Outside Innovation

Are You Measuring What Matters to Customers?

In the northern hemisphere, early September is a natural time to take stock and to set priorities. As our kids go back to school, we adults find ourselves in the same mindset: excited about learning new things, accomplishing something important, and having fun “playing” with our colleagues and customers. So, it’s a natural time to set some goals and priorities. Why not start by taking stock of how to improve your customers’ end-to-end experience of using your products and services, in doing business with you, and in doing their jobs.

I was reminded of how important this is as I listened to a long-time client, the CEO of a high tech company, recount how valuable he found an off-site strategy meeting to be. He used the Blue Ocean Strategy method to lead his team through a strategic planning session. “The most valuable part for us,” he reported, “was thinking about what’s going on in our customers’ lives before they learn about our products and after they’ve been using them for a while. When we really drilled into those customers’ (users, decision-makers, influencers, maintainers) contexts, we realized how much more we could be doing to make their lives easier.” As a result, his team created a much more targeted partner “shelf space” strategy, changed their account reps’ MBOs to focus more on after sales relationship building, and refocused their social media focus and their documentation to target customers’ “moments of truth.”

Does Your Community Have a Right to Healthcare?

By Patty Seybold

Guess what? The Governor of Maine will soon be my neighbor! Paul LePage and I don’t see eye to eye on politics. He’s a Tea Party Republican. I’m a Liberal Democrat. But, when I met with him last summer to ask for his help to save our local hospital, he told me that he and his wife were shopping for a second home on the Boothbay peninsula. Their year-round home is inland, in Lewiston (when he’s not in the Governor’s residence in Augusta). I told him we’d be pleased to welcome him as a neighbor. I recommended that he take advantage of our crashed real estate prices and glut of properties on the market due to the then-imminent closure of our local community hospital. Then I added, “after you take advantage of our low real estate prices, you could help us save our local hospital, you’d have 24/7 local emergency care for yourselves and your guests, and your property value would rise!”

Many people buy second homes and vacation homes on the scenic Boothbay peninsula and then find themselves deciding to live here year round. That’s what happened to me. It’s a wonderful place to vacation and an even nicer place to live once all the seasonal residents have gone back south.

CaringBridge: An Almost Perfect Customer Ecosystem

If you haven’t heard of CaringBridge.org, you should know about it. Eventually you, or someone in your family, will be dealing with a major health issue. CaringBridge provides the support infrastructure to deal with one of the most important, highly emotional, and time-consuming activities that a care-giving family has to deal with: keeping everyone in the loop. Email and/or Facebook work, but they’re not ideal for keeping everyone informed about the latest updates on someone’s battle with cancer, or the prognosis of someone who has just been in a horrific accident.

There are probably newer, spiffier e-tools available. But CaringBridge has something none of the upstarts have: 17 years of experience helping families deal with their health journeys. One of the things that I have learned from working with true Pioneers, is that when you devote ten+ years to understanding and addressing a customer-critical activity—whether that customer’s activity is designing an energy-efficient mobile phone, or managing IT resources, or dealing with a family’s health crisis—your understanding and experience trump all challengers. You deeply understand what the customer’s context is, what they’re trying to accomplish and what’s important to them as they do it. You don’t get distracted by side journeys because you are grounded in solving a real problem for real people: helping them get something done as easily as possible.