Friday, August 13, 2021

Personalized Solutions

To consistently deliver tailored solutions to customers, it is about creating an anticipatory good design, demonstrating technical fluency, and integrating quality components into great products/services.

With fierce competitions and rapid changes, organizations need to have an in-depth understanding of the gains and pains of organizational design and development for improving people-centricity. The customer experience is the fulfillment of a need that keeps them on the path to you. The deep look of customer journey uncovers the nuance and emotion of each touch point and the transitions in between. 

Every situation has choices, every situation has known unknown and unknown unknowns, the only way we get to understand these is by applying the higher level of thinking that we used to deliver personalized solutions mindfully and improve customer satisfaction smoothly.

Fit-for-purpose: Forward-looking organizations are shifting focus from inside-out operation driven to outside-in people-centric. Customers and clients generally need the fit-for-purpose solutions to their needs, combined with as little interaction with the seller as possible. They have to build a set of differentiated business capabilities to keep fit and ride above the learning curve. They need to believe that the customer is the lifeline of the business. The management needs to keep contemplating: Does your business solutions make logical sense to customers, make them feel special? What’s the customer’s impression on your brand? Do you reward loyal customers or push them away? Do you only focus on technical right or you always have a big picture to build strategic vision to delight your great customers and talented employees, Etc. Once you have this basic premise right, everything flows naturally, exceptional customer service and WOW moments will be the automatic result.

“Fit-for-purpose" is equally true for human relationships as for solutions to other needs. Improving customer satisfaction is about tailoring their needs and solving their problems smoothly. Be it service, product, or business solution, improvement and achieving the right balance in any truly customer centric organization requires all team members to believe that things can be improved. The empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge, to fit customers’ needs via personalization, nourish the culture of improvement and take the journey of people-centricity.

No-nonsense: In many companies, there are so many things going on, often they get lost in the overloaded tasks and activities that are not so essential. They lost their true business purpose - to create and retain their loyal customers. Inevitably they get stagnated, and become irrelevant gradually. To laser focus on their top priority issues and shape a people centric organizations, customers should become the primary driver of “why” and “what” work should be done, “how” to do it better, and “who” should do it, where to digitize the touch point of the customer experience, and which alternative solutions/services to make them delightful. Customer-facing solutions are critical as at the end of the day, they generate revenue for the business, and they are the building blocks of business problem-solving capabilities.

Put emphasis on customer-centric innovation and deliver “no-nonsense” solutions. Point out that customer inquiries are not only support related, but can also foster better ways to solve problems. This is where pro-active listening is very important and becomes a vital link in your innovation management efforts. Companies should take the outside-in customer lenses and adopt customer-centric strategies, understand the needs of customers, and appreciate customers’ feedback, to tailor their needs and grow more happier customers. Customer-led business growth can truly create the momentum for catalyzing business innovation and bringing high-performance business results.

Hassle free: The problem-solving logic is just so simple - diagnose the real problem and solve it in the right way. Championing the intuitive solutions to delight customers as an important dimension to innovate and personalize for increasing business satisfaction. To produce hassle free solutions, the management needs to collect feedback from customers: How is the customer going to use your solution? Does the new solution help users do things better than the current solution? Is it intuitive, easy to use? What’s the adoption rate? Can it improve productivity or spur creativity? Customer centricity is built upon rigorous business’s capabilities and processes to shorten the customer-centric solution delivery cycles and satisfy customers consistently.

Improvement and achieving the right balance in any truly people-centric organization requires strong leadership and all team members to believe that things can be improved via empathetic understanding, and high performance can be achieved via working hard and smart. In practice, go out and talk with customers to understand business and understand their tastes and current and future needs. Having a strong sense of how to develop customer-centric programs within the business means to build an integral and unique set of business capabilities by combining technology and business tactics to deliver personalized solutions and optimizing every touch point of customer experience continually.

“Choice,” “grade" or "range": With the unprecedented level of convenience brought by advanced technology, customers become more selective about the products/services offered to them. The more customer contact points an organization has, the more difficult it is to meet and hopefully deliver on customers' expectations. It’s important to provide choices for customers on how to solve their issues by listening to their feedback. And in the age of people, choice, and innovation, it is critical to ensure that the goal of "adding value to the company by adding value to the customer" is achieved. The customer including prospects should be studied, observed, and get involved in innovation processes. It drives innovation by co-creating alternative visions and dreams into existence of new solutions. Business leaders should encourage and facilitate empowerment of their teams to provide the premium “choice, grade, range'' of varying solutions for improving “higher-than-expected” customer satisfaction.

People centric companies become the choice generator for delighting customers and driving business growth. They seek inventions, new designs, creative and people-centric problem-solving. The careful consideration of requirements with weight-in factors in products/services design along with an overarching vision is what a good design represents. Starts with extreme flexibility and openness in soliciting customer wants, and then narrows down the process using detailed quantitative studies that first narrow the field, and then get into the trade-offs so that businesses know that what they are giving the customer is both what they really want and what they are willing to pay for (conjoint/discrete choice). Sometimes your customers may not always know what they want. But for sure they know the issues they face and they know what fits the best when you give them choices or grades or ranges of solutions.

Creative, progressive & adaptive Being people-centric is not about being perfect on doing everything meticulously, but tailor customers’ need to solve their issues timely. It’s important to overcome the “we always do things like that,” mentality, and apply creativity to problem-solving. Great vendors do not necessarily deliver "complete solutions," but, the best possible solutions, help customers overcome real business obstacles or add value via well-defined key performance indicators. There is no perfect thinking, or perfect human beings. Excessive focus on "being perfect" results in introspection, under-delegation, and unwillingness to admit any failures/shortcomings. The leader suffers, staff suffers, customers suffer.

Great solutions are creative, progressive, and adaptive. Respectful objections and opposing viewpoints can be exactly what expands the team's thinking and leads to deeper understanding, both of the problem and the process. Creative problem-solving is about leveraging multidimensional competencies to formulate creative or unconventional solutions to resolve problems; progressive solutions are capturing the upcoming trends to nurture the culture of learning and progressiveness; adaptive solutions encourage change fit mindsets or behaviors, to show versatility and flexibility in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances. In fact, in creating a people-centric organization as an outside-in" and socio-technical system, it is a question of re-inventing and re-engineering people, process, and technology to orchestrate a self-adaptive system.

Different organizations are at different stages of the business maturity life cycle, striving to move up their maturity from functioning to firm to delight. To consistently deliver tailored solutions to customers, it is about creating an anticipatory good design, demonstrating technical fluency, integrating quality components into great products/services and leverage necessary resources to build an 'ideology du jour' people-centric company with solid reputation and strong brand name.


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