Streamline & Embed: Integrate GenAI into core workflows while eliminating friction points to make usage seamless and routine.
  • Embed Customer Insight Loops into Workflows: Ensure feedback and behavioral data flow continuously into design, development, and iteration cycles.
  • Standardize User-Centric Design Reviews: Make user research a required checkpoint in the GenAI development lifecycle.
  • Operationalize Personas and Journey Maps: Integrate customer personas and journey touchpoints into product roadmaps and delivery artifacts.
  • Leverage Automation: Use GenAI-powered tools and workflows to streamline repetitive tasks, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce manual effort.
  • Automate Insight Collection and Tagging: Use AI tools to summarize and categorize customer feedback from multiple sources in real time.
  • Enable Proactive Support Experiences: Apply GenAI to pre-emptively identify when users need help and provide tailored interventions.
  • Streamline Onboarding with AI: Use GenAI to personalize training and onboarding based on role, skill level, and previous interactions.
  • Evolve & Further Accelerate: Continuously refine GenAI strategies based on insights and outcomes, while expanding into more complex or high-impact use cases.
  • Revisit Customer Segmentation Models: Use real-world data to update assumptions about user needs, usage patterns, and support preferences.
  • Expand into Complex Workflows: Identify multi-step, high-friction customer tasks where GenAI can create breakthrough experiences.
  • Institutionalize Learning Loops: Regularly review GenAI project outcomes to improve how customer insights are gathered, interpreted, and acted on.

Key "Watchouts"

  • Assuming You Know Your Users: Designing based on internal assumptions can result in low adoption and misaligned solutions.
  • Overlooking Qualitative Feedback: Relying only on analytics misses the “why” behind user behaviors.
  • Ignoring Internal Customers: Many GenAI users are internal teams-failing to treat them as customers can lead to poor experiences.
  • Skipping Discovery Due to Speed: Skipping user research to move faster can lead to rework and disengagement.
  • Forgetting That Users Change: What works today may not meet evolving user needs-insights must be continuously refreshed.

Targeted Benefits

  • Higher Adoption Rates: Customer-informed solutions are more likely to be embraced and used.
  • More Valuable GenAI Products: Solutions built around real needs deliver measurable business impact.
  • Faster Iteration Cycles: User feedback shortens the path between release and refinement.
  • Reduced Risk of Failure: Insight-driven development helps avoid costly misfires.
  • Improved Customer Experience: GenAI becomes a tool users trust and want to use-enhancing satisfaction and loyalty.

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Eddie
Accelerated Innovation

Hi, I'm Eddie 👋

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