January 14, 2015
Customers have the best ideas
At the NRF Big Show, Terry Jones, the founder of Travelocity.com and founding chairman of Kayak.com, said the best ideas come from customers and those who work most closely with customers.
In a session exploring innovation in today’s rapidly changing environment, Mr. Jones quoted Curtis Carlson, CEO of SRI International: "Frankly, innovation from the top is orderly but dumb, and innovation that comes from the bottom is chaotic but smart."
He added, "The best ideas come from the clerk dealing with the customer, the person in customer service, the programmer, etc. — from the bottom."
The idea for flight paging (receiving an e-mail when your plane is delayed) came from a Travelocity customer service person who was "tired of answering the phone." A programmer thought up sending travelers e-mails when flight prices were reduced.
Unfortunately, ideas from lower-level employees are frequently silenced by a "bozone layer," or an "impenetrable layer of middle management that stops great ideas from moving upward."
Mr. Jones, who recently launched Wayblazer.com, called on leaders to make extensive efforts to solicit ideas from the lower ranks while openly praising any that work and not punishing any that fail.
"The bozone layer will disappear because middle management will understand that you care and do want change and you are willing to change and accept risk," said Mr. Jones.
Customers are also "talking about new ideas all the time" and all employees should be working to bring the good ones to fruition.
Travelocity.com had an actual phone booth in its hallway with a line to customer service calls serving as a symbol for listening to the customer. All employees — "from the guy in the mailroom to me" — had to listen to two customer calls a month. Later in a meeting, staff would first try to improve processes at the company to avoid those type of calls in the future. But employees were also asked to consider: "What did you hear from customers that could drive our business forward?"
At Kayak.com, any e-mails would be sent and dealt with by programmers, although they get paid much more than customer service attendants. Said Mr. Jones, "It gets everybody in touch with the customer."
Finally, Mr. Jones urged the crowd to "look beyond what’s immediately apparent" in exploring ideas. Riskier, "transformative" ideas have proven to be the bigger future sales drivers than safer investments closer to the core of the business. Said Mr. Jones, "Being comfortable isn’t good for innovation. You have to feel a little scared."
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
What are the best ways to discover ideas from customers and customer-facing employees? Have you heard of any innovative approaches retailers are using to spark idea generation?
Poll
The simple answer is to listen to customers and front-line employees. Listening can take place in-store, via customer help lines and online. This has been the case throughout retail history. What’s changed is the means of communication.
Management needs to encourage listening at all levels of the company and enable the process to happen without retribution.
There is a logic that says those closest to the problem may be closest to the solution. I agree the clerk and customer level suggestions may not all be implementable but as pointed out in the article many are.
The issue is what Mr. Jones refers to as the “bozone layer.” Are they acting as a filter or a road block? I have found that many in that layer fear if they didn’t come out with the idea that it reflects negatively on them so rather that pass on what might be a good one they squash it.
That is not mean good ideas don’t come from other places within the organization including the top. I have seen instances in which when someone from another department is made aware of an issues they immediately see a heretofore unthought of solution.
All you have to do is ask! Customer-facing employees are an invaluable source of insights and innovative ideas that will enhance your position in the marketplace. During a lengthy engagement with a Fortune 50 retailer I spent a number of weeks soliciting ideas and insights from sales associates and store operations folks. They provided a wealth of knowledge and guidance. These ideas and concepts required change to the existing status-quo and ultimately died a quick death-by-meeting at corporate headquarters. Middle and senior management simply didn’t have the appetite to endure the work required to make meaningful changes. The “pain” simply wasn’t bad enough to force a change.
One interesting behavior I consistently noticed was that these same employees made terrific suggestions accompanied by a shrug of dismissal of their shoulders along with a “… Good luck.” It became evident that they had presented ideas before and nothing ever came of them. Their experience had shown them that this type of exchange was only lip-service.
