Customer Experience Innovation

Empathy and a customer-centric culture are key in today’s world. Place the end user at the very centre of your innovation process and you’ll design new solutions that customers will love.

Customer experience, insights, engagement, and value capture are all cornerstones in the new field of sales innovation that is driving commercialization excellence.

The way we help organizations develop a customer-centric culture is through the proper enforcement of hypothesis-based problem-solving. The hypothesis-based method involves designing and running experiments to test theories. The team measures the results and either discards the theory or adopts it as the premise for the next set of theories. Although it sounds like a basic concept, it is seldom practiced in the business world.

Innovation projects more often follow a solution-based approach, in which a problem is identified and a solution proposed by an expert. The team acts on expert advice instead of their own knowledge derived from testing. As a result of the solution-based approach, one study by McKinsey found that although executives agree on the critical value of innovation, 94% are not satisfied with their own results.

The concept that animates the hypothesis-based method is that by running multiple rapid tests on different simplified models, you gather the maximum amount of practical insights with minimal investment. A wide range of case studies and our own experience both contend that “fail fast, learn fast” is the most effective approach to innovation.

In fact, the sheer number of tested hypotheses is an essential practice in telling apart successful organizations at innovation from their less successful peers.