Great piece on the Israeli Fintech Industry < here >
One of many key messages is that innovation is not coming from the finserv sector… “In Israel, the country’s fintech know-how is largely a by-product of innovations in other fields”
What a shame then that so many so called experts still look vertically for innovation instead of recognising that most innovation tends to be found in the horizontal
Ah please talk to me. Won’t you please talk to me
We can unlock this misery. Come on, come talk to me
I did not come to steal. This all is so unreal
Can’t you show me how you feel. Come on, come talk to me
Yes, another Peter Gabriel lyric – but this one came to mind in a discussion around the value of customer complaints
I recently read and posted on a Forbes article suggesting that firms should actively encourage their customers to complain. Essentially the point was that, in a world where we are all trying to delight our customers, understanding why they complain – indeed, actively encouraging these complaints was a great way for a company to gauge how they were performing when it comes to delivering a competitive customer experience
My problem is that this is only part of the story and taken on its own is a potentially harmful perspective. You see, studying complaints will tell you a lot about why some of your customers complain but will tell you nothing about why others are absolutely delighted with your product or service. For many years now I have been concerned by a growing kind of one dimensional causality used by certain analysts.
This crops up in more places than you would expect – people study divorce to understand about marriage; we study unhappy customers to understand the happy ones; employers study disgruntled employees and even hold exit interviews in the vain hope that this will in some way help improve the workplace and help us better understand our staff. People say we learn from our mistakes – No; we learn about our mistakes from our mistakes – they tell us nothing about our successes.
And that’s my point there’s nothing wrong about encouraging your customers to complain and analysing those complaints IF the aim is to learn why your customers are unhappy. Just don’t think it will tell you anything about why others are delighted.
This all came into sharper focus whilst having a discussion at a recent startup boot-camp style event where a guy proudly told me how his MVP (minimum viable product) had this amazing return loop for capturing feedback on the features that didn’t work well or that customers didn’t like / want. So I casually asked – “What about the stuff they love? How do you encourage them to tell you that?” The silence was palpable and was accompanied with the kind of look “wrinklies” like me are getting used to.
Don’t get me wrong, of course you should analyse why customers discard your product or ignore certain features but don’t think that will tell you anything about why others keep it and focus on certain features. Success, like failure has its own configuration and needs to be studied.
If you are opening a dialogue with your customers you need to focus on the good and the bad; what they love as well as what they hate. Like any great conversation it needs to have the light and the dark if you ever hope to understand the whole picture…
……. so come on; come talk to me
There’s been an huge amount of column inches (or whatever the on-line equivalent is) to CDO’s…. of the Chief Digital kind rather than the Chief Data variety.
I’ve gone on record as saying that some companies will require such a role as a “catalyst of change” in a particular sector and specifically if their CIO wasn’t necessary comfortable with the whole “outside in”, consumer and data-led focus of the digital agenda. Equally, however, there are plenty of CIO’s out there who are comfortable with that narrative and they are incredibly well placed to lead “digital transformation” initiatives, though sometimes lack the presence or confidence to seize the initiative.
Some of my thoughts and comments are here – https://leadingedgeforum.com/publication/60-of-firms-face-a-digital-leadership-gap-2499/ – in some recent LEF research
Anyway, I was pleased to see a post in a similar vein from Dominic Collins on Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-wrong-chief-digital-officers-dominic-collins?trk=hp-feed-article-title-like
I was particularly drawn to his comments on the of the CDO role as a catalyst of change in certain organisations
“Essentially the CDO should be a catalyst – defined as… a substance, usually used in small amounts relative to the reactants, that modifies and increases the rate of a reaction without being consumed in the process.
The interesting thing about a catalyst is that once the desired reaction and transformation has taken place, the catalyst itself is unchanged and no longer required”
So do you agree with Dominic’s statement ??
The time has past when executives could where their lack of IT knowledge as a badge of honour. You’d never hire a CFO who “didn’t do math”, but equally you’d never hire any executive sales, marketing, managing director etc who didn’t do “numbers” – so how can you have people “who don’t do technology”.
Now you don’t have to be an expert, but get some vocabulary, do some research, get engaged, try, learn, explore, experience ….. The “digital journey” is going to create some new challenges and “not doing technology” will be like driving a Fiesta on the motorway when everyone else is in Ferrari’s. You’d better pull over and get out of the way.
The Accidental CIO 