Executive with a Track Record in Developing Growth Strategies and Solutions: I have devised and implemented winning strategies that have opened up new markets and business opportunities. I have developed strategies that address customer/market needs, secured buy-in from executives/board, motivated the functional organizations to deliver and launched successful products & business models.

 

Family Man: I enjoy spending time with my beautiful wife and two lovely kids. As a family we are a good mix of outdoors and indoors. My son and I are pretty much outdoors and sports oriented while my daughter and my wife like the indoors. This diversity of interests helps us maintain good balance in our lives.

Category: Understanding Customers

There are 3 posts published under Understanding Customers.

Customer Experience: Nine factors that impact customer experience

The above slide show gives you a brief overview of this topic, while the blog below gives longer narrative. Download a free chapter from my book for even more details.

Many of us have had customer experience horror stories, either that of your cellphone not working when you have a flat tire, or that of being stuck at an airport for hours or many other such situations. After each of these situations we wonder if the company cares about us as a customer and do they really need our business.

On the other hand, companies are trying to solve the puzzle related to delivering best-in-class customer experience. They have leadership roles focused on “Customer Experience” and have it as part of their core strategy. They are hoping to solve this puzzle and become a brand loved by customers.

So how should a company solve the customer experience puzzle in a way that is easy to understand, some way that would help them differentiate themselves against the competition.

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Customer Knowledge Chasm: Barrier to customer feedback on disruptive innovation

Many books and innovation speakers talk about importance of customer feedback during innovation process. They believe that building something without customer feedback is like gambling, the results are often not predictable and most innovations fail. Innovation success rate across all industries is around 4%, and there are a few preachers who believe this will be improved by gathering lots of customer feedback before building the product.

While there is some truth to that and customer feedback is very useful in many cases, it does not necessarily help innovation in all the cases. And this is because of gaps in customer knowledge, something that I am calling “Customer Knowledge Chasmmore

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Understanding non-consumption and barriers to innovation

Have you ever wondered why people use a paper based workflow, when there are more efficient software solutions available for doing the same job? This is referred to as non-consumption, when users prefer not so effective methods for doing a particular job while better solutions are available in the market.

The reason is that non-consumption is most difficult to understand and solve, and it cannot be solved by dreaming up and developing a product within office walls. To disrupt non-consumption, the innovators need to get in front of the customers (those who are non-consumers) and understand why they don’t use the available solutions. Once you understand the reasons you can try to solve for eliminating non-consumption and many times this has nothing to do with the product. In this blog I would highlight few reasons why non-consumption exists, drawing from my experience and reasons suggested in a must read book “The Innovator Guide to Growth “.

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