Customer Crossroads

Where can you look for customer innovation opportunities? The hack

One of my favorite places to look for innovation opportunities are the "hacker" sites.

No, I don't mean nasty people spreading computer viruses.

I mean people who have found a way to work around a problem. Or customize a thing to their own liking.

Places like Lifehacker are rife with this, but there are many other sites that have similar clever consumers showing you how they do [something] with a gizmo designed for [something else].

Here's a great example from Lifehacker of people using coffee pots to cook light meals.

Surely this is an opportunity for a simple cooking device -- something the size and power draw of a coffee pot, but with a bit more flexibility.

Cooking breakfast with a coffee maker and an iron

Oatmeal in a coffee maker

Poach chicken in a coffee maker

An entire meal! using a coffee maker and an iron

So ... maybe you aren't in the small appliance business. Nevertheless, looking for hack solutions is a good way to figure out what people need that they don't have.

Co-creation: sharing feedback, honest communication

It's my firm belief that co-creation is only happening when there is a genuine feedback loop, not one way communication. I'm seeing a lot more evidence of this lately.

B2B example of co-creation

I use a hosted Exchange service for my business offered by Sherweb.

Although I find their system baffling at times, it is a solid service for a very reasonable price.

I just got another survey from them, and here is what caught my attention:

1. they told me this is the third phase of their work to gather information from customers
2. they used the first page of the survey to tell users what actions they have taken to improve service since the prior survey

It is so startling to actually have a small business  tell you these things, that it is noteworthy!

Consumer goods

I've recently had similar experiences with other small organizations. AeroPress provided specific feedback via e-mail from a senior guy at the business! He told us what he had heard, and he told us that they were going to be proceeding with a new product, and when it would be available!

Listen, talk, listen again

It's crazy to think that our ideas about corporate communications are so stiff and fossilized that open communication is radical. But it is.

I love seeing smaller organizations really working at this. It shows that you do not need to be a global behemoth to do a great job on listening to your customers.

Getting defensive: something that doesn't work well with customers, or ideas

It seems that all of our news is dominated these days by partisan politics and scandal. For all of us students of human behavior, we're getting a real education!

[Let me just take a moment and apologize for my Mayor, who is not a good representative of either Toronto or Canada at the moment! At least I sure hope he is not representative!]

What I am noticing is -- the more pressure these folks are under, the worse their behavior becomes. The inclination is to stonewall, to defend, to deny, to attack the persecutors. The siege mentality starts to cause people to trust a smaller and smaller group of advisors, and to close ranks. Poorly thought out announcements are made. Those that disagree with managers/leaders are dismissed for their honesty and willingness to state truth to power.

The irony is, these behaviors are almost exactly the wrong thing.

When things are not going well, you need to rethink what you are doing, not double-down your efforts.

When things are not going well, that's a good time to consider fresh, objective advice.

Although hard to get honest feedback, when we do hear something we don't like, we need to give those opinions a genuine hearing. Just because we disagree.

Easy to say, of course. But we all fall prey to this kind of thinking, because our biological systems take over, and we go into defensive mode.

From a marketing perspective, this is not productive. Even in a crisis, we need clear thinking informed as much as possible by cold hard reality, and then filtered through intuition. It's a good time to consider alternatives that might initially seem really crazy, rather than just react.

Okay, so maybe you are not in crisis. But there are few organizations of any size today that are not experiencing tremendous stress because of rapid change and hyper-competition. None of us can afford to react without thinking.

Hard as it is to avoid a defensive posture in our thinking, we need to try if we are to survive. We need to listen to our customers, even when they are saying things we don't want to hear.

The power of small numbers: n=1 insights

I'm a big believer in the power of insights. Insights come from stories, anecdotes, observations. You might later need to verify or deepen that ah-ha moment. You might decide to look for supporting big data. All good. But the individual incident is still important.

When I managed sales people way back in the last century, there was a great saying I learned: "If you see it once, it's a pattern." I believe this is true, mostly. People are creatures of habit. It is challenging for us to change our behavior "just once" -- much more likely that you have actually stumbled into a pattern worth investigating.

Which is why I thought it was very interesting to find out that Jeff Bezos at Amazon reads a certain number of customer e-mails sent directly to him, and that he makes specific enquiry about some of these. One result is that entire teams drop what they are doing to respond. That might seem a bit extreme, but it's their way of keeping the focus on the customer experience.

So a company like Amazon listens to individual customer anecdotes. N=1. To keep focused on the customer.

It's a question we could all ask ourselves -- how do we keep the focus on the customer? How do we do it culturally, not just with processes, or slogans, but really constantly. How do we keep the focus on the customer.

 

Sequencing, another way to innovate the experience

Innovation in a single dimension of experience can be a great way to turn a challenge (aka problem) around and see it from a fresh angle.

Out of home dining is a great place to look at examples of this.

Traditional restaurant dining works along these lines: see a master server (maitre d'hotel), get seated, see menu, order food, food is delivered, eaten, bill presented, bill paid, exit restaurant

Quick service, like a McDonald's, tends to look like this: see menu, order, pay, get food, find a table, eat, leave

Then there are a range of other variants, where servers might bring things to your table after you order at a central station. Nando's chicken is one of these. You order at a central window, then pay, then find a table, then get your food.

There are also places that let you order remotely (hello pizza delivery!), or order remotely for pick up.

Another industry that did this was general insurance. It used to be that you had to have the adjuster deal with your claim before you got any money. Then some innovators decided to give you at least some of the money right away, before the adjudication process.

A lot of process innovation comes from adjusting the sequence of events.

Takeaway tip

Consider the sequence of delivery of the elements in your consumption chain. Write them on a piece of paper. Mix up the papers. Describe a sequence for each random mix you come up with. Try not to reject it out of hand ... see if you can think of a way to make it work.