Prelims

Half Title Page

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INNOVATION

How to Get a Lasting Market Edge

Title Page

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE INNOVATION

How to Get a Lasting Market Edge

BY

ROBERT DEW

Coriolis Innovation, Australia

with Cyrus Allen

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78754-787-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78754-786-5 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78754-788-9 (Epub)

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the help and support of many other people, to whom I am very grateful. Firstly to Cyrus Allen who not only helped with write some parts of this book and provided several case studies, but has also been responsible over the last four years for mentoring me in customer experience (CX) consulting with large clients. Without Cyrus, I would have not have progressed from being a business angel in the start-up world to high level corporate consulting. He made it possible to work with many of the large clients referred to in the book and helped me develop the depth of experience needed to write anything worthwhile. At times I was really challenged to take on his feedback, but I stuck with it because of how much Cyrus cares. If I had to choose the most important thing I have learned from Cyrus, it is the importance of caring about the people you are working for and with. Cyrus is the embodiment of customer centricity.

I would also like thank other colleagues at Strativity, Australia. For the past six years, I have worked on many projects with Strativity and have had the privilege of teaming up with some of the finest CX consultants in the world. These people have become friends and caused lasting powerful influences on how I think about the world:

• George Bejatovic for believing in the quality of this books and his indefatigable enthusiasm during writing. George helped keep me going every time motivation flagged, as it inevitably does in a project like this book.

• Michel Hogan for guiding how to cut through with the message and acceptance of ‘the squirrels that run around in my head’. Michel helped me work out how to write just what needed to be said.

• Matt Poll for sharing elegant design minimalism and validating my deep need for acting in ways that support my values in the business world. Matt helped me solve the problem of how to include simple visuals in the book. More importantly, he resonated the underlying feeling related to the importance of doing good things in business, rather than just working out how to make money.

• Brad Meehan for having the vision and drive to found Strativity in Australia. Brad is the best business development guy I have ever met because of his relentless focus to find and deliver value for his clients. In my opinion, he is one of the true leaders in the CX space in Australia. Over the years, Brad has provided support, opportunities and occasionally forgiveness during my CX consulting adventure.

It may be trite or even anachronistic to thank my parents, but they really deserve it. Both were very entrepreneurial, leaving the UK as ‘ten pound Poms’ to start a new life in Australia a couple of years before I was born. My mother promoted the importance of being intelligently thoughtful for as long as I can remember. My academic achievements all stem from her expectations about thinking intelligently. But is it my father who has most influenced my business career. He has been an amazing example of how you can take on business with an attitude of enthusiasm and optimism. As a pre-teen I learned a lot about customer interactions from travelling with him on his van during my holidays. He worked in those days as a van driver salesman, helping milk bars restock confectionary, snacks and patent medicines. It is both ironic and instructional that the customers, the wholesale distribution business he worked for, and its business model have all been made obsolescent. But the values I learned from my father about having a good attitude, working hard, caring for customers and always being in learning mode still hold true today.

Finally, I need to thank the most important person in my life – my partner Sarah Daly. We have travelled much of the world together in just six years, though there are a couple of more continents still to go. During this time, our experiences have prompted in many important insights, many of which I might have missed without her help. We have talked about everything from art and ethics, to relationships and psychology, to business and money. This creates the foundation for the businesses and life together we are continuing to build. Thank you.

List of Cases

About the Author

Robert Dew began his career as a physicist, but several reinventions evolved his career to consulting in innovation management and customer experience (CX). As the Principal of Coriolis Innovation, he now has almost 20 years of experience in helping companies grow. He has consulted for many large Australian firms, founded 48 start-ups and invested in four other private firms. As an academic, his PhD relates to increasing creativity in organisations with strong corporate governance. He has lectured in Competitive Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Creative Problem Solving as a Visiting Professor at eight universities across Europe, Asia and Australia. As a 10-year member for the International Society of Innovation Managers (ISPIM), he chaired their Advisory Board for two years and continues to front their conference rock band as lead singer.

Foreword

Close your eyes and think for a moment about the most innovative companies you know. Chances are a few names jumped up on top of your short-list – Apple, Google, maybe a favourite airline or hotel? They’re undoubtedly good at much of the innovation game but it’s a fair bet that what helps launch them up there is the quality of customer experience (CX) they are able to create and maintain. Apple wasn’t the first with either mp3 player or smart phone – but they came to dominate by virtue of their attention to design and to creating a distinctive CX.

It works the other way as well – think of companies you’d place low down on your list, the kind of firm you’d tell your friends to avoid like the plague. Once again the chances are this judgement is made on the basis of your (bad) experience as a customer rather than coming from a detailed analysis of their financials or R&D profile.

Joseph Pine made an excellent point in his article and book back in 1998 when he touched on the theme of ‘experience innovation’. His argument was simple – in a world where things increasingly become commodities (especially services) the real differentiator becomes the personal experience you are able to create in the lives of your customers. His examples included Cirque de Soleil – not your ordinary circus theatre but a very specific mix in which CX is at the heart of the value proposition. Or Virgin’s ability to punch above its weight in the highly competitive transatlantic airline game – again based on creating a unique CX around being pampered and supported from the minute the limousine drives up to your door to the Clubhouse which is so much fun that you don’t want to leave it to catch your flight.

It’s not always so obvious – and the risk with experience innovation is that it can fade. But some organisations succeed; in the UK the first online bank was First Direct and it attracted a loyal customer base by offering a very personal CX despite doing so via call centres and websites. Its real skill has been to maintain that level of satisfaction; it’s now coming up on its 30th birthday and continues to grow. More importantly, it has held on to the majority of its original customers – not through inertia but because of continued and careful attention to CX.

As Rob puts it in the book, ‘markets reward companies when they stand out from the crowd in a way customers value. This is the foundation of CX innovation. If you help your firm do something remarkable, customers will choose it more often, happily pay more for it and then refer you to other customers for free. The challenge is not so much finding the stuff the customers like, it is the standing out from the crowd’.

The idea of innovation as a kind of piracy is a metaphor running through the book – not in its negative sense but as a theme around being prepared to challenge and take risks in order to move around more effectively on the very stormy oceans of today’s business. It’s a concept (if not an image) which Joseph Schumpeter, the father of entrepreneurship theory, would have been happy with and it fits well with his powerful concept of ‘creative destruction’.

Not surprisingly, this is difficult to swallow for many senior managers in established companies. Whilst entrepreneurship would have been at the heart of all of their early days as start-ups once you make the big time you have to be careful. Control and caution come into play – the tendency in innovation towards the incremental, doing what we do better. That’s a good recipe for stability – but without some energy spent on exploration, sailing into uncharted waters, pushing frontiers, taking risks, it is also likely to lead to the demise of the whole venture. Innovation research is pretty clear about that – long-term success is a balance and any organisation needs a degree of piracy, of enabling different behaviours to develop a different offering. CX is at the heart of this.

So the importance of CX is clear; the real challenge is how to develop it and to sustain it. And that’s where this book comes in. Drawing on a decade of research in a variety of sectors it presents a structured framework for thinking about CX – what it is and how it is put together. More importantly, it offers some great examples and insights and an extensive toolkit for dealing with both incremental improvements to CX and more radical and adventurous approaches to transform it.

John Bessant

Co-Author of Managing Innovation, now in its 5th Edition