The document discusses 16 small ideas companies can implement to improve customer centricity and innovation. The ideas include learning the language customers use to improve communications, creating customer personas to better understand segments, and rewarding customers for their contributions to online communities. The ideas are meant to help companies implement customer-focused strategies in practical ways.
• Key challenges Sales People face when selling in a Covid-19 Economy; 销售人员在新冠肺炎经济中的主要挑战;
• How to harness your Value Proposition so that customers want to connect with you? 如何利用你的价值体现,让客户想在无法见到 你的情况下与你联系;
• Questioning skills to find out what the customer is really thinking or feeling; 了解客户的真实想法和感受的提问技巧;
• Following through your sales process without seeing the customers.
如何在不见客户的前提下推进你的销售步骤?
Spoke at the Software Architecture Meetup at Bangalore
Most often when you are discussing with customers on your requirements you end up donning the hat of a sales man displaying his ware with the intention of getting your ideas across and eventually the solution. What is the best way out there that you can be seen as a transformation partner instead of someone who pushes what you have in your kitty without understanding his/her true need. That is the wrong way to do the sales game whether you are peddling cloud,big data,AI or plain simple legacy migration into the shiny new thing out there.
• Key challenges Sales People face when selling in a Covid-19 Economy; 销售人员在新冠肺炎经济中的主要挑战;
• How to harness your Value Proposition so that customers want to connect with you? 如何利用你的价值体现,让客户想在无法见到 你的情况下与你联系;
• Questioning skills to find out what the customer is really thinking or feeling; 了解客户的真实想法和感受的提问技巧;
• Following through your sales process without seeing the customers.
如何在不见客户的前提下推进你的销售步骤?
Spoke at the Software Architecture Meetup at Bangalore
Most often when you are discussing with customers on your requirements you end up donning the hat of a sales man displaying his ware with the intention of getting your ideas across and eventually the solution. What is the best way out there that you can be seen as a transformation partner instead of someone who pushes what you have in your kitty without understanding his/her true need. That is the wrong way to do the sales game whether you are peddling cloud,big data,AI or plain simple legacy migration into the shiny new thing out there.
Most startups experience a tension between product and service sales at some point in their lives. While Professional Services can generate revenue and customer insight, they can also distract a startup from its core mission: building a successful product.
This presentation looks at the opportunities and risks associated with setting up a Professional Services team within your company.
The "Genesis: Idea Stage" ebook explains the phase where the journey starts for every startup: the idea stage. This eBook is the first part of the "Startup Master Class" series covering the idea, problem/solution fit, product/market fit and scaling stages.
How Can Customer Centricity Be Profitable?Monetate
Watch the webinar: http://monetate.com/webinar/how-can-customer-centricity-be-profitable/
Marketing leaders crave to know their customers better, focus on the right buyers, and maximize customer lifetime value. So how can you make being more customer-centric work for your business?
Hear Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, discuss the tactical “building blocks” underlying customer centricity as well as important insights about the interplay among them. Professor Fader will highlight a number of actionable suggestions to help companies make effective and efficient use of:
• Customer acquisition programs;
• Customer retention; and
• Customer development.
Learn how to understand your customers at a more granular level by discovering segments that are the most valuable, and then deliver different products, services, and offers to them. The result? Become more customer-centric and more profitable!
Challenges
The digital revolution changes everything. It's the force driving shifts in markets, customers and organisations. To survive and thrive, businesses face a dual challenge: staying ahead of the competition while transforming their own organisation.
Our belief
You need to be customer-focused to compete. We develop strategies around the customer, their needs, their world, their experience.
Our approach
We take a strategic approach in four key areas (brand, experience, content and culture).
Everything we do contributes to building a brand from its purpose to the customer experience. We aim beyond the sale, to gain their advocacy.
We develop resilient brands:
- Build a resilient brand: aligns belief, strategy and experience.
- A shared purpose and values with customers.
- Authentic communications with an engaged audience.
