Who doesn’t hate it when the office copier goes down? Everybody scurries away from it, yelling for the closest administrative assistant’s help as they go. After all, who on earth knows how to fix these things? And who has time to figure it out?
Opening the side panel shows a diagram that only a NASA engineer can decipher. . . The worst part: when the copier goes down the office comes to a grinding halt.
Xerox seems to have gotten the message. In an online Business Week article, Xerox Refocuses on its Customers, the company made an innovative decision.
“Rather than following the company’s standard development process–build the prototype, get customer feedback–they decided to hold focus groups with customers and potential customers to find out what they thought of the idea.”
In the article that follows, a super case study unfolds. Basically, as Stephen Hoover, VP of Xerox’s R&D stated: “The team had a certain idea of what customers wanted. Actually talking to them. . .really changed that.”
Xerox refers to its new stance as “customer-led innovation,” and has let its new process guide the launch of its new products. After all, although the company always emphasized its 5-6% of revenues spending on R&D, that really wasn’t doing much to bolster sales. With increasing pressure from a number of competitors, it was time to assess the corporate M.O.
Xerox Chief Technology Officer, Sophie Vandebroek, stated the new goal quite succinctly: “Involving experts who know the technology with customers who know the pain points.”
Now, Ms. Vandebroek’s scientists and engineers are “encouraged” to meet with some of the customers who visit Xerox showrooms. Other R&D people observe customers’ interaction with their products as ethnographers chart customer behavior.
Startling facts have emerged for Xerox in this process. For example: in the article, Xerox engineers and scientists were debating the development of the company’s first two engine copier. The team, all 30 of them, “thought customers would want to use the second engine for fancy inks or special colors.”
What actually emerged from a Webcast conversation with customers? Why not have the second engine allow the copier to operate at half speed rather than shut down if a problem arose? In that way, a broken machine would continue to operate in a diminished capacity until the repairman’s arrival.
Business people who sat around a conference table during the Webcast were so psyched about this idea, that Xerox’s stunned R&D team took it to heart–and made it happen. I’ll bet Canon, Kyocera and every other Xerox competitor sits up and takes notice. . .
Proof again that when companies really listen to their customers’ needs and comments, and they take steps to offer them products and services to address their pain, great things happen. We’re all consumers, after all, and when a specific company offers us something we truly need what it’s really saying is: “We understand you and we know what you need. You’ve told us and we heard you. Let us help you. We’re here to address your pain points.”
Who among us wouldn’t immediately bond to that brand? Who among us wouldn’t respond on a deeply human, emotional level? Talk about empathy. Talk about brand building. Wow. Doesn’t it make you wonder why more companies don’t engage their customers in dialogue?
Tags: business, customer-focused, customer-led_innovation, Marketing, office_services, Strategy and Tactics, Xerox
Ted,
Who among us hasn’t considered sneaking away from the broken copier? It was always a mystery to me why some smart person couldn’t figure out how to make them more reliable and when they do breakdown, easier to fix. I can remember walking around Starbucks to find one that was working rather than try to fix any one of those broken down. Keep in mind, when I worked there, each of the seven floors at the Starbucks Support Center measured about 110,000 square feets and held five or six copy rooms each.
Ted, nice post.
Isn’t it amazing what happens when marketing, engineering, product development etc… steps out of the ivory tower? At our company, we recently conducted some focus groups to validate what we “thought we knew”. Not only did we get validation, but we gained some incredible insights.
It sounds so ridiculous and obvious, but getting out to customers and meeting them in the customer environment–talking and more importantly listening to them, can make the difference between a “A” vs a “B” product launch.
Lewis: I always look forward to reading your comments; they’re so real and honest. You are truly authentic.
Paul: You’re so right. It is “ridiculous and obvious”, so it’s truly amazing to see how many companies launch products sans any input from their customer. It truly is amazing to see what can happen with input from all quarters, isn’t it? Now, Xerox customers can continue to work while the repairman is en route–how great is that? All because they sought out their customers to find out what they really NEEDED and WANTED. Hope this process gets instills and leads to more AHA moments for companies in every industry.
