Outside Innovation

Impediments to “Selling” Customer Co-Design

We’re both staunch advocates and practitioners of customer co-design. We don’t limit our customer co-design practice to new product development. We’ve learned over the years that there are many different ways you can take advantage of co-designing with customers: from the ways you engage with customers on your Customer Advisory Boards, to involving them as stakeholders when you’re redesigning your firm’s internal processes.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to convince others in your organization to embrace customer co-design. Most executives think it’s a good idea in practice. But, deep down, they are skeptical that customers actually know enough to be useful. They’re concerned that customers will be too demanding and will take them in directions that may not be profitable. They’re scared that customers will pull them in directions they don’t understand.

Absent a strong cultural appetite for customer co-design and engagement, we often find the following symptoms occur:

1. Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) are often thought of as sales tools or product road map validation forums; not business strategy co-design opportunities.

2. Voice of the Customer (VOC) has unfortunately become a required toll gate before the deployment of a new solution. It is seldom used to inform internal business process design initiatives. Online customer communities are often thought of as a customer support channel that will save money; not as a key opportunity for customer co-design.

How to Host a Customer Co-Design Event

When you invite customers to spend time with you to help co-design your next-gen products, services, or customer experience, you want them to be comfortable and at ease. Any event planner knows that creating an enjoyable meeting or memorable event requires a lot of attention to detail. What we’ve learned, in over 25 years of running these sessions, is that even GREAT event planners don’t know all the details you’ll need to be on top of to ensure a high-quality, smooth-running brainstorming session.

What Are the Subtle Differences that Make a Difference in a Well-Planned Customer Co-Design Event?

Clients often comment that there are so many logistics to think about, in addition to all the big picture, substantive stuff they need to handle (like making sure your top execs actually participate and that they leave their Smartphones in their pockets!). So they don’t want to pay attention to these subtle, but important details:

1. Securing a sufficiently large room (or multiple rooms) with the venue. You need enough room so that all activities can be done comfortably and without too much running from room to room.

Protecting Your Privacy: Mobile Phone Basics

Two months ago, my Blackberry fell out of my car when I stopped at a rest stop on the turnpike. I was lucky. The young man who found it lying in the parking lot, decided to try to locate the owner. He called up last number I had called, talked to a friend I had just spoken to, who gave him my husband’s cellphone number, so we were able to connect and arrange the best way to reunite me with my Blackberry. I was very grateful to this young man, but I realized that I was amazingly lucky.

At the time I lost my phone, I hadn’t secured it with a password. I hadn’t set the screen-saver to provide the “if found, pls. call XXX-XXXX for a reward” to make it easy for someone to return my phone to me. And, I hadn’t protected the data on my phone from being scraped by someone who wanted to spy on me or to steal my identity. Thanks to this close call, I have now secured the data on my phone, and arranged to be able to wipe it remotely if it falls into the wrong hands.

Here’s a handy Infographic from the people at Backgroundcheck.org to remind us of “What Our Phones Can Reveal About Us”:

How Easy Is It to Extricate Yourself from Google?

Several of our clients have decided they no longer want to be spied upon by Google. So Scott Jordan, a very vocal member of Patty’s Pioneers, has embarked on a project to see what it takes to disentangle himself from Google. Scott hasn’t cut the cord yet, but he wants to know that he can do it.

One of the toughest challenges Scott discovered was moving himself off of Gmail. Although it’s easy enough to switch search engines, with email, you can’t just go cold turkey. You want to save the rich history of all the important emails you’ve sent and received. Scott reports that the tools that Google provides to let you export your data, including your email files, are much too clunky to do the job efficiently, particularly for someone like Scott, who has amassed a LOT of emails (300,000 emails with 16GB of data) over the years that he has been using Gmail.

How to Export Your Gmail History

In a recent blog post, entitled: How to back up your Gmail and other Google stuff for safety, economy or switching, Scott describes the threes states of mind that many Google users find themselves in:

Why Do We Trust Apple with All Our Data and Not Google?

Since we’ve been writing a lot about Google and Facebook and the myriad ways they use the information they glean about us, it occurred to me to wonder why so many people trust so much of their lives to Apple? Doesn’t Apple also know what we buy, what we listen to? If we use Apple’s email, they also have access to that information, don’t they?

I asked Scott Jordan why he trusted Apple more than Google with his email (and other things). Here’s his answer:

“I think the difference goes to motivation. Google is an ad company. You are their product. The more they know about you and your associations and your interests and your intimate details, the better they can target their ads, the more they can sell and the more they can charge for them. Apple, by comparison, is a product company. The more they can make products you want to buy, the more they can sell and the more they can charge for them.

How Easy Is It to Extricate Yourself from Google?

Several of our clients have decided they no longer want to be spied upon by Google. So Scott Jordan, a very vocal member of Patty’s Pioneers, has embarked on a project to see what it takes to disentangle himself from Google. Scott hasn’t cut the cord yet, but he wants to know that he can do it.

One of the toughest challenges Scott discovered was moving himself off of Gmail. Although it’s easy enough to switch search engines, with email, you can’t just go cold turkey. You want to save the rich history of all the important emails you’ve sent and received. Scott reports that the tools that Google provides to let you export your data, including your email files, are much too clunky to do the job efficiently, particularly for someone like Scott, who has amassed a LOT of emails (300,000 emails with 16GB of data) over the years that he has been using Gmail.

