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Listening to Your Customers Discovering Problems and Unsatisfying Needs |
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By Vadim Kotelnikov, Inventor, Author & Founder, Ten3 BUSINESS e-COACH – Innovation Unlimited, 1000ventures.com
"Thanks to our customers, we turned a potentially disastrous mistake into a great opportunity." – Michael Dell
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Customer-Driven Innovation is not a one-time event or a slogan, it's a philosophy and a mindset. You should live this principle daily. Observe people, live your customers' life, watch how they use your product to learn what works and what doesn't work. Encourage experimentation and risk taking. Involve everyone. Require every person, regardless of their position to spend time on customer contact and services activities. Help your employees to understand the customer's needs by involving them in listening to customer feedback after a product launch. Ask all your employee to get on board with customer-driven innovation. Ingrain it in your operations so deeply that is becomes a part of DNA of your company... More Case in Point Dell Inc. Michael Dell founded Dell Computer Corporation in 1984 with $1,000 and an unprecedented idea – to build relationships directly with customers. Dell Inc. is the fastest growing company in the industry. It was added to the Fortune 500 list in 1992 and achieved more than $44 billion in sales in 2004. The three golden Dell rules are:
Dell Computers were the first personal computer company to organize and build itself around the idea of direct customer feedback. "Our attitude was diametrically opposed to the engineering-driven thinking of "Let's invent something and then go push it onto customers who might be willing to buy it." Instead I founded the company with the intention of creating products and services based on a keen sense of the customer's input and the customer's needs. I spend about 40% of my time with customers," says Michael Dell.4
Best
Practices
Google
is the Internet’s number one search engine today. What is the reason for
their remarkable success? It’s beta testing and
market learning. They
launched a less than perfect service into the market place to get market
feedback. Feedback is the answer to dominating a market. It also makes
great business sense. Google's competitors were trying to
perfect a product by themselves separate from their target market as
Google was continuously and rapidly upgrading their original beta
version by listening to the customer. They strived to achieve
harmony with
the reality...
More 10 Rules of Listening
By: Linda Eve Diamond
Rule #1: Stop Talking! 12 Rules of Effective Listening
Turn Your Customers Into Teachers: Listening Tips... How Do You Create Value for the Customer?... New Technology Development: Dealing With Ambiguity of the Fuzzy Front End... Active Listening... Ask Searching Questions... Listening To Emotions... Value Innovation: Two Fundamental Questions... Five Steps to Powerful Team Building... Five Popular Innovation Myths... How To Achieve Customer Satisfaction?...
The Tao of Entrepreneurial
Creativity...
Case in Point
Case in Point Charles Schwab...
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