Purpose of the workshop
We would like you to experience the way we build brands at Brilliant Noise. Test some of our tools and exercises so you can take-away something useful you can act on, take a first step forward creating a resilient brand.
UNSTUCK: Use the Brand-As-Business Management Approach to Troubleshoot Your Business is a short guide that introduces six prevalent business issues and the solutions offered by the brand-as-business approach.
A Quick-Results Method for Moving Up the S-Curve and Improving Customer Service.
Widely proven: Fast, Effective and Affordable (under $10K)
Identifies customer touchpoints or Mopment Of Truth (MOT)
Brings Customer Focus to each MOT.
Improves the customer experience to help bolster loyalty and profits.
Description of the S-Curve.
How do I do the workshop? Methodology and Deliverables.
Link to quick self assessment of your service, plotted on the S-Curve.
Also visit www.CustomerExperienceWorkshop.net
The internet is one of the easiest ways to make money, particularly if you want to make
money from your home, or make money in a way that costs little and returns many-fold on
your investment of little or nothing. It has allowed people from all walks of life to make money—big money—and quit their day jobs (or in many cases, never start one to begin with). And surprisingly, making money on the internet does not require the sort of background, education, or experience that most people think it does. Making money on the internet has been made increasingly easier, opening the door for more and more people to sit back, relax, and let the ethereal World Wide Web make their money for them.
A few definitions that everyone who wants to build a startup should know before they change their idea into a product. Basics for every stage of building and growing your business.
Mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs are tricky operations. By keeping these seven crucial questions in mind, companies can be sure that their brand doesn't get lost in the clutter.
How to create a customer centric landing page and get more leadsConversion Fanatics
Lead-generation doesn't have to be a tedious, hit-or-miss process. One of the most effective ways to generate high quality leads for your business is to have a highly targeted, well-optimized, customer-centric landing page.
Great CX requires a customer-centric mindset... and a lot of careful work. This guide is your introduction to the basics: why CX is important, how to improve it through customer feedback and surveys, plus tips from 100+ CX experts and a report with plenty of CX trends and stats—so you have everything you need to start delivering an exceptional experience for your customers.
Most startups experience a tension between product and service sales at some point in their lives. While Professional Services can generate revenue and customer insight, they can also distract a startup from its core mission: building a successful product.
This presentation looks at the opportunities and risks associated with setting up a Professional Services team within your company.
The "Genesis: Idea Stage" ebook explains the phase where the journey starts for every startup: the idea stage. This eBook is the first part of the "Startup Master Class" series covering the idea, problem/solution fit, product/market fit and scaling stages.
How Can Customer Centricity Be Profitable?Monetate
Watch the webinar: http://monetate.com/webinar/how-can-customer-centricity-be-profitable/
Marketing leaders crave to know their customers better, focus on the right buyers, and maximize customer lifetime value. So how can you make being more customer-centric work for your business?
Hear Peter Fader, Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, discuss the tactical “building blocks” underlying customer centricity as well as important insights about the interplay among them. Professor Fader will highlight a number of actionable suggestions to help companies make effective and efficient use of:
• Customer acquisition programs;
• Customer retention; and
• Customer development.
Learn how to understand your customers at a more granular level by discovering segments that are the most valuable, and then deliver different products, services, and offers to them. The result? Become more customer-centric and more profitable!
Challenges
The digital revolution changes everything. It's the force driving shifts in markets, customers and organisations. To survive and thrive, businesses face a dual challenge: staying ahead of the competition while transforming their own organisation.
Our belief
You need to be customer-focused to compete. We develop strategies around the customer, their needs, their world, their experience.
Our approach
We take a strategic approach in four key areas (brand, experience, content and culture).
Everything we do contributes to building a brand from its purpose to the customer experience. We aim beyond the sale, to gain their advocacy.
We develop resilient brands:
- Build a resilient brand: aligns belief, strategy and experience.
- A shared purpose and values with customers.
- Authentic communications with an engaged audience.
