Forerunner companies are made up of strong customer empathy. They innovate by deeply understanding what is missing from customers’ lives or businesses. To apply this approach in business design, a special company culture is needed – a way of foreseeing market opportunities through the lens of customers. Let’s explore the mindsets of customer-oriented business people.

Initially, the art of customer-centric thinking stood in contrast to the behavioral school of marketing, which focused on understanding how and why customers buy a product. Customer orientation was more interested in explaining what makes a customer committed to a service provider. The latter mindset is more forward-thinking and broad-minded in understanding different customers.

Customer thinking has been established on several cornerstones, which were hardly discussed within traditional business contexts. Let’s delve into some of these cornerstone topics that continue to make a difference and remain relevant at customer touchpoints.

CORNERSTONE 1: CREATING TRUST

Trust is not created through marketing. It stems from creating experiences and meeting customer expectations as they use the product and receive service. Trust-related concepts are satisfaction, commitment, involvement, engagement, and bonds. Trust is the outcome of these elements, representing the value, created for the customer.

Deep understanding of the anatomy of trust from customers is rare, as it cannot be fully explained through the information stored in CRM databases. It lies in the tacit understanding of the customer experience. Consequently, those who possess this rare ability to explain the anatomy of trust are key individuals in creating unique business concepts.

Food for thought: Listen to customers. Observe them. Be creative in identifying the indicators of customer trust in your business and leverage them as raw material for business and service design.

CORNERSTONE 2: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Challenge key personnel in your organization or consultants by asking them to define the indicators of customer experience with your products and services. You will quickly realize the difficulty of the task and perceive the varied interpretations within your team regarding customers’ mindsets.

Customer experience (CX) is management jargon. It also is challenging to conceptualize. Your customer frontline staff are adept at explaining the expressions of CX. These are made of attitude, competence and fluency. Strive to identify individuals with exceptional customer empathy skills to drive innovation in your customer experience.

Food for thought: Have you ever read Walter Isaacson’s superb book, ”Steve Jobs”? Exploring this book will help you uncover the interrelatedness between understanding opportunities for improving the customer experience and, as a result, designing unique products and services.

CORNERSTONE 3: VALUE CREATION IN A RELATIONSHIP

Value creation in a relationship is two-folded: value to the customer and value to the service provider. Only customer relationships that create value for both parties are genuine and have the strongest bonds. This is called value exchange.

Clever marketers know that it is impossible to maximize company ROI without high customer commitment, resulting from value to the customers. They understand the anatomy of mutual value creation and can manage the dilemma of value exchange to design sustainable business solutions.

Food for thought: During the design of new commercial business models there should be a phase to assess the twofold value creation. If mutual value creation can be clearly explained, then you are on the right path. 

CORNERSTONE 4: CUSTOMER JOURNEY

As business concepts and IT systems are defined with proper customer orientation, process definitions include three storylines: the service provider’s internal process, customer encounters, and customer journey. The outcome is an illustration of partnership, with an understanding of the roles, activities, and touchpoints of both parties. Shall we call all these together as an extended customer journey.

As concept design processes follow these principles, customer orientation is embedded in the methodology, and one key output will be working hypotheses on customers’ drivers and activities.

Food for thought: IT projects tend to rush over this thinking in the name of project agility. Where may this lead to? 

CORNERSTONE 5: MOMENTS OF TRUTH

On the customer journey, certain customer touchpoints are highly important for creating value, trust, and sales. Accordingly, there are critical touchpoints that dictate customer commitment more than others. By focusing on the design of these moments of truth, companies can make difference where it really matters.

For this reason, qualitative customer research has become highly relevant for understanding and prioritizing the different development activities for customer touchpoints. There is vast research evidence that this is the key, door opener towards a customer-centric business culture. Accordingly, it remains highly valid for business development.

Food for thought: Competitive edges await behind the critical customer touchpoints. Name and then focus on these.

CORNERSTONE 6: CUSTOMER ADVOCACY

The idea of advocacy originates from the school of customer thinking, but its use is outdated. It has a misleading methodology, as the anatomy of recommendation is too often misinterpreted.

”How likely would you recommend us?” is a shortcut for explaining customer experience. A large share of companies applies this NPS (net promoter score) kind of measurement. It is easy to do and use, and for many, it is the primary way of explaining the success of customer service performance. In most cases, this leads to wrong interpretations, as recommendation has so many different meanings for the interviewees.