How to Export Your Gmail History

In a recent blog post, entitled: How to back up your Gmail and other Google stuff for safety, economy or switching, Scott describes the threes states of mind that many Google users find themselves in:

Using Facebook’s Timeline for a Business

In my recent article, Facebook’s Timeline: Seductive and Dangerous?, I criticized Facebook’s forced march to Timeline and, in particular, the way in which Facebook is seducing consumers to use Facebook apps that will log their (and their friends’) every action. I have no interest in switching my personal Facebook page over to the Timeline view and I dread the day when I will be “Timelined.” However, it’s part of the human condition to enjoy reminiscing and “strutting our stuff,” so, when the time comes that I have to create a Facebook Timeline, I may find myself getting carried away.

However, I can report that using Timeline to “tell the story” of a business is a lot of fun, and I think it can be quite an effective marketing/communication tool. I can report that it is also an incredible time sink! Don’t tackle this unless you’re prepared to lose a week out of your life!

Updating our “Customers.com Company” Facebook Page

Our company is officially 27 years old, but it existed before that as a department within my father’s company, Seybold Publications, which was founded in 1971. So there’s quite a bit of history to chronicle. Our history is also the history of the evolution of technology—as we all moved from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs to LANs to open systems to distributed computing to internet computing and to mobile. It’s also interesting to see how customer experience and customer co-design have permeated our consulting projects throughout the years.

Why Customers.com? We chose to use the Customers.com brand name a few years ago in creating our Facebook page as part of our overall brand strategy. Right now, we’re Patricia Seybold Group, “the customers.com company.” Soon we’ll become Customers.com “brought to you by” The Patricia Seybold Group. We probably SHOULD have a Patricia Seybold Group Facebook page, too, but if we do, we’ll just redirect folks to this main page.

Respect Your Customers’ Time: Prep Carefully!

One of the things that we find hardest to get across to clients is the amount of attention they need to pay when planning for a customer co-design event, such as one of our half-day or full-day Customer Scenario^® Mapping sessions. No matter what techniques or methods you plan to use when you engage with your customers, you owe it to them to be respectful of the gift of their time and insights and creativity they’re offering.

What Most Companies Now Do Well in Planning for Customer Co-Design:

What we find is that most “enlightened” companies now do a few things right:

1. They have high-level buy-in to run one or more customer co-design activities.

2. They have a full-time, experienced and respected person in charge of the activity (this is usually someone in a manager or director role, whose day job centers around gathering customer requirements and input).

3. They connect the customer co-design/requirements gathering to real, funded projects/initiatives so there is an execution engine in place.

Where Most Companies Fail in Planning for Customer Co-Design:

1. They don’t get their high-level executives engaged early enough. The sponsor’s peers and bosses aren’t sufficiently “in the loop” to benefit from the many insights gleaned from customers before they actually come to the session. (If you’re listening/watching/reading the pre-session interviews, you are able to gain early insights and get a jumpstart on addressing opportunities.)

2. They don’t involve ancillary stakeholders and subject matter experts until it’s really too late. As you talk with customers before the design event, you’re going to encounter issues/opportunities that are beyond the scope of the currently funded projects you’re working on. So you need to find the people in your organization who ARE working on those things and engage them early.

3. They don’t get senior-enough executives to spend this quality, contextful time working side-by-side with customers. It never ceases to amaze me when CEOs, COOs, EVPs—all the people with real clout in an organization—find better things to do than to devote a day with a couple dozen really insightful customers co-designing new products, services, and experiences. Yet these same high-level execs will scrape off time (and considerable budget) for internally-focused, belly button-gazing company off-sites and strategic planning meetings. I just don’t get it!

We run these co-design sessions all the time, many times a year, in many different industries. Now, many of our clients are equipped to run their own sessions through the training and certification program we offer in our particular customer co-design methodology, Customer Scenario^® Mapping. Here’s a guide to planning a Customer Scenario Mapping session that we’ve prepared for our clients. It should come in handy for anyone who is planning to embark on similar endeavor.

How to Plan for a Customer Scenario^® Mapping Session
The New CSM Guidebook: Part 1: The Eight Pre-Session Planning Activities
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, March 29, 2012

NEW: Sign Up to View Your Google Account Activity

Google is under a lot of pressure since it unveiled its new “we’ll-collect-everything-we-have-about-your-use-of-all-our-apps” privacy policy on March 1st. On March 28, 2012, Google announced a new feature for Google Account holders, called “Google Account Activity. If you sign up for this feature, “each month we’ll send you a link to a password-protected report with insights into your signed-in use of Google services,” writes Google product manager, Andreas Tuerk, in his blog post: “Giving you more insight into your Google Account activity” announcing the new feature.

Andreas included a picture of his own monthly Account Activity report, pointing out that it reveals that he was planning a trip to Rome.

As with all new features, Google asks that we provide feedback and promises to incorporate more Google services.

How Can You Keep Facebook, Google, et al. from Tracking You and Your Friends?

I’ve been blowing the whistle on both Google and Facebook recently for their customer-unfriendly approaches to tracking our activities and the activities of our friends. (I don’t plan to stop there. Next, I’ll take a look at Apple’s privacy practices and Microsoft’s.)

I’m not complaining about the trade-off between using free services and receiving targeted ads in exchange.

I AM complaining about the routine collection of very detailed information about each of us—logs that are not anonymous but connected to our identity, our computers/phones and our physical location, and the actual activities we’re doing online. These are logs that are not only able to be used by Google and Facebook for ad placement, but they can also be used by any entity that claims it has the legal right to spy on any of us.

I am ALSO complaining about how difficult it is for customers to:

a) Know exactly what is being tracked

b) Understand how to turn off tracking

c) Keep the people in our social network from inadvertently violating our privacy

d) Keep applications and other websites that are “in” these companies’ networks from compounding the problem by adding their own tracking and aggregation on top of what is already being tracked about us