Customer-Centric Innovation Methods

Building a business around customers is harder than most companies make it out to be. Many claim to be customer focused, but few start with it as the foundation. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞. I have been reflecting on this after observing Groww. Few companies I have seen actually start with understanding their users, and their approach to building products around real customer needs felt worth sharing. 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐰 𝐢𝐬 𝐚 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞. Before launching, Lalit Keshre and his co-founders who came from a tech-consumer based company- Flipkart. Did not have a finance backdrop, but understood customers. They spent a full year listening to potential users through WhatsApp groups, Quora, and surveys in multiplexes. They realised that financial services were being sold to people, not bought by them, and that most investors did not have the right information to make decisions. Every product choice that followed came from these insights. 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐰’𝐬 𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐨𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲: *Their big break was in 2018, when they changed the game by offering only direct mutual funds at zero commissions. Zero commission became a big thing in the industry. *Within three years of their start they launched stock trading with no account opening fees, and now it has emerged as the largest broker in the country. Overall, they’ve been making trading accessible and easy. * One of their initiatives ‘Inside Groww’ invites customers to meet and interact with different teams of Groww directly in their office * Weekly ‘Groww ProdX’  sessions involve 500 plus employees for testing new product flows with real users to identify glitches and improve the tech in real time These bottom-up practices built trust. Today, Groww handles one in four new SIPs in India, has over 13 million active users, and more than 83% of new customers come through word of mouth. Growth did not come from marketing tricks, it came from solving real problems. 𝐆𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐰’𝐬 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐚 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐨𝐧: in a crowded market, the ultimate competitive advantage isn't a feature, but a foundational customer obsession. They have understood that 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐭 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐩, 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠.

What if your biggest growth opportunity isn’t in your sales pipeline, but in your post-sale experience? While most revenue teams obsess over lead volume and top-of-funnel performance, high-performing organizations are reallocating resources toward the one area most overlooked (and most profitable): customer retention. You’re not losing revenue because you can’t acquire customers; it’s because you can’t keep them. Customer experience, loyalty, and client services are no longer “support” functions. They’re strategic growth levers. And the cost of ignoring them is compounding: - Customer acquisition costs (CAC) are rising 60–75% - Churn is erasing pipeline gains before they hit the forecast - Siloed orgs are failing to act on critical post-sale insights Here’s how growth leaders are operationalizing customer-centricity to outpace competitors: ✅ Shift GTM strategy from funnel-filling to journey stewardship. Map the full customer lifecycle, then build cross-functional ownership for every phase beyond the sale. ✅ Hardwire retention into revenue models. Redefine revenue metrics: CLV, NRR, and CSAT become as critical as quota attainment. ✅ Turn customer success into a revenue function. Enable CS teams to identify expansion triggers, churn signals, and feedback loops that inform both product and GTM. ✅ Engineer feedback into daily operations. Surface real-time insights from support, community, and product usage–not quarterly surveys or lagging indicators. The companies doing this right see up to a 25% lift in renewals, 35% higher LTV, and customer referrals that shorten sales cycles by 30–50%. Want to build a revenue engine that scales and sustains? Start by asking: How are we designing for the customer after the contract is signed? Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dY3Rxsc9 __________ For more on growth and building trust, check out my previous posts. Christine Alemany Join me on my journey, and let's build a more trustworthy world together. #Fintech #Strategy #Growth