Purpose of the workshop
We would like you to experience the way we build brands at Brilliant Noise. Test some of our tools and exercises so you can take-away something useful you can act on, take a first step forward creating a resilient brand.
UNSTUCK: Use the Brand-As-Business Management Approach to Troubleshoot Your Business is a short guide that introduces six prevalent business issues and the solutions offered by the brand-as-business approach.
A Quick-Results Method for Moving Up the S-Curve and Improving Customer Service.
Widely proven: Fast, Effective and Affordable (under $10K)
Identifies customer touchpoints or Mopment Of Truth (MOT)
Brings Customer Focus to each MOT.
Improves the customer experience to help bolster loyalty and profits.
Description of the S-Curve.
How do I do the workshop? Methodology and Deliverables.
Link to quick self assessment of your service, plotted on the S-Curve.
Also visit www.CustomerExperienceWorkshop.net
The internet is one of the easiest ways to make money, particularly if you want to make
money from your home, or make money in a way that costs little and returns many-fold on
your investment of little or nothing. It has allowed people from all walks of life to make money—big money—and quit their day jobs (or in many cases, never start one to begin with). And surprisingly, making money on the internet does not require the sort of background, education, or experience that most people think it does. Making money on the internet has been made increasingly easier, opening the door for more and more people to sit back, relax, and let the ethereal World Wide Web make their money for them.
A few definitions that everyone who wants to build a startup should know before they change their idea into a product. Basics for every stage of building and growing your business.
Mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs are tricky operations. By keeping these seven crucial questions in mind, companies can be sure that their brand doesn't get lost in the clutter.
How to create a customer centric landing page and get more leadsConversion Fanatics
Lead-generation doesn't have to be a tedious, hit-or-miss process. One of the most effective ways to generate high quality leads for your business is to have a highly targeted, well-optimized, customer-centric landing page.
Great CX requires a customer-centric mindset... and a lot of careful work. This guide is your introduction to the basics: why CX is important, how to improve it through customer feedback and surveys, plus tips from 100+ CX experts and a report with plenty of CX trends and stats—so you have everything you need to start delivering an exceptional experience for your customers.
I gave a talk on the role of Design Thinking to leaders in the financial industry. The focus was on user centric thinking to innovate financial products and digital services. (all case material is removed)
Nesta creative toolkit_book_3_choosing_your_pathTẠ MINH TRÃI
Opportunities for young creative practioners and creative entrepreneurs to acquire and broaden first-hand knowledge and skills for the future business initiatives.
In order to support to the growth of the Creative Economy in Vietnam, British Council collaborates with Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Investment & Trade Promotion Centre of Ho Chi Minh City to organize a four-day Training Programme for Creative Entrepreneurs in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The programme has been successfully implemented in various countries worldwide by the leading innovation organization Nesta from the United Kingdom.
Attending the Training Programme, creative entrepreneurs are defined as young people with creative idea/initiatives who start their business and young creative entrepreneurs trading up to 24 months. They should work in any of creative industries, including advertising, architecture, arts and antiques, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, leisure software, music, performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio.
Percy Emmett, a highly experienced specialist trainer and strategist in all areas of creative and cultural industries from the United Kingdom, will be the trainer in the Programme. With the extensive experience with setting up and running creative businesses building annual income of £1.7m, he is an expert in business development and mentoring from idea to setup, as well as change management covering all aspects of personal and professional skills, business diagnostics, business planning and finance.
During four days, participants have a chance to enroll on four sessions:
1. Listening and Values Modelling
2. Customer profiling & Future Evidence Modelling
3. Financial and Relationship Modelling
4. Drivers, Business as a Promise and Blueprinting
These aims will enable them to explore their idea and its viability and to enhance leadership, business planning, relation building, resources managing, marketing and financial skills.
Reducing Support Costs by Turning to the Community (PDF)Get Satisfaction
What are all those numbers cited in customer satisfaction surveys? Are they on the level, or just enthusiasm gone wild? What's the best way to measure the success (or failure) of community, anyhow? What can you accomplish? What's realistic? How do you measure community involvement with numbers? Our second Webcast will deal with the benefits of crowdsourcing and how they might be more successfully measured. We'll talk about how others have done it and how you can do it for your own organization. Come and play the numbers game with us, get your community mobilized, and get them helping out with the help.
