Opinion
Preparing for customer led innovation
16 February 2012
Traditionally customer opinion was gained through activities such as focus groups, feedback forms and telephone interviews and was viewed strictly as a marketing discipline. Today ideas for future products and services can be gained in huge volumes through online communities, social networks, loyalty schemes and personalised marketing.
Such changes are being driven by customers and employees who are more empowered than ever before by technology. By 2020 customers will be the main source of new product or service ideas, with online communities in second and R&D in third place. That is according to 30% of business leaders across Financial Services, Education, Public Sector, IT and Manufacturing industries.
This is in contrast to today’s perception where customers are the second main source of ideas and the R&D team is the first. However, the main source of ideas for improvement of business processes will continue to be employees, with 34% of business leaders placing them in the top spot and continuing to predict that this will still be the case by 2020.
One essential action for the CIO and the CMO to support this new era of customer led innovation is to first streamline its information processes. By doing so, it can ensure that all customer feedback in both paper and digital format is easily collected, digitised and integrated into the business to be accessed by other divisions via a secure archive for business intelligence purposes.
The right technology
Some of the technology required to do it is already inside almost every organisation today. Businesses have become used to multifunction devices that print, copy and scan documents. However, few are using these to their full potential or realising the central role these devices can play in building innovative information processes. By coupling Managed Document Services (a service that manages how information enters, travels through and exits an organisation) and the right software, these devices are transformed into a communication hub that connects to ERP systems, managing the information that is entered, stored, shared, and distributed inside and outside the organisation. They can digitise critical hard copy documents, transfer information directly to a central server or file, recognise text from documents to make them easy to search, and even convert them easily into different formats – for example from a pdf into an excel spreadsheet. Confidential data is secure, with the ability to trace, restrict or audit any changes or copies made.
The end result of this dynamic partnership combined with optimising the right technology and implementing integrated information processes is a winning combination of customer-led product innovation and employee-led process innovation. In addition, customers are influencing future products and organisations are better equipped to manage the increase in information. In turn, this will allow them to be more agile in responding to customer and market needs and focus on generating business value from the data, instead of worrying about information overload.
Carsten Bruhn, executive vice-president, commercial, Ricoh Europe