Customer-Centric Innovation Methods

🔬 How To Run UX Research In B2B and Enterprise. Practical techniques of what you can do in strict environments, often without access to users. 🚫 Things you typically can’t do 1. Stakeholder interviews ← unavailable 2. Competitor analysis ← not public 3. Data analysis ← no data collected yet 4. Usability sessions ← no users yet 5. Recruit users for testing ← expensive 6. Interview potential users ← IP concerns 7. Concept testing, prototypes ← NDA 8. Usability testing ← IP concerns 9. Sentiment analysis ← no media presence 10. Surveys ← no users to send to 11. Get support logs ← no security clearance 12. Study help desk tickets ← no clearance 13. Use research tools ← no procurement yet ✅ Things you typically can do 1. Focus on requirements + task analysis 2. Study existing workflows, processes 3. Study job postings to map roles/tasks 4. Scrap frequent pain points, challenges 5. Use Google Trends for related search queries 6. Scrap insights to build a service blueprint 7. Find and study people with similar tasks 8. Shadow people performing similar tasks 9. Interview colleagues closest to business 10. Test with customer success, domain experts 11. Build an internal UX testing lab 12. Build trust and confidence first In B2B, people buying a product are not always the same people who will use it. As B2B designers, we have to design at least 2 different types of experiences: the customer’s UX (of the supplier) and employee’s UX (of end users of the product). In customer’s UX, we typically work within a highly specialized domain, along with legacy-ridden systems and strict compliance and security regulations. You might not speak with the stakeholder, but rather company representatives — who regulate the flow of data they share to manage confidentiality, IP and risk. In employee’s UX, it doesn’t look much brighter. We can rarely speak with users, and if we do, often there is only a handful of them. Due to security clearance limitations, we don’t get access to help desk tickers or support logs — and there are rarely any similar public products we could study. As H Locke rightfully noted, if we shed the light strongly enough from many sources, we might end up getting a glimpse of the truth. Scout everything to see what you can find. Find people who are the closest to your customers and to your users. Map the domain and workflows in service blueprints and . Most importantly: start small and build a strong relationship first. In B2B and Enterprise, most actors are incredibly protective and cautious, often carefully manoeuvring compliance regulations and layers of internal politics. No stones will be moved unless there is a strong mutual trust from both sides. It can be frustrating, but also remarkably impactful. B2B relationships are often long-term relationships for years to come, allowing you to make huge impact for people who can’t choose what they use and desperately need your help to do their work better. [continues in comments ↓] #ux #b2b

I recently had a chance to clock in for a 5-hour shift making coffee at one of Deputy's customers. Those hours provided a treasure trove of valuable information: which part of our product is most beloved by workers and why, what we could do better to enable worker productivity, and a wish list for new features that will help workers and managers be more connected and in sync. I also learned about how the baristas foster teamwork, what body movements and order of operations they do to maximize the amount of customers they can serve, and how they build real connection and loyalty with their buyers. It was one of the most memorable days of last year! When it comes to developing game changing innovation, "listening" to customers is no longer enough - leaders must go deeper! They actually have to step into their customers' shoes. I shared my thoughts with Forbes on the topic of human-centered design. My take? It’s about deep market research that comes with spending time with your users and building empathy through true understanding of their pain points. Translating data is something I’m passionate about, but understanding the HUMAN challenges behind the numbers is where the magic happens. Check out the 20 strategies shared by inspiring leaders, and tell me, what would you add to the list? Link here: https://lnkd.in/gH73y-nR #ForbesExpertPanel #TechnologyForGood #EmpathyInDesign #CustomerFeedback

Last week, I coached a product team through a user interview debrief. They were excited! Users had shown enthusiasm for a new feature! 🎉 But when I asked, “What problem does this solve for them?” the room went quiet. 🫣 This happens more often than we’d like to admit. 🧠 The Trap: Mistaking Enthusiasm for Validation When users say, “That sounds great!” we often interpret it as validation. But here's the catch: - Users want to be polite. - They might not fully understand their own needs. - As product teams, we may hear what we want. This is why relying solely on user enthusiasm can lead us astray. 🔍 The Solution: Semi-Structured Interviews We need to dig deeper to understand our users truly. Semi-structured interviews strike the right balance between guidance and flexibility. Key practices include: - Start with hypotheses: Identify what you believe to be true. - Ask open-ended questions: Encourage users to share experiences, not just opinions. - Listen actively: Pay attention to what’s said—and what’s not. - Probe for underlying needs: Seek to understand the 'why' behind their behaviours. This approach helps uncover genuine insights, leading to solutions that truly resonate. 🌟 Imagine the Impact By adopting this method: - Teams build products that solve real problems. - User satisfaction increases. - Resources are invested wisely, reducing wasted effort. It's not just about building features—it's about delivering value. 🦾 Take Action Next time you're planning user interviews: - Prepare a set of hypotheses. - Design questions that explore user experiences. - Remain open to unexpected insights. Remember, the goal is to understand your users, not just confirm your assumptions deeply.

