Peter HorvathIn a previous post I presented the Binding Voice of Customer (BiVoc) co-creation canvas, a process for customer co-creation. But to decide whether the ‘Binding Voice of Customer’ is even an option for a company, management needs to ask itself five questions.
Already answering these questions about a co-creation approach should be done with co-creation methods. E.g. workshops should be used to ensure that answers do not only represent opinions of senior management, but reflect views of employees and customers as well.
These five prerequisites ensure that implementation of a BiVoC approach will not push the alignment of the company’s Star Model off-balance.
1, Is strategy clear and known? As noted earlier, mission and strategy are core elements of a co-creative mindset. If company’s vision, values, business model, value proposition, differentiators and target customers are not clearly identifiable, than the distributed decision-making of ‘Binding Voice of Customer’ will only create chaos. It is important for strategy to be clear not only to senior management, but also to employees and customers. A clear strategy also ensures that proposals that do not fit the company’s strategy can be pushed back relatively unpainfully.
2, Are departments internally aligned and transparent? The left hand of the organization needs to know what the right hand is doing. This goes beyond making sure there is no in-fighting between various departments. Instead, constant communication between departments is necessary, at least in the form of regular alignment meetings. Ideally even cross-department communities, or cross-department projects should exist. Beyond trust and cooperation among departments, their respective project backlog should be internally transparent. If this is not the case, that can lead to hidden or duplicated projects, made only worse by the introduction of a completely new ‘department’ – the customers.
3, Do employees have a voice inside the company? Taking the voice of customers seriously, but neglecting to include employees in decision making may lead to internal tension. Having a history of employee inclusion at the company will make BiVoC believable both internally and externally.
4, Is customer centricity established? In order to create a ‘Binding voice of customer’, an organization first needs to master more basic tools. Rolling out basic co-creation efforts is relatively easy. But ensuring that the organization accepts the result of co-creation efforts across the organization is harder. Customer centricity is only really established if an organization has no trouble acting on voice-of-the-customer insights. If customer centricity is not really established, the organization will break apart when exposed to binding co-creation processes.
5, Is your B2C audience a primary source of revenues? “If you are not paying for it, then you are the product”[i] is an often-used phrase regarding many of today’s platform services. The main implication is that for companies like e.g. Facebook, the B2C users are not customers. Advertisers are the customers. Companies whose revenues do not come from their core user base will probably experience difficulty with a ‘Binding voice of customer’ approach, as it can lead to contradictions between user needs and the business model. The binding process would sooner or later lead to a revolt against the company by activist users. Hybrid models with revenues from both B2C and B2B audiences do exist, and in this case the ‘Binding voice of Customer’ can probably still work. However, restrictions on customer co-creation will need to be implemented, limiting the effects of the model to allow early experimentation.
Now that you know what prerequisites you should have in place for a successful ‘binding voice of customer’ roll-out, you are set to go. Now you need to make some strategic decisions, which I will dive into in the next post.
[i] The concept of “If you are not paying for it, you are the product” is attributed to a 1973 short-movie, “Television Delivers People” by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbvzbj4Nhtk). The phrase “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” is attributed to a comment on the community website Metafilter (https://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#3256046)
