How Customer-Centric Visionaries Make Information Valuable

Last week I hosted two very rich customer gatherings: the semiannual meetings of my Pioneers’ and Visionaries’ groups. The tradition in these meetings is one of “show and tell”—clients share what they’ve been working on and seek advice from their peers. There are so many great “aha!s” that came out of both meetings, I’ll be digesting and summarizing the take-aways over the next several weeks.

“Documents” Have Become Interactive Landing Pages

Visionaries don’t present information in the form of flat online documents or lock information up in PDFs (although they make it easy to download and print PDFs). They provide actionable, interactive information in small bite-size chunks. Their “Document 2.0’s” include links to curated, authoritative, structured data, such as:

• Expert ratings
• 3D Molecular models or chemical formulas
• Sortable parameters to help in decision-making
• Rich interactive imagery
• Bills of material with links to product details
• Custom-configured products they can tweak
• Comments and discussions with experts

How do they manage to cost effectively make information come alive? They take advantage of underlying data structures, taxonomies, and automated tools that link concepts, people, and products to their internal databases. They use aggregation tools to link to industry-standard authoritative external information repositories. They invest in subject matter experts to carefully curate the external data and information sources to which they link. These same subject matter experts perform quality control on the interactive links. Do customers see what they would expect to see? Can they manipulate it the way they’d expect?

Some of the Visionaries who demonstrated their rich, interactive content are publishers seeking to increase the value of the content they provide for a fee. Others are manufacturers, service providers, hospitality providers, educational institutions, or not-for-profits for whom information and content aids customers in decision-making and in their use of the products and services they purchase. Every organization that has a Web site is a publisher. Whether you charge for information, or use information to sell products, the structured approach you take to making your information actionable and valuable is a strategic and customer-critical investment.

Comments

[Mark Price]

Once you have the information your customer would be asking themselves or using to accomplish their tasks -- you also have the "metadata" -- information about what they are using and how often, to better inform product development, customer service, support, etc.

Good service begets better service...

[Patty Seybold]

You're right, Mark, the trick is figuring out WHICH information needs to be interactive. It's not as simple as hyperlinking everything to everything else. You have to give serious thought to what your customers are trying to DO and therefore, what ancillary information and tools they need to get that done. Are they putting together a bill of materials for a new product? Researching chemical interactions? Or looking for a doctor with the best track record in performing this kind of surgery. The key is to provide links to the information and tools the customer would be asking themselves or using in order to accomplish their tasks.

[Mark Price]

Patricia:

This is a fascinating insight. It seems to me that the challenge is both to have the right customer-centric data and how to present it. Using the tools you described, how can your visionaries more compellingly draw the picture of a customer-centric world using customer-level data?