Perhaps the “pain” to remain relevant and viable has reached a point where the middle- and senior-management of brick-and-mortar retailers have to listen and implement change?
Just a few years ago a friend of mine complained that there was no longer a way customers could directly affect change in a product because there was no one to listen to complaints and suggestions by actual users. In the past he could call customer service and have a detailed conversation about what worked and what didn’t. Someone representing the company would engage in conversation, but that person was knowledgeable about the product.
Passing along comments and reviews doesn’t seem to have great impact. As with all processes that influence decisions there must be a commitment and plan that integrates the various steps of the procedure, including the “listening” to customers component.
This direct approach can be very productive as customers who bother to call in and be heard have the immediate experience and feel personally involved, hence more on top of what works and doesn’t.
It’s not uncommon to include customers with employees in focus group scenarios to discuss products and marketing strategies. In essence the participants are having ideation sessions based on real-time knowledge from two key perspectives: the consumer and the marketer. No one has to stretch too far to reach out of the box, because no one is in the same box. This approach can be very productive.
Most of us that have been in retail organizations have been involved with associate “suggestion box” programs. Occasionally an idea from an associate is deemed viable and incorporated into the business. More often, however, the idea is killed because it is either too expensive or someone in senior management decides it is not worthy of the limited time and resources of the company.
I was guilty of personally “killing” some of these “ideas” myself. Often my excuse was I simply had too many other existing priorities to get behind one more initiative.
My advice is that reasonable ideas from either a customer or an associate should land on the desk of someone with the task of innovation as their responsibility, not a middle or even c-level person who already has more than they can handle on their respective plates. If there is no one in the organization that is responsible for innovation and exploring new ideas, it must fall on the CEO to both filter and support those ideas to insure the good ones do not slip between the cracks.
The “bozone layer” is an amusing play on words, but it’s not too respectful of mid-management types who are actually conscientious and motivated. In healthy organizations, good ideas should not only originate with top execs and call-center employees.
When it comes to customer needs, as Max wisely observes, active listening should be a matter of business culture. To ignore this opportunity is to leave a valuable source of innovation behind.
Early in my career I worked for the author of a Harvard Business Review article titled “Spend a Day in the Life of Your Customers.” To this day it remains one of the best ways to gain insights about your business.
The tactics listed in the article and many similar ones have by now been codified into the discipline of ethnographic market research, but the fundamental idea is simply to understand the customer’s perspective and view your business through the lens of their lives. It can be valuable to hire a service provider to organize and conduct this kind of research on your behalf but make sure that you don’t allow this to insulate your staff from the customer. The most effective initiatives and projects involve client personnel directly in hands on customer research.
In a previous career stop, I was involved in efforts to hear from company employees as it related to innovative ideas. One of the key issues was defining what fell in scope and what was not in scope. Once we were clear on that, we made sure that all ideas that came in were evaluated and communication sent back to the employee that contributed the idea as to the outcome. While this was a big undertaking, some good ideas came out of the process and employees felt like someone listened to the idea and didn’t reject it without a fair chance.
First and foremost, train employees to listen to their customers for their suggestions. And, every suggestion should be submitted, even if it seems like a crazy idea.
Second, we have a program called the Moment of Innovation. Every employee brings a suggestion on how to improve anything in the company. The ideas can be in the form of money making, money saving, safety, green, etc. Anything! And, it doesn’t need to be a big idea. It could be a suggestion to get a bigger trash can. This is a once a week program. Many/most ideas aren’t worth pursuing, but the ones that are make it all worthwhile. For example, If your company has 500 employees and each submit 50 suggestions, that’s 25,000 ideas. Perhaps only 50 of them are outstanding ideas. But, so worth it!
Echoing many here, the employees do the best listening to customers. They are excellent filters of real issues versus corner cases.
Having a process in place for listening is critical and a big function of customer advocacy roles. As part of that process, the employee should be rewarded if their idea is piloted and gain an extra reward if it becomes company policy. This is the stuff that makes great entries into internal and external newsletters and quarterly meetings.