Find new unmet customer needs by four ways of looking … Identifying unmet customer needs, pains or dreams are crucial. To increase your chances of accurately detecting customers’ problems and dreams, you must diversify how and where you look. That’s why I introduce in my new book ‘Breaking Innovation Barriers’ the ‘Four Ways of Looking’, a new model, originally developed by Louis Barsoux, Michael Wade, and Cyril Bouquet. It involves two main approaches: improve your vision of mainstream users and challenge your vision by looking at unconventional users. 1. The Microscope Strategy. By zooming in on the experiences of your mainstream users you can identify unsurfaced needs through regular focus groups, interviews, or questionnaires. You step into a role of an anthropologist to understand the passions, frustrations, needs, and wants of your users. 2. The Panorama Strategy. By this way of looking, you can find unmet needs of mainstream users by looking at aggregated data, such as errors, complaints, and accidents, that amplify weak signals. Digital tools make it much easier to observe the behaviour of large numbers of individuals. The ‘big data’ needed can be collected from multiple sources like apps and smartphones and can be analysed for trends. 3. The Telescope Strategy. With this strategy you study fringe users, extreme users, nonusers, or even misusers. Demands from small niches are often dismissed as irrelevant. But when you zoom in on users at the periphery, you might uncover pain points that are relevant to the masses too, especially when they are lead users. 4. The Kaleidoscope Strategy. You can also look at distant groups together and find similarities that show unmet needs. It’s like spotting patterns in a kaleidoscope. The challenge, especially for managers in established companies, is to think beyond the usual groups like suppliers, distributors, and competitors. Make use of digital tools and AI to quickly analyse masses of data and identify patterns. Use this new model to diversify you way of finding new unmet customer needs. #customerneeds #jobstobedone #innovation #customerinsights

Almost 10 years ago, I stepped away from my Head of Marketing role. Not because I didn’t love marketing, I did. A lot in fact. But because I wanted to solve the problem that I, and lots of my marketing peers were being tripped up by ↓ The disconnect between campaign and core. Companies often prioritise the performance customers see, but overlook the experience they feel. Brands craft powerful marketing messages promising simplicity, customer-centricity, or innovation, only for customers to experience the exact opposite once they interact with the business. 👎 A “customer-first” company with an impossible-to-reach support team. 👎 A “seamless” experience riddled with friction. 👎 A personalised campaign that leads to a generic, frustrating journey. And it's why I became a service designer; to bridge the gap between the customer experience and how teams show up, interact and deliver it every day. It’s not enough to talk about customer-centricity, because your customers are gonna see right through that. It has to be seen, actioned and felt in how teams work, make decisions, and design experiences - with your customers need at the core. Because this is the production behind your performance. At The Marketing Meetup last night, I shared my journey of building customer-centric cultures, and the three key steps that make it happen (OK, caveat here, this is a massively over-simplified version): ✅ Understand Customer insight isn’t just a marketing function. Every team should be plugged into real customer conversations. Dive into the data then push it further; spend time in their shoes, immerse yourselves in their worlds and bring those experiences into your daily team interactions. ✅ Embed Align your values and ways of working with your brand promises; map the experience gap by comparing brand messaging with real customer experiences. Train teams to think customer-first, ensuring CX is part of daily decision-making, and recognise and reward employees who bridge the gap, turning customer-centricity into action. ✅ Operate Customer-centricity must be a business-wide way of working, we're talking about moving from slogans to systems; Design cross-functional engagement strategies that span the 5Es: entice, enter, engage, exit and extend and develop customer journey ownership models - set up squads that are clear on who is responsible for each stage, and how teams work together to improve the end-to-end experience. Great brands don’t just tell great stories. They live them, from campaign to core. What companies do you think are doing this well? I would love to crowd-source a list of these examples, let me know in the comments below 👇 #CustomerCentricity #BrandExperience #ServiceDesign 

