B2B companies today have a strong desire to create better digital solutions for their buyers, recognizing innovative customer experience (CX) as a key ingredient to success in current markets. While the desire and intention to create disruptive digital customer experiences grows, however, the majority of B2B companies struggle to deliver.
According to Accenture, 80 percent of B2B companies try to innovate around CX, but fail to generate a satisfactory return on investment. In all, billions of dollars are wasted on research and development of innovative ideas that never win new business.
What does it take to design innovative digital customer experiences that predictably win? The key is uncovering the false assumptions driving the failure of B2B innovation experiments. Find the truth behind what motivates customers to make purchases in a given industry, then innovate around those foundational realities.
Opportunities to Innovate: Addressing Challenging B2B Customer Experiences through Digital Products
When companies focus innovation primarily around the product or primarily around the customer, they end up creating customer experiences that fail to make much of a difference in people’s lives.
Understanding customers only provides a certain amount of value to the innovation process. While demographics, personas and psychographics may provide helpful information about customer preference, those things alone won’t point to the best opportunities for innovation.
Likewise, simply improving a product for the sake of improvement does not lead to any strategic, industry-altering innovation. The only way to create new products or product improvements that offer customers new and formerly unavailable value is to identify the “job to be done,” then remove friction from the customer experiences surrounding that “job to be done.”
>> Read part one of this article series for more about the “job to be done” paradigm shift and why it’s the key to B2B customer experience innovation.
4 Steps to Create a Digital Product Strategy for B2B CX Innovation
Creating a digital product strategy for innovative B2B customer experiences starts with understanding the “jobs to be done” by your product. From there, analysis will reveal the best opportunities for investing in innovative solutions that pay off both for you and your customers.
Step 1. Identify the Jobs to Be Done
To get started, conduct user interviews to dig deep into the “jobs” customers expect a product to complete. Don’t trust your assumptions about what motivates purchases. Make a list of what characterizes the customer situation before using the product and what would characterize success as a result of using the product. This gaps analysis will reveal one or more “jobs to be done.”
Step 2. List Customer Experience Gaps
Once you know the “jobs to be done,” you are one step closer to defining an innovative product concept that will predictably win. The next step is to create an exhaustive list of customer experience challenges people face as they seek help accomplishing the “job to be done.”
Customers “hire” products to complete jobs for them—their satisfaction is driven by how well the product completes that job, and how easily it does so. Successful CX innovations not only get customers from Point A to Point B, they also remove challenges B2B customers would otherwise experience.
Each “job to be done” from your gaps analysis will usually have three customer experience aspects: functional, emotional and social. Consciously or not, customers will measure satisfaction based on a product’s performance in each of these areas.
For instance, the amount of effort and time customers have to invest in using a product are considerable challenges associated with the functional aspects of a job. Fear of failure may accompany customers as they “hire” products–as may social constraints, such as meeting the expectations of others through the use of the product. These are both examples of emotional and social challenges that can represent friction between customers and the progress they wish to make by hiring a product.
Here are four questions to ask