Tactic 2 for influencing stakeholders from Jules Walter: Frame your message from their POV (not yours) It’s more effective to speak their language and demonstrate how your proposal will help them reach their goals, not yours. Stakeholders are focused on their own problems and are more receptive to proposals that address what’s already top of mind for them. A few years ago, when I was leading Monetization at Slack, we began to encounter diminishing returns in our product iterations, and we needed to take a bigger swing to re-ignite revenue growth. To do that, I spearheaded a controversial project to experiment with a new approach to free-to-paid conversion. The CEO, Stewart Butterfield, had strong reservations about the project. I knew from his previous statements that he didn’t want the company to be thinking about ways to extract value from users, but rather ways to create value for them. We had scheduled a review with the CEO and a few of his VPs to discuss the proposal. Since he was intensely user-driven, I framed the entire proposal around the benefits it would have for users (the CEO’s POV) rather than emphasizing the revenue impact of the project (our team’s goal). I started the meeting by anchoring the proposal on user-centric insights that we shared in a deck: - “About 10% of purchases of Slack’s paid version happen from users in their first day on Slack.” - “Paid users find more value and retain better. Yet we make it hard for people to discover that Slack has a paid version that’s more helpful.” - “How do we help new teams experience the full version of Slack from the start?” Once we framed the issue with this user-centric lens, the CEO was more open to our proposal and let us try a couple of experiments in this new direction. This user-centric framing also got the cross-functional team more excited and set an aspirational North Star with clear guardrails, which then enabled various teammates to contribute productively to the project. After we tested two iterations of our monetization experiment, we landed on a version that resulted in a significant increase in revenue for Slack (a 20% increase in teams paying for Slack) and we used what we learned to shift Slack’s monetization strategy into a new, more successful direction. Full set of tactics here: https://lnkd.in/gezP2EDw

I see "customer first" everywhere on websites as if it’s a business strategy. It isn’t. True customer centricity doesn't just change how you talk about customers. It changes your entire business model: → Who you build for → How you make decisions → How you deliver and keep delivering value I've studied hundreds of companies to understand what separates the ones that truly live it from the ones that just put it on their websites.. Here's what the real ones have in common: 1. Customer Segments (Who it's for) → They start with one specific, underserved customer, not everyone → They resist expanding until they deeply understand that first group 2. Value Proposition (Why choose them) → Built around a need the customer is trying to fulfil → The promise is specific enough to say no to the wrong customers 3. Customer Relationships (How they work with you) → Retention is engineered from day one → The "wow" moment is designed, not left to chance 4. Revenue Streams (How they make money) → The model grows when the customer grows → Pricing reflects how they create value for customers 5. Key Resources (What powers them) → Customer knowledge is treated as a strategic asset, protected and shared → There's always someone in the room whose only job is to understand the customer 6. Key Activities (What they do every day) → They talk to customers every week → Decisions get tested against customer expectations, not internal opinion 7. Cost Structure (Where money goes) → They balance spending on both acquisition and customer retention → Investment in customer success is non-negotiable, not a cost to cut Why it's different: ▶︎ The customer is in the model ▶︎ Growth is pulled, not pushed: happy customers do the heavy lifting. ▶︎ They start with pain, not product: solutions come after deep understanding. Customer centricity is a design decision you make in every part of your business. What else would you add?

I recently had a chance to clock in for a 5-hour shift making coffee at one of Deputy's customers. Those hours provided a treasure trove of valuable information: which part of our product is most beloved by workers and why, what we could do better to enable worker productivity, and a wish list for new features that will help workers and managers be more connected and in sync. I also learned about how the baristas foster teamwork, what body movements and order of operations they do to maximize the amount of customers they can serve, and how they build real connection and loyalty with their buyers. It was one of the most memorable days of last year! When it comes to developing game changing innovation, "listening" to customers is no longer enough - leaders must go deeper! They actually have to step into their customers' shoes. I shared my thoughts with Forbes on the topic of human-centered design. My take? It’s about deep market research that comes with spending time with your users and building empathy through true understanding of their pain points. Translating data is something I’m passionate about, but understanding the HUMAN challenges behind the numbers is where the magic happens. Check out the 20 strategies shared by inspiring leaders, and tell me, what would you add to the list? Link here: https://lnkd.in/gH73y-nR #ForbesExpertPanel #TechnologyForGood #EmpathyInDesign #CustomerFeedback

Your growth is stalling - because customers feel forgotten. When I was an executive hiring agencies, the relationships often felt too transactional. It rarely went beyond deliverables. That’s something I wanted to change when I owned my agency. I remember a client once saying: “I trust your team more than my own.” That stuck with me. It wasn’t just about delivering great work - it was about showing up in ways they didn’t expect. My big takeaway: Customer-centric strategies go beyond the work itself. They’re about building trust and creating value. Here’s how to do it: 1. Map the customer journey - what’s working, what’s not? 2. Turn data into action - behavior reveals more than surveys. 3. Align your teams - sales, marketing, and CX should work as one. 4. Prioritize retention - it’s more profitable than constant acquisition. 5. Iterate constantly - customers evolve, so your strategy should too. Stay focused: Growth isn’t just about more - it’s about better. Better relationships, better strategies, better results. P.S.: What’s one way you’ve strengthened loyalty with your customers?

