What Cleaning Cheerios Out of My Toddler’s Car Seat Taught Me About The Customer Journey
We are first-time parents and our son is now a toddler. As we transitioned out of ‘baby bucket’ age, a topic that consumed many of our sleep-deprived-yet-somehow-conscious hours was research into convertible car seats. We reviewed NHTSA reviews and ratings (Pro Tip: All car seats that you see on the market have met federal child restraint safety standards are considered equally safe), booster seat conversion options, cup holder accessories, padding and print options and more in an attempt to find the ‘right’ seats. We finally decided on a seat, purchased and installed it, and everything was fine. Until we realized that one of the most painful features (or lack thereof) was one nobody had told us we’d care about.
Fast-forward 6 months to our first family road trip. In an effort to keep our son pacified after he awoke from his nap with 2 hours of driving left, we fed him a steady stream of goldfish, cheerios and other snacks. 50% of which ended up in the bottom of his seat. Which brings us to the inspiration for this article.
3 hours, 12 Youtube videos and an untold number of expletives later, the car seat was cleaned and reassembled. After my blood had cooled from a steady boil, I wondered: how is it that nobody, in the repeated baby store visits and online research, warned us about this? In all of the discussion of car seat features, pros/cons and ratings, did nobody mention how much ‘ease of cleaning’ will matter to us in the future? Did nobody consider that the last thing a sleep-deprived, frustrated parent would want to do is try to spend precious hours extracting the cushions out of the seat? We would have shed blood to avoid that awful experience; yet it was as if the car seat industry didn’t know this was a problem.
Recency Bias: What Happens Last Matters Most
In product management, there is almost always a focus on the initial sale; the specifications, features and benefits that will help close the deal. Those are important – but should not displace the consideration of later stages in the customer journey – including, in the case of car seats, what happens when first-time parents try to clean a cheerio-filled seat for the first time, months after the purchase, in the middle of the night.
In human beings, recency bias means that recent, or shorter-term memories are weighted more heavily than more distant, long-term ones. In other words, your most recent experiences weigh more heavily on your perspective than those of the more distant past. In the context of the car seat experience, what it means is this: if you’d asked me for my opinion about our car seat in the weeks or months after ‘the cleaning experience’, I wouldn’t have been likely to mention any of the benefits we’d researched – the cup holders, the extra padding, the color scheme. I’d have told you about the awful time we had trying to extract ground-in snacks from the seat.
Think Of The Whole Journey
This is the point that product managers should take away: it is crucial to think through the entire lifetime of a product from your customer’s perspective; from pre-purchase research and consideration through the purchase process, to initial use, to maintenance and repair (even if it’s months or years later), and ultimately through to the upgrade or disposal of the product once the customer is done with it. Creating product requirements that consider each stage of use will not only avoid the latent rage of a customer, but it is an opportunity to continue delivering new value, reinforcing reasons for loyalty and even fostering advocacy long after the transaction is complete.
As an exercise, try this: Take a current product that you manage, choose a customer persona and think through each of the below stages (feel free to add, relabel or remove stages as it applies to your product):
- Awareness and Discovery
- Research and Vetting
- Purchase
- Initial Use
- On-Going Use
- Maintenance/Repair
- Upgrade/Transition To Replacement (including disposal, if relevant)
For each stage, identify the customer activities and needs, and then gauge the experience a customer would have in these activities with your product today. How far did you get before you started to cringe? In many cases, customer experience declines after stages #3 or #4 above simply because the requirements of the subsequent stages don’t typically get much attention. And while it is of course critical to ensure you nail stages #1-3 to sell anything to anybody, recency bias tells us that the later stages will have an enormous impact on customer retention, referrals, advocacy and long-term loyalty.
And for first-time parents in the market for car seats: before you buy, ask the salesperson how easy it is to clean the seat when it is full of cheerios.
For examples of customer journey maps and how to use them, see the following resources:
- “Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience” in the Harvard Business Review.
- “User Journey Mapping” on Product School.
- “Customer Journey Map Component for Product Managers” on Medium.
Adam Shulman is a Product Manager with extensive experience in software/hardware systems and a passion for music and audio technology. He currently leads the Installed Systems business at Bose Professional and has been a member of the BPMA since 2016.
