How to have disruptive ideas

Simon Kirby — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:53:53 +0000

A folding plug won the Brit Insurance Design Awards in the UK this week.

As gadgets get smaller, Britain has the largest plug in the world. A problem, brought to life in this video:

The traditional British plug was invented in 1946. Why did it take 64 years to invent a better one? More importantly, why didn’t any of the rest of us have that idea?

Listen to what nobody says

I think the reason is that it’s so hard to find unvoiced customer needs. No British customer has ever said to a product designer “I’d like a more portable electric plug.” Not even to the inventor. Instead the designer, Min Kyu-Choi, had an experience; he scratched his new laptop on its plug.

Their are so many ways to trigger the inductive leaps that create innovative new products. But for me, the best one is to have direct experiences. The easy part of that is that we all of us have experiences continuously. When my alarm goes off, that’s a customer experience. When I get on the train, it’s a customer experience. Buying my morning coffee – an experience. They all come bundled up with satisfaction and frustration.

The hard part is noticing the response rather than accepting the “how things are-ness” of it. One of the best ways is to keep a record of what happens – mark up every experience on a timeline and plot your emotional response.

Not taking problems for granted is the first step towards great product design.

How service teams can inspire product innovation

Simon Kirby — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:11:24 +0000

Investing in customer insight but cutting customer contact makes no sense. Service teams have huge emotional investment in putting right the things that cause customers angst. They should be central to strategic product and service innovation.

Customer insight arms race

For £10,000 a report, anybody can buy as much customer surveying, benchmarking, customer ethnography, usability, psychodemographic segmentation, social network monitoring and integrated listening capability as they want. There are two problems with driving innovation from this kind of insight:

Lots of organisations have deep pockets, so the pursuit of a commercial edge through third party solutions becomes an arms race rather than a competitive advantage.
These approaches are a step removed from reality. They’re constructs. They are to real customer experience what television is to reality or what air conditioning is to climate.

Contact centre Cassandras

By contrast, service teams are the most under-exploited resource for driving product and service innovation out of customer insight. If this isn’t self-evident, ask yourself the following questions:

Who spends the day in constant contact with customers?
Who has most emotional investment in putting right the things that cause customers angst?

Contact centre staff know exactly what customers love and hate. They experience it viscerally every day. But, Cassandra-like, their voice is often overlooked in strategic marketing and new product innovation. Why? The reasons boil down to a) narrow service management focus on cost and operations, b) silo’s between service management and marketing c) service staff without the skills, systems or incentives to make a strategic difference and d) physical and cultural remoteness from the Board. Visually, the problem looks like this:

Service management barriers to product innovation

The most powerful customer insight you’ll ever have?

All of these barriers can be broken down fairly easily, and for far less cost than many customer insight approaches. Here are four key ways of doing it: