Innovating Customer Experiences

Every person in an organization is needed for customer experience innovation. That’s because customer expectations and competitive offerings are always on the rise. Your processes, policies, skills, and motivations have a lot to do with keeping customers coming back — and even more to do with customers deciding not to come back. Think of your own situation as a customer — whenever you’ve decided not to go back to a certain product or service or place, it was usually because you were turned off by a process, policy, skill, or motivation, right?

A thorough understanding of what customers want is based on desired outcomes rather than features and reactions to concepts and prototypes. From the customer’s viewpoint, the solution that your firm sells is a means-to-an-end. Customers should be segmented by circumstances surrounding their desired outcomes, in place of demographics or psychographics. Metrics for innovation and operations can be obtained from customers themselves, capturing their inherent evaluations throughout their selection and usage processes. And innovation is expected to be a part of everyone’s job across the organization, instead of the engineer’s realm, particularly for leaders in customer experience management.