Growth Factorials

All of us come across challenges in day-to-day life. Many times these challenges come with shallow causal explanations. These explanations seem reasonable at first. However, if you accept these explanations, you find that the solutions based on these explanations are often ineffective or incremental at best. Truly impactful solutions are developed when we dive deep to uncover the real root causes of the problems and then build solutions around them.

In one of my previous organizations, we provided online tuition to students. Our renewal rates were declining month on month. This was concerning and when I asked my renewal team, they said that the customers were saying they “didn’t have time for us anymore.” As a tactical response, the renewal script was changed and the team was trained on how to handle this issue. It didn’t help much.

I thought about it deeply. Something didn’t add up. Why was there a sudden shift in customer behaviour? Why were the very same customers having time earlier and not now? What had changed so suddenly?

To find the missing piece in this puzzle, we decided to investigate deeper. We reviewed calls between our team and customers and noticed two types of calls:

• Many customers gave vague responses like “we don’t have time anymore or we are busy with other activities. ” and our team didn’t probe further. This is what the team was reporting to us.
• However, a lesser number of customers gave clear answers to sharp probing questions by our team members. They mentioned that they were going back to offline tuition. It was clearly a pattern, and it made us sit up and take notice. A shift was underway in the market and we had to respond to it.

We immediately got our product team involved in the problem-solving process. When we talked to a few more customers and teachers, it became clear that the parents were actively moving back to neighbourhood offline tutors. As the COVID-19 epidemic receded and people started venturing out, the risk perception in sending the kids out also waned. Slowly and gradually, offline tuitions were making a comeback. What was visible in our personal lives, we had failed to see at work while we were chasing our daily metrics.

Anyway, our teams worked together and soon launched an offline tuition product. That worked like magic. Within three months of launching this program, our renewal rates were up by 50%. Had we not gone deeper into the problem, we would have missed reading the market and responding to the change in time.

Key Lessons for Leaders

1. Surface-Level Answers Can Mislead Don’t settle for what seems like a reasonable answer but doesn’t fully explain things. Probe further to uncover hidden insights. Go deep into the raw data to find patterns. Build your own point of view of the problem instead of relying on other’s POV.
2. Ask Better Questions Equip your team with the skills to investigate customer feedback and data more deeply. Use root cause analysis or the 5-why technique to get to the root of the problem.
3. Understand the Context and the Ecosystem Problems rarely exist in isolation. To understand them deeply, consider external trends, the ecosystem, internal processes, and customer behaviours.
4. Innovate at the Root Build solutions that address the fundamental issue, not just the symptoms.

In summary, when solving critical business problems, build a first-hand problem definition by examining raw data, challenging assumptions, and understanding the full picture. The key is to stay curious, go beyond the surface, find the root cause of the problem, and craft solutions that truly make a difference.