Sorry for the long comment, but I have written my master’s thesis on this topic. I’ll try to keep this as short as possible. My message is: Retailers should try to create true interaction between centralized management/development and de-centralized customer-facing employees instead of chasing and judging ideas or blaming the “bozone layer.” The real problems are related to the interaction: trust, timing, understanding, language, personalities, tools, possibilities, physical distance etc.
Innovations are exceptionally high quality outcomes of development processes. The quality of outcome depends on the knowledge and the skills of individuals involved in the process. To create innovation, first you have to focus on individuals—their knowledge and skills. Second, you have to facilitate interaction between individuals—how they can share and combine their knowledge.
In simple terms: you need three kinds of knowledge and individuals involved in development. First, you need a vision, i.e. people who understand the thing as a whole and in relation to another things. Second, you need facts, i.e. specialists who know the thing to details. Third, you need real-life experience, i.e. those who have lived with the thing.
There is a nice anecdote about Toyota. I’m sure Toyota has all the visionaries and specialist that are needed to build a car, but last year Toyota announced that it will replace some robots with humans on assembly lines. Why? It was the only way to keep the company learning. They need to have humans on assembly lines to experience the building of cars. It’s the only way to ensure that their products and processes keep evolving.
In retailing you typically found visionaries and specialist in centralized management but if you want the experience of what it is to serve the customers you have to go to a de-centralized store. To create interaction you have to overcome this division. Ideas are one way to interact and share knowledge, but it is really an inefficient way. It’s like a doctor diagnosing a patient based on a patient’s letter. It’s slow, it takes a lot of effort (to write and read letters), there’s a great risk of misunderstanding and (worst of all) only the patient is the one choosing the topics and point of views.
To create innovations in retailing you typically need fast, agile and deep interaction between centralized management and customer-facing employees. In this process, visionaries and specialists get to know what reality is and the cues on how to serve customers better. The customer-facing employees get hints of what kind of knowledge is needed and ultimately they get new products, services and processes to experience. This creates a spiral that keeps pushing development further.
This is an important topic as more and more retailers are gearing up their omni-channel strategies. It’s important to remember that stores can be more than just a part of the supply chain or marketing strategy. They can be the eyes and ears of a company.
Consumers are are constantly telling us what they want, don’t want and what they are willing to pay. They are telling us this through the data output of their interactions. These e-demand signals via search, social, reviews, ratings, Q&A, traffic data, emails, customer calls and store assistant tweets, are an easily accessible source to better understand the customer.
Take the comments on a YouTube video, the sentiments uncovered from product reviews—all of these are great sources.
The web is the “ultimate consumer lab,” there are lots of great little ideas out there. And these little ideas everyday lead to a big shift a few months later. I am more in favor of cultivating incremental sustained innovation across the board than some folks sitting in their ivory towers and figuring things out.
The question remains, are we listening with no biases? Do we have the right incentives and tools?
If somebody endorses this, you have yet another e-demand signal. Analyze it. 🙂
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The simple answer is to listen to customers and front-line employees. Listening can take place in-store, via customer help lines and online. This has been the case throughout retail history. What’s changed is the means of communication.
Management needs to encourage listening at all levels of the company and enable the process to happen without retribution.
There is a logic that says those closest to the problem may be closest to the solution. I agree the clerk and customer level suggestions may not all be implementable but as pointed out in the article many are.
The issue is what Mr. Jones refers to as the “bozone layer.” Are they acting as a filter or a road block? I have found that many in that layer fear if they didn’t come out with the idea that it reflects negatively on them so rather that pass on what might be a good one they squash it.
That is not mean good ideas don’t come from other places within the organization including the top. I have seen instances in which when someone from another department is made aware of an issues they immediately see a heretofore unthought of solution.