VicHealth Physical Activity Innovation Challenge Concept Development Workshop...Doing Something Good
Our slides from the Concept Development Workshop with VicHealth Wed 10 September 2014. Participants, 12 teams, were finalists in the Physical Activity Innovation Challenge. They included representatives from sporting clubs and associations, health and fitness professionals, policy makers, entrepreneurs and change makers. The Concept Development Workshop was the third of a three-part workshop series to build capability in the sector to generate and implement innovative ideas to get Victorians active, and to help applicants for the VicHealth Innovation Challenge to develop their ideas to get the inactive active and reach the hard to reach. Participants were led through the development of a Business Model Canvas for their concept. Learn more about the VicHealth Innovation Challenge here: http://challenge.vichealth.vic.gov.au/
Assignment Consumerism Affecting Innovation DUE 26As we contin.docxwilliejgrant41084
Assignment: Consumerism Affecting Innovation DUE 2/6
As we continue to explore the impact of emerging technologies on business and society, your second assignment is to prepare a discussion on how the new consumerism is affecting innovation in business. We discussed new consumerism last week (see lecture below pg 2-8). The assignment is as follows:
- Explain consumerism (in your own words!)
- Identify a specific aspect of new consumerism and provide detailed examples of how this new consumerism resulted in innovative responses by an organization of your choosing.
- Provide 3 or 4 bullets on ways that companies can 'listen' (and interact with) their customers in order to not miss innovative opportunities. Think like a consultant: if you had to provide 3 or 4 suggestions for an organization to do, what would you suggest?
_____________________________________________
All original writing please and provide your sources.
A business-like presentation / proper spelling, grammar is important.
“New Consumerism”
Overview
With the onslaught of disruptive technology, consumer behavior and ultimately decision-making is changing like never before. The new age consumers are taking control of their journey, discovering relevant product and service information and making decisions their way in real time. With Internet and social media as their weapon, consumers are making sure that businesses have no other way out, than to compete with each other in real time. The behavior of the interconnected consumers is not only changing, it is opening and closing traditional touch points, places, and ways to engage customers in real time and at the right time. Although we are talking about connected customers here, let’s also learn about the three categories that various consumers fall into –
Generation C is building an efficient human network where information and experiences serve as the ties that bind relationships. Therefore, it seems only fitting that firms apply a human touch in their marketing efforts. It is important that firms follow these four steps to connect with the customers:
1 Listen
2 Learn
3 Engage
4 Adapt
How do we manage the emerging trends being driven by these consumers?
Understanding the customers is the only way to develop effective and meaningful marketing, sales, and service strategies. This is the only way a company is able to develop or inspire a vision to provide their customers the satisfaction and experience they desire. Without this, the experience is left to the customer to determine and share.
This creates chaos and confusion in the market. Since connected consumers are the most influenced by those they know, the brand value of a product or service spirals down faster than one thinks.
This means organizations need to be on top of their products, brand - and customers.
The Dynamic Customer Journey
The Dynamic Customer Journey (DCJ) is about businesses building on existing experiences to retain customers. During the journey,.
A Better Approach to Customer RetentionFramed Data
Welcome to part 1 of 6 for our How to Improve User Retention series. Each week, we’ll provide a new post with best practices, advice, and real examples on how to keep your customers happy, engaged, and buzzing about your product. We’ll chat about high level planning strategy, how to apply specific advice, and point you to some of the web’s best tools. Enjoy!
This slide explains about an idea for partner program of tansalink service, "Café de Cloud".
You can obtain the information about the service at tansalink.com
Over the last year, we’ve done several customer insights projects for clients using the 'Jobs To Be Done' framework. We’ve done this for companies in management consulting, consumer packaged goods, and apparel. Doing 60-minute interviews with one customer at a time and distilling that information has been some of the most interesting work I’ve done in my career. Here’s how we do it and why it’s worth doing.
