Over the past couple of years, I have been keeping notes regarding products and services that I was once loyal to and longer purchase. It’s a bit of an odd activity really…that is until one gets the opportunity to synthesize an otherwise banal diversion into something that has deeper implications.
The increase in pace and scale has created corporate cultures of indifference – sure senior management proselytizes quality, customer service and innovation – after all, isn’t that what Mission Statements are all about? But at street level, where customers are won and lost, the ability to capture, understand, improve and deliver seem to be mythical pro-actions of an age long past.
The common wisdom today is that price is King. Common sense would beg to differ – value is King. In certain cases, corporate myopia has guided the best down a path of cost-cutting to the point where products no longer stand for what they once stood for, and brand erosion is insidiously setting-in; the ship is taking on water faster than the ability to bail it out. We live examples of this everyday - and the feelings that we retain from these experiences dictate the future fate of those relationships. Three personal examples come to mind:
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Being a long-time customer of a particular sport-shirt brand, I recently bought a button-down sport shirt – as I stood in the mirror to examine how it looked, I immediately noticed much of my torso (all the bits that are usually concealed by fabric) in plain sight. So in the quest for profit-maximization, the weight of the cotton had been reduced to such an extent that, the quality component of the value proposition (aside from style and price) had been removed from a once successful equation.
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I remember when cellular telephone service was introduced. The scrappy upstarts really went out of their way to win customers, with good response times, customer service representatives that cared (it showed) and innovative services that spoke to the needs of a jaded wired clientele. Today, as network saturation and swelling customer bases are now the domain of these carriers, the upstarts are acting very much like the incumbents they once challenged – when companies start airing ads promoting how good their service “actually” is, you know there’s a problem – where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Despite having a corporate account, getting customer service from our cellular carrier today requires us to do all the work – and still the response times and care for service are extremely poor.
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Our family owns an American car and a European car – both are advertised as reliable products backed by outstanding service networks. Both cars are current model year, yet between them, they have been in for non-scheduled service a combined 13 times!! And on eight of those occasions for the same problem. I know what the problem with their system is and so do they; why then do they persist in pushing my loyalty to the point of no return? I suspect to the where we will no longer be repeat customers.
To boot, one service manager told me to write a letter of complaint to the factory – well if that’s the case, what is he there for? And imagine if you had a problem with a store-bought vegetable and the super-market manager told you to call the grower – the apathy in some industries has taken on endemic proportions and is now considered the norm. No wonder companies are loosing business despite herculean efforts – they may be working on the wrong parts.
At today’s cost of client acquisition, it seems insane to run a business in this fashion; but the truth is, it’s the rule rather than the exception. One certainly asks oneself…why?
The answer lies in resources – people, time, money and focus. Now the aforementioned profit-maximization in itself in not a bad thing – that is what companies are meant to do; but not at the cost of the brand and/or customer loyalty. The latter has gained a particularly important role, as one now has to consider the risk of experience-sharing; poor word-of-mouth has immediate repercussions and can have a profound bite in this customer-empowered age of Web 2.0.
After 20+ years of efficiency programs, Kaizen, downsizing, right-sizing, re-engineering, M&As and outsourcing, most companies today are running lean…very lean. New opportunities for increased efficiency pop-up everyday and should still be capitalized on, however the real big opportunities lie in product and top-line growth. Many organizations have already started conversations and collaborations with constituents far and wide. But involving the customer and other people external to the company for new product and other improvement ideas is only part of the solution. Getting them beyond conversation is the key: inspiring, co-creating, collaborating, informing, sourcing, validating, voting, cost justifying, providing expertise, idea tasking and building these ideas up to a point where it makes sense for your resources to jump in is where the bulk of your new leverage resides. And not just in the division and augmentation of labor, but in the self-organizing, diverse and immediate responsiveness that are the drivers of innovation deliverables for any corporate imperative. An un-implemented idea has no value – in fact, if proper measures are in place, one could successfully argue that it has negative value.
Companies are being called upon to innovate at all levels, including in the way they manage; philosophically, that sounds great. But bringing about a wholesale change in real-world operations requires an adaptive approach – a revolutionary tack may either not gain traction or can overwhelm the successful part of an existing model and kill it.
Establishing a process that engages your stakeholders into participative innovation delivers the best of both worlds: a rich, motivated and available talent pool that is more responsive than your organization has the ability to be on it's own; along with execution expertise to rapidly leverage opportunities from a much more diverse group of collaborators. Implementing profitable ideas is the result we’re after. The icing on the cake is that you can select the participants and set the boundaries of your networks to suit your needs and comfort levels. That’s the win-win innovation model that is geared to help your products reappear in the eyes of customers, who yearn to remain loyal or return to their once trusted brands; or better yet, discover entirely new ones.