Superb and timely post. Yes the trend of co-creation by the customer of a desired product or service is very nicely depicted in this blogpost. In fact, the dire need for such an approach in case of drug delivery systems is also felt. On the blog http://www.diabetesmine.com one gets to know the importance of the Xerox approach since the Exubera (inhaled insulin) launch by Pfizer is not delivering the desired business results. One of the factors is the unfriendly design of Exubera.
Wow, thanks Ted for highlighting the BW article (my Google Alert informed me
. Our researchers indeed continue to have amazing “dreaming sessions” with customers. We (including me) scientists & engineers love to creative novel things– these customer dreaming sessions give us reality checks.
Let me share one of my other favorate customer-led innovation examples (there are many). We developed a set of image enhancement technologies to help customers manage a complex color image publishing problem. We had this fantastic, state-of-the-are novel image enhancement technology. What turned out however, is that we assumed that customers would change how they did their job and learn the new technologies. However, it turned out that most customers had a manual way to do their jobs that they liked. And so while our technologies were accurate and precise and would significantly cut the time to press, our customers just didn’t find it comfortable to do their jobs in this new way. A team of our scientists with our experts in ethnography watched how our customers did their job. It was eye opening. We realized that with some relatively modest changes and by really simplifying our tools and process for the most common tasks we could really make it easy for our customers to get exactly what they want – fast and the first time. Our business team launched some of these changes last fall and they have had a very positive response and we will continue with many more in the future.
By having these frequent dreaming sessions with customers, we do not waste research and development time and dollars implementing the solution the wrong way and only finding out after launch–.
That’s the power of customer-led innovation, happy customers earlier, and less wasted investments.
Our researchers and myself occasionally comment on these technologies on our blog at http://www.bigilittletblog.com/blog
Sophie Vandebroek
CTO, Xerox Corporation
Sunil: I thank you for your great insights. As you point out, many industries would benefit immensely from customer input. After all: who will be using the product? The customer.
Sophie: I am honored to have you add to this conversation. It was my pleasure to point out the great work Xerox is doing in its collaborative efforts with engineers, scientists and its target customers. Your company is marketing itself and its products in an important way.
Your willingness to share your insights is invaluable to the business community. Thanks for taking the time to do so.
Xerox is not alone in taking this approach. Whirlpool is also doing this with great results, for example.
Ethnographers or cultural anthropologists add great dimension and insights into customer behavior, wants and needs. As they study target demographics, companies have a much greater than 50/50 chance of getting it right. Don’t they?
Ted, excellent points about customer-driven product development.
Dell has done something innovative in this arena (IdeaStorm) that I write about in my blog.
Xerox can take this a step further by examing what Dell is up to.
Glenn,
Thank you for your input. I’m sure the innovation chief at Xerox will be very interested in what Dell is currently doing. Ms. Vandebroek has demonstrated how much she wants her company to provide the kinds of products her customers expect from Xerox.
Again: these ideas can provide a blueprint for every product and service company, large and small, to interact meaningfully with their customers and get to the heart of what matters most to them.
Nice post Ted. Since I see my uber-boss Sophie (4 managerial levels removed
has jumped in here, so lemme add my 2c here.
I am way back upstream in the research organization of Xerox and I have to say it has been nice to see this CLI activity ramping up and shortening/clearing our line of sight to the customers.
Most consumers probably don’t realize (I didn’t till I moved to industry) just how many layers of people and processes there are between research/engineering and the market that need to be penetrated before serious data-driven conversations can start.
Our folks running CLI help put together actual customer interaction events on site, and with printers in the room to touch/feel/discuss. We are also exploring simpler mechanisms like blogs where you can interact much more directly and easily. Of course, unlike s/w companies that use blogs a lot more, we’re just getting started. I suspect that’s because when you are talking about hardware and print quality etc., pure text is often not rich enough to talk about everything you need to talk about.