Surveys can serve an important purpose. We should use them to fill holes in our understanding of the customer experience or build better models with the customer data we have. As surveys tell you what customers explicitly choose to share, you should not be using them to measure the experience. Surveys are also inherently reactive, surface level, and increasingly ignored by customers who are overwhelmed by feedback requests. This is fact. There’s a different way. Some CX leaders understand that the most critical insights come from sources customers don’t even realize they’re providing from the “exhaust” of every day life with your brand. Real-time digital behavior, social listening, conversational analytics, and predictive modeling deliver insights that surveys alone never will. Voice and sentiment analytics, for example, go beyond simply reading customer comments. They reveal how customers genuinely feel by analyzing tone, frustration, or intent embedded within interactions. Behavioral analytics, meanwhile, uncover friction points by tracking real customer actions across websites or apps, highlighting issues users might never explicitly complain about. Predictive analytics are also becoming essential for modern CX strategies. They anticipate customer needs, allowing businesses to proactively address potential churn, rather than merely reacting after the fact. The capability can also help you maximize revenue in the experiences you are delivering (a use case not discussed often enough). The most forward-looking CX teams today are blending traditional feedback with these deeper, proactive techniques, creating a comprehensive view of their customers. If you’re just beginning to move beyond a survey-only approach, prioritizing these more advanced methods will help ensure your insights are not only deeper but actionable in real time. Surveys aren’t dead (much to my chagrin), but relying solely on them means leaving crucial insights behind. While many enterprises have moved beyond surveys, the majority are still overly reliant on them. And when you get to mid-market or small businesses? The survey slapping gets exponentially worse. Now is the time to start looking beyond the questionnaire and your Likert scales. The email survey is slowly becoming digital dust. And the capabilities to get you there are readily available. How are you evolving your customer listening strategy beyond traditional surveys? #customerexperience #cxstrategy #customerinsights #surveys

When you align learning strategy with how the brain actually learns you'll find that performance improves. In many organisations, learning still means content delivery - I battle this challenge regularly. L&D teams measure outputs like number of courses, completions, attendance rather than outcomes. But humans don’t learn by consuming information. They learn by connecting ideas, making meaning, and putting their knowledge and skills into practice over and over again until their brains physically change. If you want to genuinely change behaviour and performance in your organisation then your whole strategy needs to be designed with the brain in mind. Here are three practical principles to share with your design and delivery teams: 🧠 Space, don’t cram Learning needs time to settle. Encourage teams to design experiences that build over time rather than delivering everything in one go. The return on retention is remarkable. 💡 Engage peoples emotions People remember what feels relevant and real. Challenge your designers to stimulate learners emotions with hooks like stories, challenges and personal connections. Don't just design pretty slides. 🔄 Practice and retrieval Learning journeys, rather than one off events, give people time to apply, reflect, and test new skills where it matters - on the job. This doesn't mean repetition for its own sake; it's simply how neural pathways are strengthened. When your learning strategy aligns with how the brain naturally works key metrics like engagement, performance and business impact improve. How do you enable your teams to bring brain science into the way they design and deliver learning?

Here’s an insight many companies overlook: You can only innovate at the speed your clients are ready to accept innovation, but different customers have different levels of “Innovation Hunger”. The trick with Innovation Hunger Assessment, is to assess how much innovation you can push on your customers. Maximising the innovation push will maximise your speed of innovation. One business leader who espouses this idea is Continental Automotive Singapore’s President and CEO, Kien Foh Lo. For an hour or so I sat down with Kien Foh Lo to discuss this interesting and important topic. Continental, if you did not know, does way more than just the tires that they are famous for. Its Automotive group sector, which employs about 92,000 people around the world, develops and produces all kinds of parts for the mobility industry, from parking radars to window projection solutions to software defined vehicle and much, much more. According to Kien Foh Lo their different automotive customers have different innovation needs. Some need help with improving their processes, some want to be pushed to the limit to be able to be the first to introduce the latest technical solutions on the market. The job of the people at Continental Automotive Singapore is to understand how much each customer wants to be pushed. Kien Foh adopts this concept that he calls “the 3R of listening” - it stands for Receive, Review and Respond. It’s all about Receiving ideas, demands and suggestion from the customer, Reviewing what to do with this information and then Responding quickly and correctly to the right things. It’s more than just “listening to the customer” - it’s about understanding how much innovation their customers are able to receive and - more importantly - what kind of innovation they are ready to receive. Kien Foh Lo: “We need our people to be curious, to challenge the status quo and to be hungry to nudge our customers forward but just the right amount that they can ‘handle’.” Kien Foh Lo calls this “the positive push”. If you know which client to push, in what direction and with what level of force, you will maximise the effect you can get from your innovation. After all, cutting edge innovations that no clients want is not going to bring you success. And just producing the same old solutions that customers always wanted is not going to bring you progress. But, pushing the right innovation, to the right customer in a way that makes the customers appreciate being pushed will bring you both progress and success. To be able to do that effectively you need "Innovation Hunger Assessment” (IHA). Final Thought: Do you assess how much innovation you can push on your different customers based on their “innovation hunger”? 

