Know Me! Surprise Me! Make It Easy For Me!
Know Me! Surprise Me! Make It Easy For Me!
Those three simple statements say so much and should be very easy to do, but it seems like in the world of knowing your consumer and how to best meet their needs it is very difficult. These three principles are no negotiables as a leader within any organization I am a part of. They become the way we operate and do business internally and externally.
This past week I was lucky to participate in a roundtable with some dynamic innovation 
leaders from across several industries. We were able to share and talk for several hours on our struggles, challenges, and successes. I had an epiphany during the middle of the session – and it was simple – many of these companies do not know THEIR consumer! These companies were doing wicked cool things, but still had a mentality of BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME!
In August of this year, Sam Milbrath spotlighted five brands who do customer-centric innovation well in their businesses. This leads me to a dynamic leader I work with today, Cristin Gardner. Cristi
n leads the consumer experience team in my organization and guides a team of colleagues in developing a strategy to bring to life: Know Me! Surprise Me! Make It Easy For Me! She truly gets this principle and how valuable it is to any organization.
Another, ah-ha, moment I experienced is that these companies practiced innovation, but not Customer-Centric Innovation. In today’s times, we as leaders must not separate the two. They must work hand-in-hand and be the center of how an organization functions operationally. In the blog post, Is The Customer Always Right? by Jennifer Lee from Deloitte, she talks about the future of Consumer Driven Innovation. She simply states that to make Customer-Centric Innovation successful you must understand how you will work with customers – as well as why!
So how do you this, Shawn? Below is our three core principle and values and how we live them out as colleagues, teams, and an organization. Enjoy!
KNOW ME…
- Cultivate authentic, human connections
- Establish new and reinforce existing relationships that provide support, encouragement, inspiration and accountability for near, as well as, long term well-being improvement. Help members engage in their well-being with strategic partners (coaches, those close to them, and those who are “similar strangers”).
- Be a trusted guide, partner and advocate
- Listen to our members first. Allow them to become vulnerable and reveal their true fears, needs and desires. Be non-judgmental. Help them focus and choose realistic, personalized goals. Empower them to achieve real and positive change in their well-being. Be there to help them be their best self.
- Account for the whole person and the context of their daily life.
- Have empathy for our members. Solve their problems. Be respectful of their time, desire and ability. Engage them in the ways that they choose. Meet them where they are. Help them integrate the things they need to do for their well-being into the lives they already lead.
SURPRISE ME…
- Harness our knowledge to provide novel, useful and actionable insights
- Use what we learn about each individual to offer personal and targeted insights, feedback, content and next steps. Remember what we’ve learned about the member.
- Give them realistic, personalized action plans that align with THEIR definition of what well-being looks like—not ours. Provide insights and connections that the consumer might not discover on their own.
MAKE IT EASY…
- Deliver a consistently frictionless experience
- Understand how real users interact with us. Make every interaction with Healthways effective and simple. Provide seamless integration regardless of channel (digital, onsite, phone, paper). Ensure each piece of the experience feels like part of a whole. Use what we learn about our successes and failures to continuously improve the experience for our members.
Next time we will break each one down and what and how you bring them to life everyday!