Stop chasing “more leads”. Start growing the customers who keep coming back and bring others with them. Most sales conversations start with: “How do we get more at the top of the funnel?” The better question is: “What are we doing with the customers we already have?” That’s where customer centricity comes in. When you design your business around your best customers – not just what you want to sell – three things happen: 1️⃣ Retain – Make it easy and rewarding to stay Retention is the first growth lever. If a good customer leaves, you don’t just lose revenue, you lose future opportunity. Ask: -> How easy is it for them to continue with us? -> Do we remove friction, or create it? -> What signals are we ignoring when they start to disengage? 2️⃣ Expand – Solve more problems, grow shared value Your existing customers are already paying attention to you. Instead of pushing “new” at strangers, deepen value with the ones who trust you. Ask: -> What bigger problem are we really solving for them? -> Where are they forced to go to another provider, and why? -> How can we grow their outcome, not just our invoice? 3️⃣ Refer – Turn happy customers into active advocates The most credible marketing is a customer who chooses to talk about you. Ask: -> Are we giving them stories worth sharing? -> Do we make it simple and natural to refer? -> Do we recognise and reward advocacy, or just expect it? Around this loop sit four discipline questions: -> What it is: Are we truly designing around customer needs, or around our org chart? -> Why it matters: Do we see retention, expansion and referrals as core revenue levers, or “nice to have”? -> Where to focus: Are we clear on our high-value, high-fit customers and the problems we solve best? -> How to deliver: Are teams aligned around customer outcomes, and are we measuring beyond “new leads”? Customer centricity is not a slogan. It is a deliberate choice to grow with the customers who stay, buy more, and bring others with them. If you look at your current sales strategy, is it lead-obsessed, or truly customer-centric? #Sales #CustomerCentricity #SalesAcceleration

#CustomerExperience leaders need to split their strategies into deliberate bottom-up and top-down approaches. Many get the bottom-up right, but they struggle with the top-down. Bottom-up strategies focus on improving customer-centric employee behaviors at scale. These approaches include #CX or empathy training for front-line workers, using Voice of Customer feedback to set touchpoint expectations based on customer feedback, and building customer-centric KPIs into individual performance appraisals. But where many CX leaders struggle is often with engaging senior leaders to influence their customer-centric behaviors. It's difficult to influence C-suite behavior, but if you're expected to improve customer-centric culture in the organization, then you cannot avoid this. Top-down strategies start with showing senior leaders how customer satisfaction impacts growth, retention, margin, and lifetime value. It also includes improving CX and VoC reporting to provide more recommendations and actions, not just findings and data. Having discussions with leaders about the importance of financial and non-financial rewards for customer-centric behaviors is another tool in the top-down toolkit. And using personas and journey maps is a vital way to convert customer and touchpoint data into a compelling story of necessary change. Don't rely on dashboards and reports to do the job of top-down CX engagement. Don't count on a couple of positive customer-centric comments from leaders as a sign of meaningful, irreversible support. And do not assume that the fact your CX job exists is evidence of senior leaders' commitment to customer experience. Part of the job for a successful CX leader is to constantly prove the value of customer-centric strategies, influence senior leader priorities, and arm decision-makers with the insight they need to make customer-centric decisions. Don't just empower your frontline workers and assume the job is done. If you aren't building a consistent dialog with executives, you're not only missing an opportunity to make the most significant customer impact but also seeding future problems that can lead to declining support, budget, and resources for customer experience initiatives. Take a comment today to identify or define your top-down and bottom-up CX strategies for 2024. If there's an imbalance, solving that now can lead to better outcomes by the end of this year.

