EIT UM Accelerator batch #2 HUB East delivered its first Learning Session dedicated to Customer-Centric Approach organized by Czech PowerHUB. 

Five selected startups for batch #2 Accelerator HUB East experienced their first learning session delivered by Czech PowerHUB which has tested them how well they know their customer. And we are excited to share a few tips & tricks of this learning session.

First of all, you should be aware of this recommended design thinking process which should be proceeded as follows: understand, explore, define, ideate, prototype, test (1). We think that design thinking  process is an ideal approach to define your customer persona because it stands upon these principles – customer-centric, cooperation and diversity, fail fast and cheap to learn, trust and creativity.

To give you an example ask the people around you: “What is their idea about the best party?” Grill party, Sausages, Wine testing, Game night, Movie night and Popcorn – what is the takeaway for us? That every person has different needs, preferences, and wishes and we need to accept this premises. Based on these findings your are then more capable of identyfing which communication channels, tone, selling points you should address towards them. Why is that importants will be answered below.

Learning Session started.

During this learning session, we focused on exploration and definition of the customer and an immediate test for observation skills give us the score of 3 out of 21 points discovered changes. This tells us how many perceptions we are able to ignore and not remember, though it is so easy to catch them and gain the better picture of your customer.  

Afterward, we did a role-play (2) which worked absolutely amazing. The roles have been split up between startups and mentors, one of them was a potential customer and the second one was the entrepreneur. The one and only aim were for these in entrepreneurs role to find out as much as possible about the opposite side. You should bear in mind that such a type of interview should be in line with these rules (3):

• Be open and friendly.
• Listen more, talk less.
• Look for insights, not ideas.
• Ask open questions.
• Acquire the overall picture.
• Ask why when what which.
• The customer is always right.

We gave to startups and mentors only 10-20 minutes to do the role interviews, following which they should describe their customer in the means of (4): 

• What does he like?
• What does he believe?
• What does he need?
• What does he wish?
• What he doesn’t like?

Who is your customer?  

This question is pretty simple and straightforward, right?  Finding the right answer to this might seem like a very easy and simple thing, but in the end, it can give you a hard time really uncover your customer persona.  And, honestly, almost every investor, partner will be seeking for that type of information. Wrong answered question could be the reason why you are not able to sell more, why your brand is struggling or why you have difficulties with finding partners or investors. 

Well agreed, it is needed.  

Let’s try this within your teams and get better picture of your customer persona!  

Learning Session was not only about customer-centric approach but also about very rich discussion and we were glad to invite to it also the Mayor of Ricany City, David Michalicka, who was presenting the current challenges in his city. 

Many thanks go to our partners SpinLab and ZONER cluster. 

Press Contact Details:

Karolina Kramkova ‐ E: karolina@powerhub.cz ‐ T: +420 604 193 386