Why Customer Innovation Shouldn’t Start with The Customer.

The common thinking around customer innovation is to start with a customer problem that needs solving. It sounds right on the surface, yet that approach often leads to incrementality vs big change.

The common approach to customer innovation is to do customer research, listening groups, scan customer data for insights, or dig into dissatisfiers in the NPS data and pick a top-ranking problem to solve. But there are two problems with starting with the customer. 

Problem One: Solving current customer problems isn’t guaranteed to be aligned with your corporate strategy of where-to-play and how-to-win (WTP/HTW). Current customers want it all. They aren’t into compromises. If you follow the customer expectation route, you could end up designing solutions over-engineered for the corporate strategy. 

Problem Two: Customer innovation that starts bottom-up with a customer problem worth solving is usually complex and crosses a number of organizational silos. When it comes time to surface the investment case for green-lighting the initiative, the metrics to measure business impact aren’t mature enough to show attribution and business value across all the impact points. As a result, many CX professionals resort to innovation initiatives that can be measured with today’s metrics, which tend to be smaller and marginally incremental. 

A better question. 

The better question in building a customer innovation roadmap is to ask “what is our corporate strategy for where we want to play and how we want to win in the future?” Initiatives that support this direction are more likely to be funded and accelerated.  

The follow-on second question is “What must be true for our customer experience in the future state?” What you are looking for is the outcome you want your customers to experience when engaging with your brand in the future WTP/HTW. The corporate strategy of WTP/HTW may result in a different reality than the reality your customers experience today. 

Every initiative brought before the c-suite to be funded will almost certainly be vetted against the question, “Does funding this initiative move us closer to achieving our corporate strategy of WTP/HTW?” Hence, making it far more likely your customer innovation initiative will get funded than one that is only solving for today’s current customer experience, especially if the metrics in place today aren’t sufficient to make a strong business case on today’s reality. 

As a Chief Customer Officer, I’ve seen a number of customer innovation funding requests that only deliver incremental improvement on today’s reality and far fewer that reached higher and moved us closer to where we needed to go from a corporate strategy. 

As Roger Martin so eloquently points out, customer-centric thinking is increasing in importance as part of corporate strategy development. It’s time for customer innovation projects to go bigger in creating breakthrough solutions that are fit for the future vs incremental improvements. Incremental improvements are important but the real pay-out for a high-performing CX discipline is to make the kind of change that fuels the corporate strategy vs. pulling fuel from the corporate strategy. 

Andy Murray, Speaker, Author, Podcaster. Founder and Chair of the University of Arkansas's Walton College of Business Customer-Centric Leadership Initiative and Founder of bigQUEST, a customer innovation company.