by: Idris Mootee
Here you’ll get a three-minute guide to "Customer Experience Innovation". Not only does it need a better definition as it is often casually used to describe "sales automation" or generally referred to as "usability design".
As digital convergence is changing the way we conceive of and consume communication, entertainment and media services. How can organizations evolve their service offerings, their networks, their customer communities and their entire organization…and stay competitive while creating and delivering an integrated, innovative, engaging customer experience?
Today’s business climate is radically changing the way companies interact with customers. I encourage you to read the book Best Face Forward by Jeffrey Rayport and Bernard Jaworski. They refer to customer interfaces as the next frontier of competitive advantage. (To me, Jeffrey was the most entertaining prof at Harvard and I was telling everyone in the class then he was more of an entertainer than a B-School prof. He was very passionate about "service management" back in those days.) Companies today need a CX innovation strategy that will allow them to create, communicate, and capture value through all "customer interactions". The CX innovation strategy defines the elements of the customer experience that drive bottomline performance by segmenting the customer base according to responsiveness; level of engagement and brand relevance. It also brings into consideration the use of customer advocacy and empowerment. The demand chain-operating model examines how to organize the client’s internal and external resources to develop and manage customer experiences, and defines which elements of the demand chain should be managed internally or externally. Used together, these two elements define the boundaries and requirements for all customers’ interactions, management systems, business processes, organizational design, and enterprise technology systems. The main point is: the value of the service you deliver increases exponentially when you improve the experience design.
CX innovations are often associated with risky decisions and too many unknowns, the way to deal with it is a "design-thinking-business-strategist" will make decision based on their informed intuition (some form of ethnography) and then cross-validate them with business and customer economics. They will not wait for the perfect data. This risk-killing or discovery-driven planning approach to CX strategy combines with an informed set of possible futures of the converging landscapes are the key to successful customer experience innovation.
Organizations need to embrace risk in order to innovate and grow. Anytime we’re bringing new things in to the business we introduce risks. There are risks of whether the technology will work; risks of customer talking over control of the brand; risks of customers adopting too slowly and risks of integration within the open-networks of partners. Risks are everywhere. The key is to learn to live with the risks and embrace it.
Successful customer experience innovation requires effectively managing risks along the development cycle. We need to combine D-School thinking with B-School thinking. Design thinking starts with customer’s unmet needs and may be the most effective way to mitigate risk, not marketing research or endless quantitative studies. Rapid prototyping that let’s you identify problems and solve them early on. By crafting and telling a compelling customer story is part of the strategy development approach, and this is not typically what strategy consultants do. The questions is ..who will be the master of this new art?
Original post: http://mootee.typepad.com/innovation_playground/2007/05/three_minute_gu.html
