To better understand and anticipate customer needs, companies like P&G pour millions of dollars every year into ethnographic research. But what if you need insights and you don’t have that kind of budget? Try a DIY technique called From Pain To Gain, which helps companies understand the issues and obstacles around a given product or service.

It’s ideal for improving aspects of your business that customers complain about, but it’s also effective for solving internal pain points in the office. To illustrate, let’s explore a pain point that most of us can relate to: meetings.

Start by writing “Meetings” as your Pain Point at the top of a sheet of paper or a whiteboard. Then, draw a line down the center. Title the left column “Pains” and title the right column “Gains.”

For the Pain portion, think about the issues or obstacles you encounter around meetings. What distracts you from having a positive meeting experience? Some examples might be:

“Meetings are too long or happen too often.”
“Hosts don’t provide a meeting agenda—or they don’t stick to it so attendees constantly go off topic.”
"A decision-maker isn't always present, which means meetings don't result in actual decisions."
Now, turn a few or all of the pains in the left column into gains for the right column. Think about which issues contain opportunities for solutions that could delight people and offer you ways to build the business or save money.

For example, you could address the complaint about meetings that are too long or too frequent by recommending a time limit be placed on them like HBO did. Or reduce their frequency like Sprint did by turning many of its weekly meetings into monthly ones.

For the issue about hosts who don’t provide agendas, consider mandating that a three-bullet point agenda be included in every meeting invite so hosts think through the actual purpose of a meeting before scheduling it.

To address a lack of decision-makers in meetings, borrow a tactic from Bristol-Myers Squibb and empower people to decline any meeting where a decider isn’t present or designated in advance. And consider circulating a polite reminder that emails are for providing info, and meetings are reserved for the express purpose of making decisions.

While Pain to Gain was designed to help people get into the mindset of their customers, it also offers a proven method for addressing employee pain points. To get even richer insights, consider inviting frontline employees or even actual customers to participate in this exercise. Utilize this technique any time you need to find solutions around a specific product, service, or area of your business.

Source : https://www.executivespeakers.com/Admin/news/Create