Is your obsession with user empathy actually hurting product innovation? For years, the UX community has elevated empathy to an almost sacred status.   We're told to "walk in users' shoes," "feel their pain," and "see through their eyes."   This idea has become so entrenched that questioning it feels insane. But maybe it's worth saying something uncomfortable: excessive empathy can sometimes lead to less innovative products. Users are experts in their problems, but they're often limited by their current mental models and experiences. They can tell us what frustrates them today, but it’s rare for them to come up with radical new solutions. This creates a fundamental tension in UX research: how do we honor user needs while still pushing beyond what they can articulate? Let’s talk Netflix. In 2011, they made the controversial decision to separate their streaming service from their DVD rental business (remember Qwikster?). At the time, most of their customers were DVD users, and the shift was met with significant user backlash. Had Netflix over-indexed on empathy with their current DVD customers, they might have invested everything in optimizing their DVD delivery system. Instead, they made a forward-looking decision that initially frustrated users but positioned the company for its streaming-dominated future. Reed Hastings later acknowledged they moved too quickly in the transition, but the strategic direction was ultimately correct. This wasn't ignoring empathy, it was balancing immediate user needs with forward-looking innovation. This doesn't mean we should dismiss empathy. We need a more nuanced approach that I think of as "oscillating perspective", consciously moving between deep user understanding and strategic distance: - Immersive empathy phases: Get close to users to understand their current context and pain points - Strategic distance phases: Step back to challenge assumptions and imagine possibilities beyond current user expectations - Informed synthesis: Bring these perspectives together to create solutions that both meet current needs and open new possibilities The most transformative products often don't come from asking "what do users want?" but instead asking "what could users want if they knew it was possible?" I could talk about the iPhone here but you get the drift. The next time someone tells you to "build more empathy" with users, remember that empathy alone is not enough. You must have the courage to see beyond users' current perspective. I’d love to know where you think the balance between empathy & innovation lies!

Let's say you're a marketer launching a new feature. Out of the following two options, which one do you choose? 1. A keyword-optimized article that ranks well on Google. It’s well-structured, answers common questions, and brings in steady organic traffic. 2. A deeply researched piece based on direct conversations with customers. It dives into their pain points, uses their language, and speaks to what they actually care about—whether or not it checks every SEO box. The first might bring in traffic. The second will build trust and demonstrate value. See the problem? We often treat customer-centricity and SEO like they're opposing forces. We worry that focusing on genuine customer needs will somehow hurt our search rankings. But here's the thing: it's not an either/or situation. It's a "both/and." Think about it. What's the point of ranking high if your content doesn't actually connect with the people who land on your page? They'll bounce, and your ranking will eventually suffer anyway. Google's algorithm is getting smarter. It recognizes valuable, engaging content. And what's more valuable than content that genuinely addresses your customer's pain points? This "either/or" thinking plagues marketing. It's not just customer focus vs. SEO. It's: • features vs. benefits: Do we list every technical spec, or do we tell stories about how those specs improve people's lives? • sales enablement vs. brand building: Do we create brochures, or do we create thought leadership pieces that position us as experts? • short-form vs. long-form Content: Do we create quick social media snippets, or in-depth guides that provide real value? • data-driven vs. creative: Do we focus on analytics, or on gut instinct and artistic flair? It's literally.....everywhere. And the biggest problem is the chosen path is heavily influenced by internal subjective opinions NOT backed by data and/or being too scared to take risks. In instances like "customer centricity vs SEO", you do both of them. It's how you BALANCE and ALIGN them so well that they deliver what you're hoping to accomplish aka pipeline. You can't be publishing 10 blogs/month using a customer-centricity approach without showing a measurable pipeline from it. Be it in the form of acquisition/retention/upselling. It has to add value at some point and you gotta prove your point to your stakeholders. You see, SEO's been the champion channel for millions of brands. Every single playbook, podcast, newsletter, blog, video, landing page mentions SEO as a key pipeline driver. You don't need to be anti-SEO to be customer-centric. You need to be pro-pipeline, pro-your-company-goals. And if a blend of customer centricity + SEO gets you there, you choose that (keeping your subjective opinions aside).