A Culture for Shared Customer Insights

Building A Culture of Shared Customer Insights

A company can have a growing set of one-off digital offerings that, in total, do not create strategic value or establish a strategic direction.  Developing shared insights requires careful design of the process of choosing experiments.

There are multiple approached to developing customer insights, such as hackathons, idea fairs, and other methods of generating ideas. These lead to hypotheses, which are explored through the test-and-learn process.  The insights gleaned are shared within a company, which helps to develop a culture around customer insights.

While implementing widespread experimentation in an organization can generate shared customer insights, there is a risk that resources might be wasted on unbeneficial experiments. Adopting good design practices for multiple, simultaneous experiments minimizes this risk.

According to Jeane Ross, Cynthia Beath, and Martin Mocker (2019. Designed for Digital: How to Architect Your Business for Sustained Success. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), the design best practices that correlate with increased revenue from digital offerings are:

High-level vision

Integrated cross-functional teams

Cocreation of digital offerings with customers

High-level Vision

Experiments should align with a company’s vision and strategic goals to avoid unbeneficial experiments. The vision directs the choice of experiments. If a digital offering is not consistent with the vision, it is not a good use of company resources, even if it is a viable offering.

Many companies introduce innovation labs that fund a broad range of experiments. If those experiments are not directed toward a vision, the company will struggle to scale the resulting digital offering. The experiments will all compete for resources if they prove viable, but they’ll create an unmanageable operating environment.

There is an infinite number of potential experiments, so companies need to choose their experiments wisely. If the company’s high-level vision hasn’t been established, management wil need to assess its learning from experiments regularly, so that clear direction for experiments ensures that the company is spending wisely.

Integrated Cross-Functional Teams

The design of new digital offering usually requires knowledge and active participation of employees with multiple different kinds of expertise within an organization. Teams that create digital offerings should include IT developers, of course, but also people involved in marketing, sales, and customer service. In addition, individuals with security, legal, and compliance knowledge may be required from time to time. Including people from all relevant functions during the early stages of the design process enables the premise of the digital offering to be challenged from mutiple perspectives. This will flag potential issues early, when theu can most easily be dealt with. A cross-functional team is also likely to be more creative than a team with just one kind of knowledge or specialization.

Cocreating Digital Offerings With Customers

Gaining insights into the problems, inconveniences, and desires of customers drives learning around what customers will ultimately be willing to pay for. One way of gaining these insights is cocreating with customers.

While there are different viable approaches to building a culture for shared customer insights, a common key point for success with this building block is the promotion of hypothesis testing through experimentations in a company. Experimentation in isolation or within siloed units, however, presents the risk of duplication — and thus unbeneficial experiments.

Key Points On Shared Customer Insights

These are the points to consider when building shared customer insights in your own organization, according to Ross, Beath, and Mocker.

Digital offerings came from the intersection between customer desires and digitally-inspired solutions. These solutions are derived from the capability added by digital technology.

Perpetual experimentation is an iterative process that builds on itself by implementing the learnings from each iteration.

Experiments at a company-wide level should be designed in line with the best practices that correlate with increased revenue from digital offerings.

Insights from experimentation should be shared within an organization’s business units to promote the adoption of a test-and-learn culture.

Customer insights are derived from the results of a portfolio of iterative experimentation. Sharing these customer insights across an organization ensures that business units can leverage lessons learned elsewhere, which ensures that resources are not wasted.

Conclusion

Test-and-learn approach is an important part of deriving insights into potential digital solutions and how they intersect with customer desires. Restricting insights into individual business silos, however, limits the benefits that company can gain from experiments. Building a culture of shared customer insights drives much greater value from the digital offerings than can be generated by a set of isolated experiments.

“Shared customer insights are valuable for identifying early digital offerings. They are just as important for constantly enhancing and evolving a company’s portfolio of digital over time.”
— Jeane Ross, Cynthia Beath, and Martin Mocker (2019. Designed for Digital: How to Architect Your Business for Sustained Success. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Author

Ysobel Rose, Organizational Design for Digital Transformation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management Executive Education, 2020.