Mahlab Media's Head of Client Services, Roslyn Atkinson, shares her expertise of all things content marketing in this in-depth and thought provoking presentation.
Similar to Ideekaarten Customer Innovation - Marion Debruyne (20)
Companies fiddle constantly with their incentive plans and sales executives are always looking for ingenious ways to motivate their teams. If sales targets are missed, they blame the sales compensation plan and start over. Meanwhile, The finance organization views the comp plan as an expense to manage. That’s not
surprising: Sales force compensation represents the single largest marketing
investment for most B2B companies. So naturally finance tries to ensure that comp
plans have cost-control measures designed into them. Additionally, many companies
respond to cost-cutting pressure from the finance department with incentives that
backfire. More often than not, controls encourage salespeople to spend time with
customers according to the company’s internal needs, rather than when the customer
is ready to buy.
This is the world of the sales machine, built to outsell less focused, less disciplined competitors through brute efficiency and world-class tools and training. Recently
sales has been caught off guard by dramatic changes in customers’ buying behavior and sales performance has grown increasingly erratic. The very approaches that made the sales machine so effective now make selling harder. The sales machine is stalling. Leaders must abandon their fixation on process compliance and embrace a flexible approach to selling driven by sales reps’ reliance on insight and judgment.
Companies have become savvy customers; they have often determined the solution and the supplier they need, and the price they are willing to pay, before the salesperson enters the scene. In this competitive environment, the premium on finding, training, motivating and retaining star performers has never been higher.
Because firms only measure past sales performance, they have limited insight into how a salesperson will do going forward and what types of training and incentives
will be most effective. Failing to forecast a salesperson’s future value can lead to costly misallocation of training and incentive dollars. Many firms overvalue their poor performers and undervalue their stars, which might lead to undervalued top salespeople to slip trough their fingers and into competitors’ arms. This article illustrates a novel method for measuring a salesperson’s future profitability to the firm. Future performance is linked to specific types of training and incentives and show how those investments can dramatically boost revenue.
Social networks are critical in sales. Companies and salespeople can improve
performance significantly by understanding the interplay among the different webs
of customers, leads and colleagues they develop.
The sales process can be represented as four distinct stages, which all require a
different set of abilities and network configuration. If salespeople and managers
understand how networks function, they can pinpoint the most effective network
configuration for each stage of a sale and take the actions necessary to create it and
outshine competitors. In each stage of the sales process, the salesperson’s efforts
come down to two essential and complementary types of network-management
actions: managing the information flow and coordinating the efforts of contacts. This
article offers a framework for systematically managing different social networks, by
matching the network to the task. The article also presents three levers managers
can use to encourage salespeople to integrate the network-based view and make the
best possible use of social networks.
This document summarizes three connected pieces of work by Steve W. Martin, that should resonate with salespeople and sales managers alike. A lot of research has been conducted concerning the right capabilities a salesperson should have to become a high-performing top salesperson. This project involved the interviewing of top salespeople and sales leaders to gather more information
about the attributes necessary to exceed your quota.
This interesting articles suggest that successful salespeople need not always
exhibit extrovert tendencies, nor will salespeople be at a complete disadvantage
if they introverts. The author works on a concept proposed by bestselling author
Daniel Pink and proposes the ambivert (referring to an individual who falls
between an extrovert and an introvert) as the ones who are more likely to be
successful in the long run. Basing himself on a sample of salespeople, Adam
Grant, proves his point and offers some pointers for sales managers.
In this article, the authors suggest that sales managers need to realize that not all sales visits to the customers will necessarily create value for the customer. Sales managers need to realize that different sales processes exist when dealing with customers and the key factor determining the sales process is got to be based on how much value a salesperson can bring to the customer. The
authors go on to identify three different types of sales processes and give reasons as to why value based segmentation is the best way to help your salespeople deliver value not just for their customers but also for themselves.