The point is that way of promoting a product is as much related to the product category as the researched product itself. This is why NPS has severe methodological issues. Advocacy is relevant as a thinking model, but the current measurement needs to be more trustworthy.

Food for thought: The advocacy approach is often misused and misleading, and the results may lead to unfair conclusions about the competence of service personnel or customer processes – or the competitiveness of the brand.

CORNERSTONE 7: ASPECTS OF LOYALTY – CUSTOMER INVOLVEMENT, COMMITMENT, RETENTION, AND BONDS

Customer involvement explains customers’ proficiency in a product category. Customer commitment refers to willingness to stay as a customer and buy again.

Several leading businesses are utilizing a matrix of product category involvement (high-low) versus customer commitment (high-low) to segment their customers. Together, these represent deep and vast understanding of the evolution of customer relationship. This approach also has proven fruitful in explaining customer information search, buying behavior, and much more.

In the same business context, bonds represent the stability of a relationship. These can take various forms, such as financial, social, experiential, or based on trust.  Customer involvement, commitment, and bonds serve as valuable indicators of the strength of relationships and offer a relevant knowledge to manage customer loyalty.  

Food for thought: Companies who regularly analyze won and lost sales cases with qualitative approach, tend to have deepest understanding of involvement, commitment, and bonds.

CORNERSTONE 8: PRESENCE WITH CUSTOMERS

Presence refers to the availability of your company, customers being able reach you at the right time and place, and delivering contextually relevant experiences with a human touch. This topic holds special significance for businesses that have downsized their business units as part of their journey towards complete digital transformation.

Omnichannel customer environments are increasingly digital driven. In a digital environment, the customer experience differs significantly, characterized by an opportunity for increased fluency, but a risk of lack of experience, heightened commercial noise, straightforward digital self-service, mass tailored solutions, and customers packed into their own segmented silos. As a result, meeting customers’ unique inquiries and requirements for personalized solutions may become a challenge, or even neglected. Unfortunately, instances of bad service occur and often feel artificial in the digital.

To bridge the gap between the digital and human-to-human experiences, businesses have established user communities, where individuals can share ideas, exchange experiences, and offer support to one another.

Food for thought: When will we witness the emergence of business models and advancements in AI that enable unique service experiences? These would recreate the sense of presence and go above and beyond what can be achieved in human-to-human interactions. When, where and how will AI-driven user communities with a “human touch” surpass the traditional human-to-human approach?

CORNERSTONE 9: INNOVATING WITH CUSTOMER EMPATHY

When the development team possesses a deep understanding of customers—their values, priorities, life environments, and decision-making processes—an excellent opportunity for creating genuine value and delivering exceptional customer experiences arises.

However, challenges arise when customer-facing personnel are insufficiently represented in the innovation process. It is crucial to incorporate their insights to comprehend the value creation from both the company’s and the customers’ perspectives. To see your business concept through the eyes of the customer, methods such as customer journey design, prototyping, narratives, storytelling, roundtables, and case studies are employed.

To summarize the meal for thought:  

”Don´t keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. You will be certain to find something you have never seen before. Of course, it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it”.

These are the words by Alexander Graham Bell, that inspires the commercial team to rethink the ways of analyzing, listening, and talking to the customer, as well as digging deeper into new opportunities in the market.  

HOW TO MAKE THE DIFFERENCE WITH EXCELLENCE IN CUSTOMER FRONTLINE?

Take the opportunity to enhance customer orientation with your next major commercial project, whether it be a product launch, new service concept design, new offering planning, business acquisition, or new commercial model planning.

Within this development project, study moments of truth to explain retention. Focus on how to cultivate customer empathy and trust. Establish a unique presence and design a remarkable customer journey. Prioritize some customer relationship related key objectives that serve as goals for progress.   

The author, Hannu Mattinen is a senior business designer and MD of Steps Ahead (www.stepsahead.fi). He produces online co-working and simulation environments for service concept design. Applications: service innovations, go-to-market programs, sales and competence upgrade programs. Author of three business books. Sparring comments for this blog welcomed to hannu.mattinen / at / stepsahead.fi.