Almost 10 years ago, I stepped away from my Head of Marketing role. Not because I didn’t love marketing, I did. A lot in fact. But because I wanted to solve the problem that I, and lots of my marketing peers were being tripped up by ↓ The disconnect between campaign and core. Companies often prioritise the performance customers see, but overlook the experience they feel. Brands craft powerful marketing messages promising simplicity, customer-centricity, or innovation, only for customers to experience the exact opposite once they interact with the business. 👎 A “customer-first” company with an impossible-to-reach support team. 👎 A “seamless” experience riddled with friction. 👎 A personalised campaign that leads to a generic, frustrating journey. And it's why I became a service designer; to bridge the gap between the customer experience and how teams show up, interact and deliver it every day. It’s not enough to talk about customer-centricity, because your customers are gonna see right through that. It has to be seen, actioned and felt in how teams work, make decisions, and design experiences - with your customers need at the core. Because this is the production behind your performance. At The Marketing Meetup last night, I shared my journey of building customer-centric cultures, and the three key steps that make it happen (OK, caveat here, this is a massively over-simplified version): ✅ Understand Customer insight isn’t just a marketing function. Every team should be plugged into real customer conversations. Dive into the data then push it further; spend time in their shoes, immerse yourselves in their worlds and bring those experiences into your daily team interactions. ✅ Embed Align your values and ways of working with your brand promises; map the experience gap by comparing brand messaging with real customer experiences. Train teams to think customer-first, ensuring CX is part of daily decision-making, and recognise and reward employees who bridge the gap, turning customer-centricity into action. ✅ Operate Customer-centricity must be a business-wide way of working, we're talking about moving from slogans to systems; Design cross-functional engagement strategies that span the 5Es: entice, enter, engage, exit and extend and develop customer journey ownership models - set up squads that are clear on who is responsible for each stage, and how teams work together to improve the end-to-end experience. Great brands don’t just tell great stories. They live them, from campaign to core. What companies do you think are doing this well? I would love to crowd-source a list of these examples, let me know in the comments below 👇 #CustomerCentricity #BrandExperience #ServiceDesign 

Consumer Insights, thy name is Consumer Observation “You see, but you do not observe….Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.”-Sherlock Holmes Brands, in their zest to win consumer’s heart and market share, are going all guns blazing to understand consumer behaviour. Technological advancements & multiple data sources are adding to the many ways which brands are leveraging to better understand their consumers. As much as the ways & means of capturing consumer data evolves, there is no substitute to observing & listening to consumers first hand through home visits. Afterall, consumers are real human beings and not just a data point!! The art & science of observing consumers called as ethnography helps humanize consumers for the brands serving them. A brand which has leveraged ethnographic research methodology effectively for consumer observation to fuel product innovation is Loreal. Having entered Indian market in 1992 and facing challenges from the likes of HUL, P&G, Dabur etc. Loreal, very early, understood the need for ‘close encounters’ with Indian consumers for India specific product innovation – ‘Indo-vation’. Brand has been investing in understanding consumer need through multiple ways including regular consumer home visits. And these in-the-moment, in-context consumer observation exercises have helped discover unmet consumer needs thereby triggering innovation opportunities. It was one such consumer home visit which led to the launch of Garnier Fructis Shampoo+Oil, during 2009-10. While visiting consumers, brand custodians observed that young girls realised the importance of oiling their hair as practiced by their mother but never found the time to do it. Loreal launched Garnier Fructis Shampoo + Oil eliminating the need of two separate haircare routines, thereby saving time for its consumers. No surprise that the product became highest-selling Garnier Fructis variant within a short time of its launch. Getting to know consumers is not a rocket science. All that it needs is a brand with a sincere desire to know consumers and a consumer insight gathering approach which views consumers as they are – human beings with a complex weave of emotion & rationality. Fun fact: One of the earliest success stories of ethnography driven product innovation is 3M. In the 1920s, 3M engineer Richard Drew spent several days at an auto assembly plant, observing how the workers were using his company’s sandpaper. His observations about how workers were using the product and challenges faced by them led to the birth of 3M masking tape!! #ConsumerInsights #ConsumerBehaviour #MarketResearch #Marketing #ProductInnovation