Based on extensive research, this study by the Corporate executive Board
(CEB) builds on their idea of the challenger sale by providing strategies by
which salespeople can better understand the diversity that exists in the decision
making unit of the customer and work on making sure that the diversity does
not drive apart the customers from a key decision. On the contrary successful
salespeople work on developing a consensus in the decision making unit of the
customer and using this to drive home the sale. The various strategies to help
consensus are then elaborated in the article.
Instructions for Submissions thorugh G- Classroom.pptxJheel Barad
This presentation provides a briefing on how to upload submissions and documents in Google Classroom. It was prepared as part of an orientation for new Sainik School in-service teacher trainees. As a training officer, my goal is to ensure that you are comfortable and proficient with this essential tool for managing assignments and fostering student engagement.
The Indian economy is classified into different sectors to simplify the analysis and understanding of economic activities. For Class 10, it's essential to grasp the sectors of the Indian economy, understand their characteristics, and recognize their importance. This guide will provide detailed notes on the Sectors of the Indian Economy Class 10, using specific long-tail keywords to enhance comprehension.
For more information, visit-www.vavaclasses.com
Synthetic Fiber Construction in lab .pptxPavel ( NSTU)
Synthetic fiber production is a fascinating and complex field that blends chemistry, engineering, and environmental science. By understanding these aspects, students can gain a comprehensive view of synthetic fiber production, its impact on society and the environment, and the potential for future innovations. Synthetic fibers play a crucial role in modern society, impacting various aspects of daily life, industry, and the environment. ynthetic fibers are integral to modern life, offering a range of benefits from cost-effectiveness and versatility to innovative applications and performance characteristics. While they pose environmental challenges, ongoing research and development aim to create more sustainable and eco-friendly alternatives. Understanding the importance of synthetic fibers helps in appreciating their role in the economy, industry, and daily life, while also emphasizing the need for sustainable practices and innovation.
1. Extreme customer centricity
with innovative power is key
16 small ideas with big impact
The ‘small ideas with big impact’ are meant to inspire and to give ideas
on how to turn strategy into practice. Implementing customer innovation
can be a huge change project. These ideas will help you along in creating
rituals, best practices and communication tools.
Collect all 16 small impact ideas, put them together by discussing them
to generate more impact in becoming a successful and innovative,
customer-centred company.
Customer innovation
Customer Innovation is the new book of Marion Debruyne,
Professor at Vlerick Business School and expert in marketing and
strategy, innovation and competition. It presents a unique case
for developing the outside-in organisation to drive your business
success.
The 3x3 framework gives you a practical guide to focus your
business on the customer of today and the customer of the future.
ORDER NOW! www.vlerick.com/customer-innovation
2. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Learn the language
of the customer
Customers leave behind text: whether it is in the emails they send
to your service department, the calls they make to your call center,
the replies they give to open-ended survey questions, or the tweets
they share about your brand.
By analysing the verbatim of text, we can learn a lot about the way
customers word things: what are the exact phrases, terminology
and words they use?
This exercise can help you to transform your own communication
and really talk the customer’s lingo. This can be used again in
marketing messages and copy.
1
3. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Personas
Personas are fictional characters that embody your main customer
segments. Personas help characterise different segments by developing
a story around them. For every customer group you create a narrative:
a name, a face, a picture, and a description of this customer’s
day-to-day life. Personas help to put a face on the numbers and
facilitate
internal communications about the different segments a
company is serving.
Personas help to foster the conversation about customers within an
organisation. They also help to identify different customer segments
and narrate what makes them different on behaviors, attitudes, context.
Do you use personas? Who are the personas in your market?
2
4. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Reward for contribution
When running an online community, reward participants for their activity
rather than for the ideas they bring to the table. The purpose is to create
a culture of sharing (and learning), a sense of affiliation (as well as identity
and status), and perhaps even personal relationships among like-minded
participants. To facilitate all of this, the extent of contribution and commu-nity-
promoting behaviour of participants needs to be rewarded and put
in the spotlight.