Our marketing folks are leading the charge of course. Check out
http://www.bigilittletblog.com/blog/
but yeah, researchers and engineers are ramping up their public presence too. Check out
http://blogs.xerox.com/
which has one of our Second Life enthusiasts, Jonas, from research, running a cool blog on stuff he’s up to. We have pretty active internal blogs, and hopefully more of us will set up external facing ones too (my bad: I haven’t yet done so).
Venkat,
Your input is very important to this discussion: the larger the company, the more numerous the layers of management and protocol. Somewhere along the way, the customer becomes further and further removed from the R&D process; yet, products are in development to fit their needs and desires. Xerox now gets this, and they’ve done something about it.
Now that Xerox’s marketers, scientists and engineers are on board with these concepts, it’s great to see they’ve instituted blogs to converse on a basic, human level with the customer. Let’s hope all concerned keep it real and learn a lot about where their customers really are. It will lead to a huge upsurge for Xerox, if they do. As many great companies do, Xerox has been struggling of late, so this change of direction is a welcome sign of things to come.
Keep up the great work, Xerox. And every other company who has lost touch with the customer: get going! You can do this, too.
Interesting thread.
Let me add something to it, as I am directly involved as head of a group of ethnographers in the European lab.
And this is the first distinction I would like to make: at Xerox we are using ethnographic methods for both product development and research.
And when it comes to research there is something that I find extremely fascinating: when we look at the reality of the daily work of our customers, that’s for us a source of inspiration to be very provocative about technology.
Take the case of the Eureka system, a system to support field engineers developed at PARC. Some AI people over there were working on an expert system, then they showed it to the field technicians, who were amazed by its capabilities, but–they had no need of it, as they needed the knowledge emerging from the field to circulate, not the core engineering deep, but standard expertise. This lead to the development of one of the first tools for knowledge sharing, named Eureka, now widely used by the engineers to support continuous learning. Ethnography turned an “expert system” into a “system for experts”.
Or the case of the paperless office study from the Cambridge lab: everyone in the nineties was talking of the paperless office as of a reality coming very very soon, while some ethnography was able to articulate which aspects of paper make it so pervasive in the office world that this transition will be longer than the hype was pushing for and a lot has to be put in the electronic world to have it happen. Or a project of ours, where we suggested that to support our customers facing technical problems a web tool is great, but there will always be cases where they need to interact with technical people and for that the assistance should be truly integrated with the faulty machine, with techniques for pointing and displaying actions “on the box” while using voip to talk with the operator.
All of this is at the heart of our way to do research, we dare to look at the reality of the work practices despite marketing hypes or technological pushes, and then, as in research our desire is to inform the world of tomorrow, we envision and design the technology of the future (our ethnographers also learn how to protect the ideas coming from the field with patents, by further developing them with the contribution of computer science researchers). Not easy, as we also need to avoid being side tracked by the multiple immediate problems we see in our observations, but very fascinating.
Antonietta,
Thank you for adding yet another, and very important, dimension to this conversation. I must say, it’s been very nice to have three voices making themselves heard from Xerox itself. You have all contributed much more than anyone from the outside could ever do.
From what you have all said, it’s quite obvious that your dedication to ethnography has paid huge dividends in both research and product development. I hope other companies will do what they can to get in touch with their customers to find out what they really want and need.
BTW: I had to chuckle when you brought up the “paperless office study”. Last fall, I wrote a post on “Paperless Marketing” proving that every aspect of business, including marketing, will always include paper. . .no matter how advanced our technologies become.
Talking to customers is essential. But Xerox’s big discovery could have been easily found another way if they had used Predictive Innovation.
The first step of Predictive Innovation is to make a function diagram. It shows the individual pieces that system needs to satisfy the customer. These are totally basic things. For instance its obvious that people want a copier to copy when they go to use it. “Function When Needed” is one part of the of the copier function diagram.
I have a lot of articles about Predictive Innovation on my blog.