L4 - Understanding the Customer

Question 1

Customer insights are?

Answer 1

Direction as to what a customer will find valuable – solutions that will engage customers - solutions they will pay for

And this is needed as customer demands change, business competition change, and digital technologies emerge – making customers and markets UNPREDICTABLE.

Question 2

Shared Customer Insight Defined

Answer 2

• “They have configured people, processes, and technology to incorporate digital offerings experiments into their DNA.
• In doing so, they are developing a building block we call shared customer insights, defined as organizational learning about what customers will pay for and how digital technologies can deliver to customer demands” (p. 25 in Ross el al., 2019)

Question 3

Successful digital offering

Answer 3

Intersection between what a customer desired and what digital technologies makes possible

Ross et al.

Question 4

Getting Customer Insight Right

Answer 4

1. Shared customer insights through experiments (Learning from experiments maen that you can recognize what isn’t working)
2. Test-and-learn: requires evidence based culture
3. Vision of value proposition for digital company.

Ross et al.

Question 5

You need this 5 to work with shared customer insights

Answer 5

1. A high-level digital vision for new customer value:
   A company should have a “digital” vision, and as companies build customer insights, their visions are likely to evolve.
2. A constant flow of digital experiments that test how digital technologies can deliver customer value: No company has unlimited capacity for experiments, conducting more experiments generally leads to more learning.
3. Tightly integrated product development, sales, and service processes:
   A new value proposition invariably requires a customer to act differently—to disrupt a power structure, shift expertise, or respond to new data.
4. Customer co-creation of digital offerings:
   Building customer insights involves working directly with customers early and often. Digital innovations are brilliant only if customers are willing to buy them. Every company has made false assumptions about what customers might want. A company with a shared customer insights asset can quickly identify and correct those false assumptions.
5. Formalized sharing of learning across the enterprise:
   A company can preferably fold its Digital Services Team into a Digital Business Unit reporting directly to the CEO. This unit owns responsibility for accumulating and sharing learning about customers and digital technologies.

Question 6

The Customer - Centric Ecosystem

Garret & Ritchie

Answer 6

”The Connected World is a set of Ecosystems made up of many products and many connections (…) People seek information. People push information. People react to information from humans and machines.

(…) People and things are interacting throughout the day, every day. (…) Adding value often requires the things to fit into the ecosystem seamlessly (…) exchanging information with other parts of the network to create contextual value – to the user”

Question 7

Define Touch Point

Answer 7

A customer experience consists of individual contacts between the firm and the customer at distinct points in the experience, called touch points (Homburg et al. 2015; Schmitt 2003)

A customer experience is built up through a collection of multiple touch points in the customer journey

Question 8

What effect does PiU data have in the connected world?

Answer 8

PIU = Product in use

PiU data is the core basis for decisions on the product or the service will engage the connected world’s users

PiU data can extend the relationship a company can have with its customers

Garrett & Ritchie

Question 9

The other side of data to consider –> Two sides to PiU

Answer 9

Two types of data:
1. How well the product is performing (Efficient products)
The product-in-use is of lower maturity usage

2. How the user is experiencing the product (Effective products)
   The product-in-use is of higher maturity.

Ross et al. 2019

Question 10

Customer Journey as Design Method - 5 steps

Answer 10

1. Can make an experience transparent for the designer
   o Understanding the user’s feelings, motivations, needs and questions
2. Can close ‘holes’ in the designers understanding of use of a service/product
   o Where does the experience begin/end
3. Can indicate new interventions and service designs
4. Can be used on pure digital user experiences as well as analouge
5. Can help understanding processes in organisations that cross department borders (silos)

Question 11

Lean startup - 5 steps.

Answer 11

1. Idea generation (Vission and Business model)
2. Validated Learning – testing hypotheses:
   “(1) Do customers recognize that they have a problem you are trying to solve? (2) If there was a solution, would they buy it? (3) Would they buy it [the solution] from us? (4) Can we build a solution for that problem”
3. Define and build experiments
4. Measure
5. Lean

Lean startup is a tool for continuous experiment design and testing of the ideas underlying these ideas (Bocken & Snihur, 2020: 3)

Question 12

Business Model Canvas & Lean Startup

Answer 12

Not tools conceived for ideation

Conceived as a tool for the rigorous and continuos experiment design and testing of the assumptions underlying theses ideas

a tool for the subsequent activity of experiment design and testing