At Adidas for example, there is the Insider of the month initiative. The
winner gets a goodie bag from Adidas and a badge to say they were the
Adidas Insider in a particular month and year. Nominees are chosen by
the community, as well as the company. The company advertises their
favourite by creating a story about the person’s contribution and posting
it onto the community showcasing who they voted for. In turn awarded
members usually ‘go public’ thanking Adidas for their recognition.
Do you stimulate and reward contribution and community-promoting
behaviour in your customers?
3
5. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Say thank you!
Participants in co-creation often do not find it important to get rewarded
for their input. They are after openness and gratitude, the need to feel
validated and respected for their contribution. Participants should get
feedback on the results of the exercise, as well as information on what
happened with the selected ideas and insights further. Hence, they
evaluate the exercise as meaningful, having created real value for the
company, and are likely to participate again.
Some companies invite partners or customers to submit insights or ideas
for innovation that disappear in a ‘black box’ after submission. The whole
idea of co-creation is to foster a natural collaborative ideation process,
because it leads to better and richer ideas. If precaution is necessary,
companies should make sure they give feedback on each idea to the
author submitting it (e.g. virtually in external online communities or
face-to-face in small-scale ones) which yields further advantages.
Do you make sure to thank customers for their ideas and keep them
informed on what you did with their feedback?
4
6. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Mirror, mirror on the wall
There is no substitute for direct customer feedback, as the people
manning the customer service lines at your company will testify. But
why reserve the experience of getting direct customer feedback only
to the people in the frontlines?
Make it company policy to have everybody share in this direct feedback
from customers. Raw and direct confrontation with customers removes
the distance that occurs when you only read about customers in polished
summary reports. So make it a rule to learn directly from customers.
For example, everybody in the organisation should listen in to at least
3 customer calls every week. This serves many purposes:
• it’s a signal of the importance of customers
• it is a constant reminder of who we’re working for
• it is a great source of inspiration
How do you do this in your company?
5
7. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Walk through
the same door
The aim of the ‘walk in through the same door’ exercise is to experience
the customer experience you provide in exactly the same way as your
customers would.
It is an exercise to follow the same path as your customer would:
when looking for info on your website, when looking for a product,
when navigating through your store …
Enter your retail location through the front door. In fact, search for
a parking spot first. Go to your website and experience every click
a customer has to make to find the information they’re looking for,
without the shortcuts and passwords that are available to you.
6
8. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Internal crowd funding
IBM has been experimenting with ‘enterprise crowd funding’ where
the company gives its employees a small budget and encourages them
to commit it to each other’s proposed projects. There was a website
that was inspired by internet crowd funding websites, where members
of the organisation could propose projects, and members of the organi-sation
could take their €100 and spend it on each other’s projects.
The idea is to use the wisdom of the crowd and apply it within your
own organisation. As a result, there was a grassroots effort, with people
advocating their projects across the organisation, and all employees
having a vote in which projects were going to get realised.
One of the old IBM mantras goes: “None of us is as smart as all of us.”
Internal crowd funding really uses that principle. Have you already
embarked on the idea of internal crowd funding?
7
9. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Customer Storytelling
So often the informal communication inside a company only relates
negative stories about customers.
“Can you believe the stunt X pulled?”
“Did you hear about the impossible demands Y is imposing?”
“We just had a complaint from Z.”
Customer storytelling aims to counterbalance this and change the
narrative around customers. Essentially, it is internal content marketing
about customers. Successes with customers, compliments from
customers, problems solved for customers, … share them. How?
By creating formal stories about them that can be used in multiple
communication platforms.
Think of customers in your company who would fit this shoe perfectly
and start sharing your first customer story today.
8
10. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Beware of the
‘BOHICA-syndrome’
Companies often set up a customer centricity initiative and are
disappointed if they don’t see immediate results. The reason often
is that the organisation suffers from the “BOHICA-syndrome”.
In other words: Bend-Over-Here-It-Comes-Again.
