Incorporating customer insight teams into service innovation

Many service organisations now have Customer Insight teams. Three things that we have noticed:

Firstly, although organisations have Customer Insights teams, many of them do not have an effective design and innovation process in place to get a return on their investment in insight. Too often, Customer Insight teams are either marginalised or their insight used to justify prior decisions.

Secondly, the insights are often limited to analyses of quantitative sales data or large-scale market research. And although this is extremely useful, it doesn’t always get to the heart of people’s wishes. This kind of data tends to answer the ‘what’ questions, rather than ‘hows’, which are so crucial in service provision.

Thirdly, such data deals with historical, rather than the immediate and hypothetical dispositions necessary to fuel innovation. Classically, if you ask people what they want, they will answer with great insight within the limited boundaries of perceived possibility, and based on past knowledge. Insight generation in service design often takes place at moments of interaction, as part of a co-design process. In other words, when we spend time with customers we create activities that help them to design the ways that they think things should work. We include managers in these activities so that the ideas are derived directly through experiences – rather than through the analysis of data.

Customer Insight teams are increasingly recognising the value of qualitative user-research methods such as ethnography. They are also recognising that out-sourcing insight generation to market research companies often denies the product manager and others the chance to get close to the people that use what they create.

Resources
Norwich Union case study

Ethnography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography

Ethnography.com
http://www.ethnography.com/