Customer Collaboration

Companies that want to stay relevant and competitive realize more than ever how important it is for them to focus on the changing needs of their customers. Collaboration with customers becomes an important way to ideate and innovate customer-oriented products and services that satisfy demand. Many companies, however, interpret or equate customer collaboration with focus groups and similar interactions that ultimately end up asking customers what they want. Many of these exercises prove fruitless. Over time, they often make it seem that, despite best intentions, the company is not interested in listening to what customers are trying to tell them.

Organizations are looking for more effective ways to collaborate with customers, ways to gain genuine insights and direction from their interactions with customers. To do this, organizations need to bring customers into the conversation before the products or services are introduced. They need to view customers as an integral part of the requiste variety that feeds their thinking, decision making and innovation. They need to make sure that their interactions with customers are anchored in a conversation that the customers care about; topics that interest the customer. When they do that, the insights into customer needs abound for anyone paying attention.

When done well, customer collaboration not only leads to relevant, sometimes breakthrough ideas, products, and services, but also builds credibility, stickiness, and brand, assets that in the long run can even exceed the benefits of great products and services.

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