It means the employees are tired of working towards new temporary
goals all the time, they’re traumatised by the fickle ever-changing
stories by top management. And they see this new story on customer
centricity as just the newest thing, before we move on to the next fad.
As a result, they do the minimum they can get away with, waiting for
this all to blow over.
Building a customer-oriented culture requires time, commitment and
focus. It’s not a short-term project, but a long-term vision executed
across all layers and decisions.
9
11. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
3-minute exercise
When tracing end users’ activities and workflow, a useful approach is
an exercise called “three minutes”. The objective is to learn what end
users are doing three minutes before they use a product or service and
three minutes after. We then look at what they do during the next three
minutes in both directions.
With 3-minute increments, you stretch this exercise until you have a
complete
view on the entire workflow of a customer. This approach
usually combines interviews and observation. It allows you to see the
context and the interfaces (in usage and time) your products and
services have with others.
So the focused observation is about:
• What products and services are used together with ours?
• What products and services are used immediately before and after
ours?
• How well are these products and services seamlessly integrated with
each other?
10
12. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Astonishment report
When new employees join, they can still look at the organisation with
a virgin eye. They are not hindered by the curse of knowledge and can
look with a fresh perspective.
The astonishment report tries to capture that fresh perspective.
It is a report that new employees are asked to write up after just
a few months within the organisation. It describes what surprises
them, what they find odd, what was unexpected. It is a reflection
on the things they would approach differently.
Are you ready to have a mirror held up to you?
11
13. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Reverse mentoring
Follow in the footsteps of companies like Cisco, Ogilvy & Mather and
GE. In an effort to school senior executives in technology, social media
and the latest workplace trends, many businesses are pairing upper
management with younger employees. The senior execs stay up to
date on how the younger generation uses communication technology.
At the same time, they feel the pulse of younger recruits within the
organisation. The junior mentors gain access to a senior executive
level where they rarely get heard.
The benefits? Better workplace relationships, no different speeds in
adopting new technology and employee satisfaction.
12
14. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Wall of shame
The wall of shame serves the same purpose as a wall of fame: to make
a showcase in a public spot with a lot of passers-by. But it shows the
failures of the company instead of the successes: the products that
did not work, the projects that were killed, the early attempts of the
company’s current products …
The wall of shame is a way to celebrate failure, and not hide the
projects and initiatives that were not successful. By showing them we
demonstrate there is no shame attached to failure, there is only shame
attached to a lack of trying. The wall of shame shows that success
was inevitably preceded by failed attempts. It illustrates the saying:
success is for 99% failure.
13
15. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Post mortem analysis
Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Products at Google,
asks each of his teams to do a post-mortem analysis of a failure and
publish it to everybody else. Mistakes should not be buried or hidden.
There are more learning opportunities in mistakes than in successes.
But the learning only happens if we are willing to take a closer look,
understand exactly what went wrong, so we can prevent this from
happening in the future.
14
16. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Hire for diversity
“Diversity is your best defence against myopia.” The way to break
through a set mental model is to bring in different ones. Do you find
yourself in an environment where all your colleagues have worked
in the same industry (or even the same company) for years? It’s no
surprise then that a common mental model has emerged, and that it
is difficult to change. By hiring a diverse set of people, you can make
sure new deviant voices are brought in.
This can be done by hiring from outside the industry, by encouraging
diversity in demographic profile, or even better, hire from the same
profile as your customer is. In a B2B environment, this means hiring
people who have experience in your customer’s industry instead of
your own. Like a Trojan horse, they will make sure that the customer
perspective comes forward.
15
17. Customer Innovation: small ideas with big impact
Fake it till you make it
A working prototype or producible product is not required to already
do smart real-life experiments. Find ways to work around the problem
of not having the actual product, and still doing realistic market tests.
Why not gauge customer interest by putting a ‘keep me informed’
button on your website? Or create a fake prototype: a real-life user
interface with a fake back-end. It looks like it works, but the back-end
functionality is missing. The fake prototype can already be put in
users hands to get feedback on.
16