Thought Experiment #28: Every company needs a Head of Customer Learning

Following the well-received post explaining why every company needs a Head of Experimentation, this post explores why every organisation needs a Head of Customer Learning.

TL:DR: Organisations spend too much time thinking of products, services, technologies and business models - and not enough on searching, creating and scaling new relationships. 

Many organisations see their 'customers' as providers, buyers, consumers, beneficiaries or users. The bulk of the interaction is transactional and an exchange of functional value.

However, customers can be much more than that. Higher-order relationships of value can include learning, co-creation, and even facilitation of new relationships with other stakeholders in the ecosystem (aka multi sided platforms) - where 'Customers' don't just use your products and services to get their immediate jobs to be done. The lens of relationship can lead to exploration of 'life-changing' value.

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First, a few nuances of the role of Head of Customer Learning:

• Starting point matters: When thinking about innovation, your starting point can be value (how can we deliver 10x reduction in costs), outcomes (how can we build a $100m revenue business in three years), business model (will customers buy on a subscription fee), or any other of the fundamental questions of your business-model canvas. However, the Head of Customer Learning role does not start with such organisation-first constraints, but uses the relationships-first constraint, as the starting point. The role is responsible for the problems, questions, experiments and systems related to the creation of new relationships between the organisation and their existing or non-customers. By changing your starting point, or frame, you can dramatically change the range of possible solutions.
• Functional value v life changing value: This role helps organisations to turn their transactional centred relationships into growth centred relationships. This person's job is to create mechanisms (roles, tools, platforms) which deliver knowledge, skills, mindsets, resources, and networks to make customers better. Whilst other parts of the organisation are busy creating innovation labs, which invariably focus on functional value through new technologies and products, this role is building new structures and tools (e.g. customer-labs) to deliver 'life-changing' value:

• Less is more: Every new product, service is about 'more' - more interactions between the customer and the organisation. In some cases, the Head of Customer Learning asks a fundamentally different question: How to drive 'less' interaction with the central organisation and yet create more value for both parties? That's fewer chatbots chats, fewer website visits, and less time engaging with the organisation.
• Different to existing roles: It goes well beyond the existing research, marketing or innovation-related roles, which optimise the existing relationships between 'customer' and organisation. Most large organisations already have an internally focused learning and development capability. Why not use similar skills and capability to turn a pure cost centre into new revenue or new value? It's not a "community manager" role. You could also call it Head of Platforms - turning existing products and services into multi-sided platforms. However, I feel that's too narrow focused and many relationships of value don't always start with platform-first thinking.
• Search, create and scale new relationships: This role is concerned with more fundamental questions of searching, creating and scaling new and different relationships of value. The word 'relationships' sounds fuzzy, but there needs to be a discipline associated with finding new relationships that will scale and generate significant value for all. For the all the talk of disruption theory, at a basic level, AirBnB searched, created and then scaled the relationship between homeowners and visitors.
• Strategic role: It's a strategic role because, after the success of any initial experiments, it requires changing the mindsets, structures, incentives, skills and strategies of the organisation to enable scaling the value of new relationships.

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Second, let's look at four different organisations as examples of where this role can add strategic value:

Example 1: Hospitals - Most people have probably experienced the transactional nature of hospitals. What if someone in the hospital was responsible for turning the wasted waiting time (whether in the hospital bed or outpatients) into learning opportunities for patients? What if they redefined the relationship between a patient and a hospital? This approach at Parkland Hospitals, taught Patients to Administer Their Own Care. It reduced the number of bed days by nearly 28,000 and saved approximately $40 million system-wide over four years. This demonstrates the business-case for the new role.

A new Head of Customer Learning could institutionalise this example in more hospitals. It's a strategic role because it's up to the person who owns the job to create a new system, to change existing structures and roles inside the organisation, in order to serve the new relationships between hospitals and patients.

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Example 2: Supermarkets - When I leave my local supermarket I'm no different to when I entered. I have my shopping, but the whole experience is a largely a transactional relationship.

There is an, as yet, undetermined number of customers who are looking for more. Some are prepared to pay for cookery classes. Others may lack the knowledge, creativity or inspiration to try something different, their food experiences at home may have become stale, or they may make the same dishes over again. There are others who find that existing solutions such as cookbooks and online recipes are not relevant to them.   

A supermarket Head of Customer Learning could start by hiring a chef and creating a micro cookery studio inside the supermarket. Its purpose would be to inspire different customers, from budgeting students, the elderly, time-starved working parents, to allergy sufferers to start cooking something new. Customers could be taught the knowledge and skills to execute at home and, of course, the supermarket can provide the resources (fresh food = immediate sales). This is simply building a new and better learning-centred relationship between the supermarket and its customers.

However, this relationship may (or may not) scale in terms of value. A higher-order relationship would be created where instead of hiring a professional chef, the supermarket hires local cooks, such as mothers who are not working, whose cooking skills and time are under-utilised. They can teach and sell their dishes to specific customers (multi sided platform) which are currently underserved, perhaps even under a quite different business model. 

The Head of Customer Learning is not there to create a 'learning community' per se, but is there to see if learning can facilitate new value exchange that can scale.

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Example 3: Schools - Research proves that parents are a bigger determinant of a child's academic outcomes than their school, at least until key stage two. Yet in reality, the formal engagement between parents and schools is limited to those pressured seven minutes every term, aka parents evening. Now, what if schools taught parents and not just their children? This is a fundamentally different relationship. Instead of serving just the local or national government (the customer who funds them), or serving students (the users) - what about schools also serving parents?

Of course, you might not call this role Head of Customer Learning and instead may call it Head of 'Home' Learning.

The obvious push-back is that schools are already starved of critical funding, to create this new 'luxury' role. This is the 'organisation-constraints-first' thinking. The Head of Home Learning should be open to search, create and scale new relationships with parents. In terms of scalability, there is no reason why this could not be a subscription fee for the school's parents, thereby covering some or all the costs of this role.

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Example 4: Banks - Much of the digital transformation work within existing banks or new challenger banks is still focused on making a better app or chatbot. It's just a faster, better and cheaper version of the same thing. The fundamental, transactional-based, relationship is still the same.

The job of Head of Customer Learning explores different relationships of value between their bank and its customers. That's why blockchain is exciting, not because it's better or faster technology, but because it can facilitate new (and different) relationships.

Or, what if instead of providing just the accelerant (money/loan), banks also provided the incubation to go with that loan. This training or support could be provided by an ecosystem of independent advisors, can be made compulsory, and attached to the loan, much like house surveys of ￡1K are attached to every mortgage approval in the UK.

Rather than the largely transactional relationship where individuals select lenders based on who is willing to lend and at what interest rate - what about adding a third variable of relationships?

Of course, much like the hospital example, there are specific use-cases where this will work better than others. It is the job of Head of Customer Learning to find these early-adopter use cases.

As merely one example, the Head of Customer Learning could run a [non-customer] incubator (point 1). It's much easier to go after non-customers inside a big organisation than existing customers, as it treads on fewer organisational toes.

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In summary, many organisations have defined roles, mechanisms and tools to help execute on new technologies, products, services, and business models. Very few organisations have the internal capability or capacity to experiment with new relationships. The Head of Customer Learning job is to search, create and scale these new relationships into value for all.

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