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With the current hype on customer centricity going strong, a lot of companies are asking Reply to help them turn their product and service development towards a more human centered one. Though a justified – and long overdue – strategy, what is often forgotten is the need for an organizational structure that is empowered and able to translate this ambition into reality. Once this is brought up, a frequently heard response is: but this is how we are structured and we’re not looking at the internal structure right now, we need to make sure we have the consumer side of the business set up properly and then we’ll look at the rest.
Customer centricity is achieved through human-centered strategy and design. This means that organizations consciously put people at the core of their business strategy, reviewing processes and methods for the development of new products or services, thereby positioning end-users, whether they are internal or external – at the core of the operation.
The fact of the matter is that your organization – despite popular opinion – is not about ideas or creativity; it is about individual people forming a group, sharing a vision which is empowered and enabled through a cultural context. This context gives them the possibility to generate and test ideas followed by – in most cases – the iteration of said ideas and building on top of them.
When it comes to customer centricity, culture is the dominating factor to achieving true customer centricity. This is not just a workfloor mentality or attitude, most important, it starts right at the top. Here C-level commits both financial resources and executive support to initiatives that support the effort towards a customer centric – or, as we at Reply prefer to say, human centered – organization.
As a result of this approach, one key-impact area would be the development and maintenance of IT systems; be they customer facing or internal. The new human-centered requirements will form the basis for enterprise IT to be developed (or transformed) to create outstanding customer experience. That completely changes the set-up and navigation between legacy, new systems and data-analytics. This also means closer collaboration between business and IT; cross-functional teams, bringing enterprise-users, customers and non-customers alike into the development process and actually listening to what they have to say in order to continuously improve your products / services.
The framework Robotics for Customers was set up to facilitate the changing corporate landscape seen with our customers. The Robotics for Customers team focuses on the intersection between human-needs and technological developments. The team has engaged - and executed - several different projects with a variety of industry leaders across Europe, from Telco to Energy to Fashion and Automotive. Robotics for Customers representatives have also spoken at leading conferences such as Techfest, the Disruptive Innovation Festival and Inhorgenta. Aiming to facilitate implementation, we deliver experience prototypes from the early phases of a project, not powerpoint presentations. We do so in order to help the organization speed up progress and share the future results as soon as possible.
Reply's Robotics for Customers team puts forward a framework that can be deployed on three levels of your organization’s business and development strategy:
- Changes in today’s organization, products and services; what is the immediate problem, how are competitors solving it, creating short term fixes and optimizations in an iterative and collaborative manner with the customer organization. - Innovations that will help customers create a competitive advantage in the mid-term. This means taking the short term offering and moving it one step forward in order to help create new, evolved organizational structures, products and/or services. - Conceptualizing, creating and implementing full-blown transformation programs. This involves research and rapid prototyping to establish user and system needs, process creation for constant optimization and improvement as well as iteratively collaborating with technology partners to implement the proposed structural changes in the customer’s organization.
The Robotics for Customers framework is based in the following principles: - Human-centered - Acknowledgment of organizational realities - Focus on the root cause - Articulate ideas in tangible prototypes
By involving the right members of the Reply family with its extensive technological, strategy and design capabilities, Reply is uniquely positioned to bring innovation-to-market in a speedy fashion, with the ability to traverse both C-suite and workfloor, we ensure transparent processes and clear expectations on all sides and cross-company.