The great question: when to think vs. when to do? And a question rarely answered correctly, as people and organisations spend an unbalanced amount of time and resource doing one over the other.

A recent article in Fast Company, “Design Is A Point of View“, lists 7 steps to correctly design a strategy. There are some good ‘nuggets’, if you read between the lines that give us the start to knowing the difference…

In today’s world of broken customer promises, late deliveries, missed appointments, erroneous products and, well, just plain shocking behaviour, its unsurprising that most customers have simply come to expect poor customer service. Let’s remember here that a decline in negative feedback doesn’t necessarily suggest an improvement in performance, just a complacency of the consumer. If we consider the entire customer experience, at least for the purposes of this article, to include every customer touch point from marketing, including pre-activities such as advertising, promotions, samples, to final day of the verbal or written contract between the vendor and customer, then there is a severe misalignment between what is promised and what is delivered.

Commonly, the result is that the contract between a vendor and customer is expired, by one or all of the parties involved. Mediocre or poor service is the cause. Arguably consumer apathy to the customer experience may be worse that even a negative reaction. But this does leave any opportunity. One that’s really not that complicated…

Another commentary on nGenera, but they do have a lot of (in my opinion) interesting theories and strategies.

This time the article, entitled: “Seven Questions Senior Executives Should Ask About How the Customer Experience Accelerates Profitable Growth“, suggests a more simple, but much more effective, strategy to achieve profitable growth.

Focus. On. Customer. Experience. (FoCE).

Sounds familiar…

It’s a song we’ve all heard before. Poor customer experience. But this song has had a decidedly different outcome, and further evidences that the ‘same-old-song‘ just isn’t being listened to anymore. That’s an important word: listen. A lot of companies, even those trying to jump on the social media bandwagon, aren’t listening. Without that, the outcome can be dire.

Just ask United Airlines…

 

This just stroke me as too funny, and as equally relevant- we do forget how funny we are…

I recently was invited to, what turned out to be, a very interesting web-ex, host by nGenera, on: “Pervasive Personal Identity“. Great stats, interesting trivia and extremely innovative ideas.

My favourite piece of trivia: who holds the most intimate details of its users, with their complete acknowledgement of, management of and payment for by its users? I didn’t get it either…

Is it that I’m looking for it, thus finding it? Or is there simply more out there.

Lil’ bit of column A. Lil’ bit of column B. But I think a lil’ bit more of column B. Where ever one looks these days, there are examples of collaborative design, and web 2.0 tools are not too far behind.

A number of experiences, meetings and articles of late, have demonstrated that collaborative design is getting it’s much deserved attention at executive and board level meetings. But challenges still remain. Most note ably, a very traditional [business] problem: technology & innovation implementation, without a salient and exhaustive analysis of the desired end- state.

So, I am cracking open an Innocent carton for a pretty darn good smoothie. I began to examine the carton, as I usually do, looking for whatever joke, queer fact or just whatever anomaly Innocent had designed into the carton this week. Found some pretty funny stuff.

Something then dawned on me. Is humour a way to gain customer loyalty by bettering the customer experience?

My answer: yes.

Every so often, I review old magazines, blogs, podcasts etc. looking for some topic or thought I may have missed, that might interest me (or others I know). Missed a big one in the latest issue of the Rotman Magazine entitled: “Wicked Problems” (I explain the term later if you can hold on).

Page 17 has an interesting interview with CogNexus Institute founder, Jeff Conklin. The title page states: “Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems“, predicting an interesting analysis of the changing world of problem- solving, that is increasingly solved via a shared understanding of the problem-at-hand.

Sounds very collaborative…

In one of my many (more recent) ‘wanders’ through the internet I re-connected with a distant colleague from many years ago at Rotman. Seeing a new role he’d taken on, led me to his company website. I was hooked. And a deeper ‘cyberdig’ (love that term), reveled a good, rudimentary article on ‘how to start thinking about collaboration: 101‘ for companies. Entitled: “Ten Questions to Ask about Business Opportunities through Collaboration” (sorry you need to register), the writers document the necessary considerations of and planning for a roll-out of a collaborative strategy.

There were definitely a few: “Thank you! Someone else gets it too” moments… But the overall point? Collaboration is more than a strategic advantage, it’s a strategic imperative…