Innovating Coffee

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For many of us coffee plays a vital role in our day. It helps us get cranked up in the morning but it’s also the social drink of choice when you need to meet someone for a quick catch-up.

Over the last 40 years the interest in coffee has exploded, there’s coffee shops and café’s in every nook you can find, there are mobile coffee carts in popular carparks at the beach or where we walk our dogs and many of us have our own machines at home.

My guest in this episode Nicholas Lee , has spent a large part of his career focussed on designing the most innovative experiences in the world for coffee drinkers in the comfort of their own homes. Which he’s done all over the world with leading electronics brands like Phillips, Saeco and DeLonghi.

In this episode we explored:

1.???? The Starbucks effect

2.???? Some really interesting things you didn’t know about coffee

3.???? Some great stories of innovation

4.???? How to overcome product or tech centric cultures

5.???? Building personalisation into product experiences

6.???? Co-creating with customers

If you would prefer to continue reading, scroll past the video for the core insights

Top 6 Insights

1) The Starbucks effect

Starbucks have had a massive impact on growing the coffee market globally but particularly in Asia, which was traditionally a tea drinking culture. Using softer alternatives to the espresso, like the americano, milk based coffees and iced lattes they have found a way to break into new markets and attract new customers. It’s a great lesson for introducing new products into markets. Understand the customers barriers and then develop easier alternative pathways that are enticing for them.

2) Are you solving a real customer problem?

Nick provided an example where one of the product engineers had found a way to make a technical improvement to one of their machines which lead to the customers getting 1% more coffee out of the beans, however it didn’t really solve a customer problem. Whereas one of the big things customers actually wanted was for the operation of the machine to be simpler. Which is what they ended up focussing on. It serves as a great reminder to make sure you start with real customer insights, otherwise you could be wasting time and money.

3) How to overcome product or tech centric cultures

Many organisations are still very product centric or tech centric. As per the example above, if product engineers are left to their own devices they will continue to make the product incrementally better. Often this drives a culture focused on product improvements. So, how do you overcome this happening? In Nick’s time at Philips and Saeco, he found that bringing the lead engineers into customer research sessions was a great way to close that gap and help drive a more customer centric culture. It’s also a great exercise to do with your senior leadership team and CEO to help them get a better perspective of your customers.

4) Innovation starts with great customer insights

You can’t just improve the product you have to innovate the whole customer experience. When developing one of the most innovative coffee machines in the world, the Saeco Xelsis, Nick’s team conducted extensive customer research and found that when a customer brews coffee from a machine in the morning it’s like they are at a mini theatre, the lights go on and it’s like a little performance. So, they designed the entire customer experience around going to the theatre, the machine itself looked like an amphitheatre with coffee playing the lead role in the spotlight and the drip tray became the stage. The customers loved the feeling of the machine because it went beyond functional elements creating an amazing experience.

5) Building personalisation into product experiences

When developing DIY products like coffee machines, it’s important to understand the aspects that customers enjoy in real life and do what you can to mirror those aspects in the product’s experience in the customers home. For example when people go to a café with friends they are able to customise their coffee order and if they come back regularly they expect their barista to remember their order. So, for Nick it was really important to factor these customers desires into the design of coffee machines. In the development of the Xelsis this led to a sophisticated touch screen with an elaborate range of coffee options to choose from as well as allowing customers to adjust things like caffeine strength, temperature etc and then being able to save profiles so you don’t have to start from scratch. If you offer personalised experiences, customers will keep coming back or in this case, keep using the machine at home.

6) Co-creating with customers

Co-creating with customers can unlock really innovative new ideas. Nick talked about running exploratory session where they would get customers in to bounce ideas around with designers and product engineers. One problem that customers were having was that in most other machines frothing the milk and cleaning that part of the machine takes far too long. One of the customers came up with the idea of a click on, click off milk container that could be washed in the washing machine. So the team developed the idea and took it to market, which has been a game changer in the coffee machine space. This shows what can happen if you really listen to customers.

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About me

I’ve spent the last 20 years working on digital transformation and CX projects all around the globe with brands like Samsung, Virgin, Lexus, eBay, Australian Air Force as well as being Head of Brand and Digital CX at a professional football team. If you would like to get in touch or have any questions:

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