Customer Satisfaction 1 — Identifying the Customer

1. Who Is Your Customer? The Washing Machine

"Identify your customer" sounds like one of those statements that is technically correct and practically useless. The user is the customer — everyone knows that, and management knows it best. But the real world is more complicated than that equation.

An office worker in the city buys a washing machine for his parents in the countryside. The person paying — the son — wants the machine to reduce his parents' physical labour, at a fair price. The people using it — the parents — want it simple, so they don't have to think too hard, and comfortable enough to make daily life easier. And the small child in the house may treat the machine as a great hiding place; there is no shortage of tragic cases of children climbing into washing machines.

The payer, the user, and the person who could be hurt are all "customers", and their core needs are completely different. The son cares about value for money. The parents care about ease of use. Safety — preventing a child from climbing in — will not be raised by either the buyer or the user. Only when the designer asks the right questions, separates the three roles one by one, and identifies both the stated and the unstated needs, does the machine become one people want to buy, want to use, and that is safe for everyone.

2. Stated and Unstated Needs: Safety Is the Customer Everyone Forgets

Customer needs come in two layers. Stated needs are what customers can articulate: "it must save power", "it must be quiet", "the drum must be big enough". Unstated needs are what they never say but expect to be there — sometimes without even being aware of it — and whose absence causes serious damage.

Safety is the most typical unstated need. Nobody buying a washing machine says "please make sure my child cannot climb inside" — not because they don't care, but because they assume it should already be true. The elderly user doesn't mention it either — not out of indifference, but because they assume the designer has thought about it. Yet safety incidents keep proving a brutal rule: when an unstated need is missed, the price is the highest. Safety is not a bonus. It is the floor beneath the floor.

Seen through the KANO model, safety straddles two categories at once. It is a basic factor — fail it and the product is fatally flawed. But identifying it is as hard as identifying a delighter — customers never tell you, and the designer has to derive it backwards from real usage scenarios. Digging out unstated needs and building them into the product definition is what separates a product customers merely tolerate from one they are satisfied with. Finding those needs and landing them in the technical solution is exactly the divide between an average product and a good one.

3. External and Internal Customers: The Half Nobody Watches

Beyond the external customers who pay and use, every professional also has internal customers: the next process downstream, the functions you collaborate with, the stakeholders inside the company. Internal customers have the same two layers of need. Delivering conforming work on time is the stated, basic need. Communicating progress proactively and flagging risks early is the unstated performance need. Anticipating what they need before they ask, and proposing something better than expected, is the unstated excellence need.

Design Engineering and Production: A Typical Internal-Customer Case

Design engineering usually treats the external customer or end user as its customer, and making the product meet the functional requirements is simply the job. But that view is incomplete: the design result also goes to production. Drawings, product specifications and other design documents are received, above all, by the shop floor. Production is therefore a major internal customer of design engineering.

Look at the design through production's eyes and the verdict can differ sharply from the end-user view. Production cares about manufacturability and ease of manufacture. When a design slips, engineering changes follow; in bad cases production stops, and the loss is significant. For this internal customer, the design objectives should focus on the correctness, completeness and self-explanatory quality of the documents — plus the training needed to make sure production staff actually understand the product knowledge behind them.

Only goals built this way satisfy production, reduce friction and raise efficiency. The metrics are measurable: fewer engineering changes, faster resolution of production-related product issues. These apparently "extra" efforts — making drawings self-explanatory, arranging training — are precisely the unstated need being met. They are not hard KPI line items, yet they directly determine how smoothly functions work together and how efficiently the company runs.

Much of the misery people experience with customers comes from one blind spot: treating all customers as one undifferentiated crowd. A design engineer who sees only the end user and ignores the shop floor can turn an exquisite drawing into waste paper in the workshop — because it cannot be produced efficiently. Talk to different customers with the same script and they will conclude that you are confused. Separate the customers, find each one's needs, and match the communication to each — even where the needs interact, the picture immediately becomes clear.

That takes one key shift: from self-centred effort — "I gave you what you asked for, I worked hard, and I feel wronged" — to genuinely customer-centred collaboration. Ask the other side: what support do you want from me? What are you trying to get from me? Once both of you stand at the same height with the same understanding, you can get the job done together. That is the crossing from "I do it for you" to "we do it together".

4. If You Cannot Identify the Customer, You Cannot Satisfy Them

Customer satisfaction does not start with "how can we do this better". It starts with "who are we doing it for". The washing machine tells us that when one product has to serve a payer, a user and everyone exposed to the risk, missing any one of them leaves a fatal blind spot in the design. The design-to-production case shows the same thing inside the company: customers exist not only outside the building but at the next workstation. And safety, the archetypal unstated need, reminds every designer that the needs customers never voice are the ones that must never go wrong.

External or internal, stated or unstated, the core principle is one: understand the people first, then talk about how. Identifying your customer is not a multiple-choice question — it is the only entrance to satisfying them. Once every customer has been placed in their seat, the stated needs voiced and the unstated ones unearthed, what you deliver stops being a product that "meets requirements" and becomes a promise people can rely on.