Outside Innovation

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.

How to Design a Customer-Centric Technology Architecture (for Business Leaders and Geeks)

Why is it so hard to design easy-to-use Web sites, mobile phone apps, and other customer-facing applications? Because you need to approach the design and development of customer applications differently than you would the design of applications that are designed to run your business. Whether you're a technologist or a business person who cares about the customer experience you offer, it's important to understand the subtleties involved in developing customer-facing applications.

The people that I admire the most, and the ones that I write about the most, have internalized a set of best practices for technology design and implementation that most of them don't even think much about. It's just how they do things. Over the decade that I have been following many of my heroes — the people who developed the original customer-facing applications described in Customers.com in 1998 — they have continued to evolve their companies' information technology infrastructure from the outside in. They always start with their customers' critical scenarios. They support these scenarios using different technologies, across a variety of channels and touchpoints. Their architecture evolves over time, but it's very consistent and elegant and simple.

In the fourth section of our Customers.com Handbook, we describe some of the elements that go into the design of truly customer-facing technologies. Some of these practices are the same ones you'd use to design or to think about any software development project. But you'll see that there's a subtly different spin. Customer-centric applications need to be designed to adapt and change constantly as customers' behaviors and needs change.

How to Approach Information Technology and Information Architecture for Your Customers.com^® Initiatives
A Handbook for Your Customers.com^® Initiatives—Part 4
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, September 16, 2010

How To Provide Customers with a 360-Degree View of Their Context

By Patty Seybold

We need your help! Ronni Marshak and I are revising our book, Customers.com, which was published in 1998. We’d like to “crowdsource” this next generation edition. Every few weeks, we’ll offer you a new chapter or section. We’d like your help in making this a truly useful “Bible” for everyone engaged in designing their businesses from the customers’ point of view. Here’s how:

1. Read the chapters that interest you as they appear and add your thoughts, comments, and criticisms here. 

2. Contribute your own suggestions about companies or organizations that would provide great examples for each chapter—we’ll do the research.

3. Contribute your own ideas—either customer-centric principles you adhere to and/or lessons you’ve learned that you’d like to share. 

In the original Customers.com, the fourth of our eight critical success factors for “Making it easy for customers to do business with you” was “Provide a 360-Degree View of the Customer Relationship.” That mantra has become a holy grail for virtually every organization’s CRM charter. But we think it’s wrong!

In today’s customer-driven economy, customers demand more. They want to drive. They don’t want you to gather information about them in order to sell them more stuff. They do want your help in getting things done.

So Ronni Marshak and I have changed that critical success factor to: Provide a 360-Degree View of Each Customer’s Context. In this chapter, Ronni describes what we mean. We welcome your reactions, feedback and ideas! We are also seeking good examples of at least two case studies to go with this chapter. We welcome your ideas!

National Semiconductor’s New WEBENCH® Visualizer Raises the Bar

I've always admired Phil Gibson's work and have often pointed to many of his accomplishments as best practices. This week, he did it again! On November 9, 2009, he unveiled the most sophisticated, yet simple to use Web dashboard that I have ever seen to help customers make buying decisions.

By turning a virtual knob to optimize for power efficiency, small footprint, and/or cost of a total bill of materials, design engineers can instantly generate and evaluate the most appropriate options among billions of power supply circuit designs. By turning the dial, or selecting different parameters or filters, engineers can visually navigate a bubble diagram depicting the choices that meet their requirements. They can zero in on a group of designs to compare. Or, by shifting their perspective or their parameters, instantly generate a new set of options. Designers can start from one point in space (input source, output voltage, and output current) and visually shape and navigate to their preferred solution. Phil calls it “designing at warp speed” because you feel as if you're in a spaceship jumping from one set of bubbles to another. The size of each bubble is its cost. The bubbles are arrayed along dimensions of footprint size, number of components, and efficient heat dissipation.

 

Phil Gibson is the VP of Technical Sales Tools at National Semiconductor. He is also in charge of National's award-winning Web site. Phil always amazes me with the robustness and completeness of the free Web-based tools he provides to prospects, customers, and partners.  

Other e-business leaders may be happy when their customers can use their Web sites to quickly find and buy products. Phil isn't happy unless customers can use his Web site and tools to design, specify, simulate, and test complete circuitry, which they can then purchase either as a complete priced-out Bill of Materials from dozens of partners or purchase an evaluation board and components that are shipped overnight.

Ecommerce: A Decade of Learning

It’s been 10 years since I first published Customers.com to chronicle best practices in “making it easy for customers to do business with you” on the Internet and beyond. It seems an appropriate time to reflect on how far we’ve come in selling our wares and serving customers via the Internet. There are still some businesses that don’t have or seem to need Web sites. For example, most of the small convenience and specialty stores we find in neighborhoods, particularly those in the developing world, don’t have ecommerce sites. On the flip side, there are countless boutique businesses around the world that have succeeded because they’ve been able to extend their reach through their clever use of the Web both to promote their wares and to make it easy for customers to shop online.

What Matters to Ecommerce Customers? What makes a good online shopping experience for you? Click here to take our quick poll:

a) It’s easy to find products that meet my criteria quickly.

b) The products I need are available in my timeframe.

c) I can easily compare and contrast similar products.

d) I can read and trust other customers’ reviews.

e) I can complete a purchase with very few steps.

f) I trust the integrity of the merchant and the quality of the products on offer.

g) I know that I’m getting a fair price.

h) I know that the products will be delivered on time.

i) I know that it will be easy to return or exchange.

j) Other?

Making It Easy for Customers to Do Business with Us

This is the one mantra that clients repeat over and over to me when they’re explaining what drives their current business strategy. Since I coined and popularized that phrase as the tagline for my book, Customers.com in 1998, I am gratified that “making it easy for customers to…” is still the Holy Grail for so many initiatives. People apply this phrase when they’re discussing a broad variety of initiatives. People used to mean literally “how do we make it easy for customers to do business with us?” as in easier for our customers to buy things, return things, use things, get support, and so on. Now, clients tend to use this phrase more broadly to mean: “Making it easy for our customers to do what they want to do,” with the subtext: “by using our products and services.”