Corporate innovation refers to deliberately promoting original and out-of-the-box thinking within the company environment. To achieve this, many firms set up offices in co-working or other shared spaces to get to know startups and identify future markets for potential collaborations.
As you all well know by now, having a corporate innovation strategy is crucial for your company’s long-term survival. However, it can sometimes become difficult to know where to start and how to do it in an effective way. In the end, what all companies want is to find the next big thing that will capture the interest of new customers, as well as prevent current customers from leaving.
Source: https://www.superoffice.com/blog/how-to-create-a-customer-centric-strategy/
It then only seems obvious that any corporate innovation efforts need to have a sole focus – the customer. Why? Well, innovation would not happen without the evolution of customers’ needs and wants. That’s why we see that more and more companies are realising the importance of this customer-focused approach. However, it requires both a corporate culture that fosters analytical thinking and is able to look at its markets from multiple viewpoints, as explained by Forbes, and a tool, such as Novable, that helps your corporate innovation strategy to adapt together with your consumers’ evolving needs.
In this article, we are going to unfold what you need to do in order to create deep connections with your customers, leading to a higher level of satisfaction, trust, and loyalty.
Every time you connect with a consumer, you have the opportunity to get to know them better and win their loyalty. The most important goal for any business is to offer superior customer satisfaction and perceived value.
Customer relationships can take the form of basic connections, complete partnerships, and everything in between. Nowadays, businesses are picking their clients carefully, giving them more power thanks to the development of new technologies. Customers are increasingly influencing both their own and other customers’ brand experiences. Here are a few examples of how your business can become customer-centric.
Customer opinions are crucial. They act as a roadmap for your business journey toward corporate innovation. By listening to your clients, you can discover new aspects of your business that can easily be improved, positively affecting their overall experience over time.
When gathering customer feedback, focus on the segments generating the majority of your company’s revenue and their persona. What are they looking for? What is their typical purchase journey? Do these categories generally reflect the market as a whole?
In current times, there are no excuses for ignoring customers’ opinions. Thanks to social media, this kind of information is easily available and can be collected throughout the initial stages, including idea development and product design, rather than during the actual testing phases.
Be there for your customers. They want to be listened to and be taken care of. In order to build a great company culture, having a customer support team is required. The secret to creating and sustaining a successful business is the experience you receive by working with your clients. It is a win-win relationship.
Customer interactions are one of the main customer satisfaction drivers. While you might try to infer from your service representatives what the customer requires, only interactions in the field can offer you accurate insight. Moreover, they contribute to customer issues resolution. Anyone who has ever worked in customer service has experienced an upset client. The representative can save the connection and gain insight into how to improve the next interaction by paying attention to the customer’s problems. Trial by fire provides the best learning opportunities, motivating employees to perform better.
These aspects imply the collateral effect of providing data to improve operational procedures and address the corporate innovation strategy.
Businesses are taking collaboration with customers to the next level by implementing a co-creation approach to their corporate innovation strategy. Co-creation is a social, active, creative, and dynamic process that aims to create new, useful products or services through collaborative brand-customer interactions and connections. Previous research shows how this concept affects customer trust, as well as customer loyalty. In particular, results encourage managers to embrace co-creation in order to boost trust and to more efficiently convert their corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts into increased loyalty. This represents a new perspective because most firms embracing co-creation do so for the mere purpose of reaching high levels of corporate innovation, not realising that it also helps increase the customer retention rate.
Corporate innovation starts and develops with the customer, a constant awareness of the market, technological possibilities, and innovative solutions for both current and future challenges. It is unlikely to deliver superior value only by simply asking consumers what they want. In order to build a customer-focused innovation plan, it is necessary to constantly challenge mediocrity to reach customer delight.
For this reason, a startup scouting tool like the Novable platform results to be helpful to move in this direction. By implementing a collaborative approach and finding quality candidates, companies can create new products and services more rapidly and affordably. Additionally, the risk associated with things operating poorly or, even worse, failing completely, would be notably reduced.
We don’t only promote this mindset, we also apply it to our core values and corporate culture. We go beyond keywords by making sure that the matching companies truly offer what our customers are looking for. This is possible thanks to the combination of the algorithm work and the Novable Agents, who are ready to iterate results based on specific requirements. Adaptation is key to corporate innovation and success.
Through Novable, your company will be able to better satisfy customers’ needs, by changing and adapting current operations accordingly to highly shifting requirements.
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