Posts with the tag 'innovation'
Does anyone take seriously that poster about customer centricity hanging over the copier?
“Centricity” implies focusing your attention on someone and responding in a relationship-nurturing way.
That ex you dated in school and who demanded your attention all the time didn’t work out. Most of us have to divide our attention among our siblings, spouses, children, in laws, bosses, colleagues…and customers.
So, when someone hangs a poster in the copy room that says, “We are Customer Centric,” I have an out of body experience. I envision myself standing in a Dilbert cartoon.
This brings me to my first point.
No one can be customer centric all the time.
If you were, you’d get fired.
Our job descriptions tell us how we fit in the organization. Customer centricity might be mentioned. But, the bulk of our job responsibilities consist of responding to colleagues, bosses and deadlines. Not customers.
Imagine a coworker in marketing, IT, accounting or production who is customer centric all the time. You’ve repeatedly asked him for that report. He’s not actually ignoring you. It’s just that he’s customer centric. Not you-centric. His boss gets the same treatment.
How long do you think it would take for this guy to be voted off the island?
The only exceptions might be sales people and customer service reps. If I have to borrow someone’s watch, I’ll hunt around for a Timex in sales or customer service. Those employees deal with customers every day and know the most about what they go through.
Back to our job descriptions…
We have to schedule client executives for slivers of customer centricity one to three months in advance. That’s because executives’ calendars are chock full of organization centric meetings, projects, emails and reports.
It takes weeks to schedule a workshop. This brings me to my second point.
Customer centricity happens for a few, rare moments. You have to make the most of them.
My job is to make moments of customer centricity payoff in these ways:
1. Align managers on what they need to know
2. Imbue them with an accurate, empathetic understanding of what customers go through
3. Identify opportunities to surprise, attract and retain customers
4. Resolve misalignments that could undermine innovation efforts
5. Frame and prioritize customer experience improvements
6. Plan and implement initiatives
If this were easy, everyone could do it. I’d be out of a job. It’s not easy. It’s hard because we have limited time to make progress at each step.
We also need to apply several skills simultaneously: customer experience research, change management, strategic planning and business process design, for example…which brings me to my last point.
Delegating customer centricity to people who can’t advance innovation efforts in compressed time frames won’t get your organization very far.
Often, customer centricity is assigned to a functional area with a deep, narrow portfolio of skills. Marketing research, customer service or human resources are common assignees. The new “customer centricity department” will put more meetings on your calendar. They may hang nice posters in your copy rooms. They may report on their heroic efforts, which will delight your executive team.
But, their chances of marshaling organizational resources to innovate anything meaningful to customers are remote…possibly near Pluto.
Customer centricity is a momentary, shared state of empathy with customers. Creating and leveraging these moments depends on unique combinations of skills and methods. They also require that the highest levels of leadership be engaged and energized by rapid progress.
If you’re committed to customer centricity as inspiration for improving your customer experience, please contact me…when you can find a minute.
Jason M. Sherman is president of Cleveland-based, Whyze Group. Whyze Group is a leading provider of qualitative, customer- and user-experience research and innovation workshops to Global 2000 clients. The company has been recognized by the Baldrige National Quality Program, business associations and numerous business media as a leader in research and innovation.
Connect with Jason on Linkedin.
Follow @JasonMSherman on Twitter.
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Email Jason here.
Jason direct: (440) 785-0547.
Tags: accounting, Cleveland, customer centric, customer centricity, customer experience, customer service, empathy, innovation, IT, marketing, organization centric, sales, Whyze Group
May 22nd, 2012
Completes assigned tasks. Meets deadlines…Daydreams effectively? Can companies really stimulate innovating thinking?
In the Cleveland Plain Dealer this Sunday, Mary Doria Russell writes about Imagine, a new book by Jonah Lehrer about how creativity really works.
Lehrer writes that creation isn’t a linear process. Innovators are ordinary people who encounter predictable walls. Rather than beating their heads against them, they quit. They find ways to go around them.
Everyone encounters barriers.
Successful innovators who’ve hit walls have something in common: They quit.
They didn’t quit their jobs. They gave up on unproductive lines of reasoning. “They really, truly gave up, often howling in frustration,” Lehrer says.
That’s when innovators “go forward by stepping sideways.” They quiet the linear, rule-constrained left side of the brain. Then, they unleash the conceptual, imaginative, right side. Your right brain soars with your best ideas when you’re just dozing or standing in the shower. The right brain makes unexpected connections. “Suddenly, you just know.”
Another Sunday paper described a painter who abandoned the conventional rules of the art game and built a $100 million a year business. His name is Thomas Kinkade, “painter of light.” Kinkade’s works hang in one out of 20 American homes.
The Sunday New York Times describes how Kinkade imagined a new path to success. He ignored the art critics, targeted consumers who rarely bought art and bypassed art gallery distribution channels. He chose instead to sell his sentimental, mass-produced paintings directly to consumers. He marketed his works through franchise galleries, cable television and online.
If you’re not advancing on the path you’re on, quit. Imagine another route to connecting with customers.
Successful innovation is about connecting with buyers. Kinkade’s lateral thinking coincided with reconnecting with his faith and others who shared it. He said, “People who put my paintings on their walls are putting their values on their walls: faith, family, home, a simpler way of living…they beckon you into this world that provides an alternative to your nightly news broadcast.”
Thomas Kinkade was one man who thought differently. What about when you’re one manager among a team of managers?
Getting managers to agree on a lateral route to innovation requires a special combination of skills.
After you have your eureka moment, how do you get others to follow along? Chances are that others have similar ideas. But, for reasons related to decision making processes or office politics, those ideas don’t get a fair hearing.
Others with different ideas probably feel similarly frustrated. This isn’t a deliberate or even conscious stifling of creative thought. It’s a natural outcome of diverse people working in one organization. There’s a lot of pressure on company leaders to keep everyone’s oars in the water, rowing in the same direction.
As a result, most leadership teams’ approaches to innovation could be described as “satisficing”. They suffice to satisfy key influencers within their organizations. Satisficing usually results in tweaks that customers don’t perceive or don’t care about.
Has satisficing happened in your organization?
Satisficing is a normally occurring barrier to company innovativeness. It has its own inertia. It usually needs to be acted upon by an outside force to change it.
In upcoming posts, I’ll talk about how leadership teams have acquired and applied three critical skills to overcome satisficing and get innovative in ways customers care about:
- inhabiting their customer’s frame of reference
- Identifying lateral innovation opportunities
- orchestrating the delivery of powerful customer experiences
What do you think? Could more companies stimulate innovative thinking? What’s holding some back?
Jason M. Sherman is president of Cleveland-based, Whyze Group. Whyze Group provides qualitative, customer- and user-experience research and innovation workshops to Global 2000 clients. The company has been recognized by the Baldrige National Quality Program, business associations and numerous business media as a leader in research and innovation.
Connect with Jason on Linkedin.
Follow @JasonMSherman on Twitter.
Receive alerts by email.
Email Jason here.
Jason direct: (440) 785-0547.
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Tags: Baldrige, barriers, Cleveland, customer experience, customers, frustration, imagine, innovation, Innovation Workshops, Jason M. Sherman, jonah lehrer, lateral thinking, linkedin, Ohio, qualitative research, Thomas Kinkade, twitter, user, Whyze Group
April 13th, 2012
