The Power of Customer-Led Innovation

Many organizations spend a lot of time and money developing solutions without taking the time to ask their customers if this is something they need or want. Organizations that continue with what’s worked before instead of innovating and listening to customers are likely to be surpassed by a competitor. How can listening to customers help your business create products and services?

What is customer-led innovation?

Innovation is becoming a key differentiator in nearly every industry. Organizations that remain focused on innovation often benefit from:

• Increased value for customers
• Increased revenue growth
• New revenue streams
• Taking market share away from competitors

However, developing products and services without including the customer will likely result in the creation of solutions that don’t align with what customers want.

Customer-led innovation is a business strategy that helps your organization understand how what your business offers intersect with the needs of customers. Listening to customers and learning about the pain points they need to solve can drive innovation in the right direction for your organization. Undoubtedly customer-led innovation is key to developing the products and services customers love.

Here’s how to make customer-led innovation work at your organization:

Partner with your customers

To put customer needs at the center of your business strategy, start by viewing customers as partners who can help your organization drive innovation. This means listening to customers and gaining insight into their challenges before you start developing a product or service.

Be flexible

Listening to customers and acting on their feedback requires being open to new ideas and abandoning previous processes. Being flexible paves the way for continuous customer engagement and true customer-led innovation.

Use customer relationship management software

To support customer-led innovation, your organization needs the ability to collect customer data and make it easily accessible to your teams — such as sales, marketing, and customer success — to keep everyone focused on innovation. With data housed in a central location, teams can create seamless experiences to complement the customer-led solutions your organization develops.

Harness the power of customer-led innovation with Speridian

Many organizations don’t take the time to consult with customers about the solutions created for them. By using customer-led innovation as a business strategy, your business can work with customers to develop the products and services they want. Surveys, focus groups, and other traditional methods of collecting feedback after developing a solution are still a good idea. However, you will likely find greater success by partnering with customers in the beginning and allowing their ideas to drive innovation.

Speridian Technologies is a global business and technology solutions provider that helps clients modernize their businesses through digital transformation. With a proven track record of solving business challenges with our unique, industry-based consultative approach, we can help your business achieve greater success.