All you have to do is ask! Customer-facing employees are an invaluable source of insights and innovative ideas that will enhance your position in the marketplace. During a lengthy engagement with a Fortune 50 retailer I spent a number of weeks soliciting ideas and insights from sales associates and store operations folks. They provided a wealth of knowledge and guidance. These ideas and concepts required change to the existing status-quo and ultimately died a quick death-by-meeting at corporate headquarters. Middle and senior management simply didn’t have the appetite to endure the work required to make meaningful changes. The “pain” simply wasn’t bad enough to force a change.
One interesting behavior I consistently noticed was that these same employees made terrific suggestions accompanied by a shrug of dismissal of their shoulders along with a “… Good luck.” It became evident that they had presented ideas before and nothing ever came of them. Their experience had shown them that this type of exchange was only lip-service.
Perhaps the “pain” to remain relevant and viable has reached a point where the middle- and senior-management of brick-and-mortar retailers have to listen and implement change?
Just a few years ago a friend of mine complained that there was no longer a way customers could directly affect change in a product because there was no one to listen to complaints and suggestions by actual users. In the past he could call customer service and have a detailed conversation about what worked and what didn’t. Someone representing the company would engage in conversation, but that person was knowledgeable about the product.
Passing along comments and reviews doesn’t seem to have great impact. As with all processes that influence decisions there must be a commitment and plan that integrates the various steps of the procedure, including the “listening” to customers component.
This direct approach can be very productive as customers who bother to call in and be heard have the immediate experience and feel personally involved, hence more on top of what works and doesn’t.
It’s not uncommon to include customers with employees in focus group scenarios to discuss products and marketing strategies. In essence the participants are having ideation sessions based on real-time knowledge from two key perspectives: the consumer and the marketer. No one has to stretch too far to reach out of the box, because no one is in the same box. This approach can be very productive.
Most of us that have been in retail organizations have been involved with associate “suggestion box” programs. Occasionally an idea from an associate is deemed viable and incorporated into the business. More often, however, the idea is killed because it is either too expensive or someone in senior management decides it is not worthy of the limited time and resources of the company.
I was guilty of personally “killing” some of these “ideas” myself. Often my excuse was I simply had too many other existing priorities to get behind one more initiative.
My advice is that reasonable ideas from either a customer or an associate should land on the desk of someone with the task of innovation as their responsibility, not a middle or even c-level person who already has more than they can handle on their respective plates. If there is no one in the organization that is responsible for innovation and exploring new ideas, it must fall on the CEO to both filter and support those ideas to insure the good ones do not slip between the cracks.
The “bozone layer” is an amusing play on words, but it’s not too respectful of mid-management types who are actually conscientious and motivated. In healthy organizations, good ideas should not only originate with top execs and call-center employees.
When it comes to customer needs, as Max wisely observes, active listening should be a matter of business culture. To ignore this opportunity is to leave a valuable source of innovation behind.
Early in my career I worked for the author of a Harvard Business Review article titled “Spend a Day in the Life of Your Customers.” To this day it remains one of the best ways to gain insights about your business.
The tactics listed in the article and many similar ones have by now been codified into the discipline of ethnographic market research, but the fundamental idea is simply to understand the customer’s perspective and view your business through the lens of their lives. It can be valuable to hire a service provider to organize and conduct this kind of research on your behalf but make sure that you don’t allow this to insulate your staff from the customer. The most effective initiatives and projects involve client personnel directly in hands on customer research.
In a previous career stop, I was involved in efforts to hear from company employees as it related to innovative ideas. One of the key issues was defining what fell in scope and what was not in scope. Once we were clear on that, we made sure that all ideas that came in were evaluated and communication sent back to the employee that contributed the idea as to the outcome. While this was a big undertaking, some good ideas came out of the process and employees felt like someone listened to the idea and didn’t reject it without a fair chance.
First and foremost, train employees to listen to their customers for their suggestions. And, every suggestion should be submitted, even if it seems like a crazy idea.
