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Let’s be competitive on price and offer just a little bit of better service…
I heard an on the ground salesperson say that on a call last week. I later told the CEO about it and let him know what I thought about “just a little bit”. Below is an extended version of what I said to him. A quick thought is you will never hear innovators say “just a little bit”, only non-innovators say that!
This is part one of the series on how to leave small thinking behind. In this first post, I’ll show you a simple technique for coming up with radical ideas. In the second part, you’ll learn how to evaluate ideas so they don’t fit into “me-too” territory. In part three, I’ll tell you how to determine which ideas might work.
Perception separates the innovator from the imitator. So, a shift in perspective is all that is needed to see opportunities for new offerings. Here is one creative approach to do that…
One of the challenges of coming up with unconventional ideas is the weight of past ideas. Not just the ones you’ve applied, but also the ones you’ve seen, heard, tasted, smelled and felt, all of these are in your memory. You see, what we have stored in our heads is just as much a blocker of uncommon ideas as is your boss not giving you permission to go wild.
This is why the first 15 – 30 you come up with are always going to be very obvious. They are stuff you’ve already seen before. To get to the good stuff you have force your brain to come up with more. But this is quite hard and takes some time for many to do…
But let’s suppose you don’t have the time to sit down and make a list of 50 – 100 different ideas on how to solve a pressing challenge. What’s a quick way to shake things up?…
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Big data and analytics are going to alter customer experiences through personalization. But, companies should be wise get out of the building and not assume that big data is an innovation silver bullet.
As companies adopt great business insights such as social and big data technologies, automation and anticipation will become hotly adopted strategies to create or enhance existing offerings. While people are stuck perpending over kibana vs grafana, many retailers are getting ahead in the competition simply because they’re focused on their development by implementing new strategies and using more advanced business software such as the ones developed by CBX. For some industries, such as retail, providing the option for customers to order through their mobile phone is the first step towards automation and anticipation, and pretty soon we’ll start seeing people’s orders waiting for them before they even order them.
With all the data about customer habits it has accumulated over the years, Starbucks is a company that is uniquely positioned to do this. I don’t know the exact number of times the average person stops by Starbucks on their way to work, but I’m sure it is in the 3 day average.
That’s an ingrained habit.
But, even with some sense of certainty of what people might do, we still have to ask ourselves some questions: How will customers benefit from us anticipating what they will order today? At what point does novelty wear off? How will it make them feel? What would make them feel less uncomfortable?…
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I once wrote about connecting the dots. But connecting the dots isn’t constrained to strategic thinking, it applies in every domain. For example, to read a person’s unspoken thoughts, you can read their body language. This takes some preparation, but it is really about connect the dots within a context.
Taking this example further, the same principle applies in the domain of customer experience. What does connecting the dots look like? To illustrate, here is what happens at Gramercy Tavern (from the book Influencer):…
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People remember, and pay for experiences. But, some businesses are delivering unhappiness, and they don’t know it. And they might not have an epiphany even if they go out of business. This is sad…
From a customer experience perspective, a business’ single focus should be to eliminate all the obstacles that will stand in the way of the customer achieving their desired outcome.
But, eliminating friction is not always intuitive. Why? Here are three reasons why:…
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People have short-term memory, so we tend to only remember the end of an experience. This is a critical insight for experience innovators (aren’t we all?), because we don’t take the time to take a step back and look at the big picture.…