Why Being Customer Centered is Central to Your Innovation Strategy

​Most organizations believe they keep their end user, audience, members or customers front of mind when they are creating new programs or service offerings.  Yet often this is based on preconceived notions about members, beliefs developed from a staff member’s time in the field, or based on interactions with a few of their volunteer leaders.  It is rarely based on an in depth exploration of the day-to-day work life of their members. Qualitative research digs into their experience and has the opportunity to uncover unmet needs. 

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Find the Pain Points

​Organizations may have survey data and other feedback from members and participants.  This is useful for setting a baseline of knowledge but doesn’t often provide the insights into the challenges that your customers really need help with.  Using a human centered design approach for innovation provides tools to investigate what is really keeping your customers up at night and getting in the way of them achieving the success they seek.  Identifying these ‘pain points’ provides you will the opportunity to brainstorm how your organization might help solve the problem.

​Start with Lived Experience

​Start with your customer and learn about their lived experience today. You can do this by interviewing them, getting them to tell you about they interact with your organization - their customer journey -- and how they feel about it or providing them with a way to capture their experience each day for a specific period such as a video or web journal.  With this rich information in hand, a program design team then analyzes it for themes, looking specifically for the pain points that participants describe. These pain points are rarely uncovered from a direct question, such as, “what do you need help with?”  Too often people say they need something and then when it is offered, they do not end up buying it.  It is the challenges that emerge through inquiry that is less direct that are usually more fruitful for program or service development.

Uncover Unmet Needs

Looking for insights

​For example, I was working on a project to design new offerings for a niche audience key to the association’s future. Other smaller organizations were providing services to this influential audience and the association did not want to lose their participation and membership. We started by interviewing 12 people that represented a cross section of this audience.  With the interview narratives complete, we gathered a group of staff to analyze the interviews for insights. We asked each person to note 30 items of interest on post it notes. Then we split the groups into teams and each team was to come to agreement on 4-6 themes that they saw in their insights. Engaging this wider group of staff had additional benefits of sharing the insights from the research with those beyond the core program development team. From the five sets of themes, our core team then synthesized the information, especially looking for statements of need. One need we identified was the need to connect with colleagues at their career level outside of the organization’s main conference. With this in mind, we created a number of options. After vetting and iteration through focus groups, the organization then launched a topic-focused retreat using the ‘unconference’ model. The program has since been successfully expanded to other senior audiences.

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Tackle Problems Your Customer Actually Cares About

Taking the time at the front end of an innovation process to really dig into your member, your audience, your participants, your customers’ world sets you up for success.  Program or service prototypes still need to be tested with your end user before full development occurs.  But this important step helps ensure that you are looking for ways to solve problems your customer actually cares about.
 
Want to learn more? Let’s talk. I work with associations and nonprofits to help them put the customer at the center of their new program and service development initiatives.