Second, we have a program called the Moment of Innovation. Every employee brings a suggestion on how to improve anything in the company. The ideas can be in the form of money making, money saving, safety, green, etc. Anything! And, it doesn’t need to be a big idea. It could be a suggestion to get a bigger trash can. This is a once a week program. Many/most ideas aren’t worth pursuing, but the ones that are make it all worthwhile. For example, If your company has 500 employees and each submit 50 suggestions, that’s 25,000 ideas. Perhaps only 50 of them are outstanding ideas. But, so worth it!
Echoing many here, the employees do the best listening to customers. They are excellent filters of real issues versus corner cases.
Having a process in place for listening is critical and a big function of customer advocacy roles. As part of that process, the employee should be rewarded if their idea is piloted and gain an extra reward if it becomes company policy. This is the stuff that makes great entries into internal and external newsletters and quarterly meetings.
Sorry for the long comment, but I have written my master’s thesis on this topic. I’ll try to keep this as short as possible. My message is: Retailers should try to create true interaction between centralized management/development and de-centralized customer-facing employees instead of chasing and judging ideas or blaming the “bozone layer.” The real problems are related to the interaction: trust, timing, understanding, language, personalities, tools, possibilities, physical distance etc.
Innovations are exceptionally high quality outcomes of development processes. The quality of outcome depends on the knowledge and the skills of individuals involved in the process. To create innovation, first you have to focus on individuals—their knowledge and skills. Second, you have to facilitate interaction between individuals—how they can share and combine their knowledge.
In simple terms: you need three kinds of knowledge and individuals involved in development. First, you need a vision, i.e. people who understand the thing as a whole and in relation to another things. Second, you need facts, i.e. specialists who know the thing to details. Third, you need real-life experience, i.e. those who have lived with the thing.
There is a nice anecdote about Toyota. I’m sure Toyota has all the visionaries and specialist that are needed to build a car, but last year Toyota announced that it will replace some robots with humans on assembly lines. Why? It was the only way to keep the company learning. They need to have humans on assembly lines to experience the building of cars. It’s the only way to ensure that their products and processes keep evolving.
In retailing you typically found visionaries and specialist in centralized management but if you want the experience of what it is to serve the customers you have to go to a de-centralized store. To create interaction you have to overcome this division. Ideas are one way to interact and share knowledge, but it is really an inefficient way. It’s like a doctor diagnosing a patient based on a patient’s letter. It’s slow, it takes a lot of effort (to write and read letters), there’s a great risk of misunderstanding and (worst of all) only the patient is the one choosing the topics and point of views.
To create innovations in retailing you typically need fast, agile and deep interaction between centralized management and customer-facing employees. In this process, visionaries and specialists get to know what reality is and the cues on how to serve customers better. The customer-facing employees get hints of what kind of knowledge is needed and ultimately they get new products, services and processes to experience. This creates a spiral that keeps pushing development further.
This is an important topic as more and more retailers are gearing up their omni-channel strategies. It’s important to remember that stores can be more than just a part of the supply chain or marketing strategy. They can be the eyes and ears of a company.
Consumers are are constantly telling us what they want, don’t want and what they are willing to pay. They are telling us this through the data output of their interactions. These e-demand signals via search, social, reviews, ratings, Q&A, traffic data, emails, customer calls and store assistant tweets, are an easily accessible source to better understand the customer.
Take the comments on a YouTube video, the sentiments uncovered from product reviews—all of these are great sources.
The web is the “ultimate consumer lab,” there are lots of great little ideas out there. And these little ideas everyday lead to a big shift a few months later. I am more in favor of cultivating incremental sustained innovation across the board than some folks sitting in their ivory towers and figuring things out.
The question remains, are we listening with no biases? Do we have the right incentives and tools?
If somebody endorses this, you have yet another e-demand signal. Analyze it. 🙂