Getting Curious About Your Customers’ Frustrations Will Give You New Ideas. Make Doing So Part Of Your Organization’s Culture.
Has your company’s innovation hit a wall? Are you worried about how you’ll stay competitive with innovation waning?
You may be staring directly at a number of innovation opportunities but just not seeing them.
Andy Fromm, CEO of Service Management Group and co-author of The Curiosity Muscle, explains that many of the best opportunities to innovate come simply from hearing and understanding your customers’ frustrations with your products or services. Armed with this understanding, you can make the necessary improvements and come up with new ideas.
But to understand your customers’ frustrations, you have to be tuned into their needs, their tastes and their views — all of which can change overnight. You have to be constantly asking questions and hearing the answers, even they’re not what you expected.
In other words, you and your team all have to be curious. All the time.
How? Institutionalize curiosity for yourself and your entire team by:
- Letting go of the “expert mindset” leading you to believe you have all the answers.
- Finding out if there things you think you are doing well that you really aren’t.
- Listening to your customers’ and employees’ feedback, and take it to heart.
- Never get too comfortable with what you’re doing. The more comfortable you get, the less curious you become.
- Keep experimenting. Even if something feels like it’s working, don’t ever stop being curious and looking for ways to improve.
Once curiosity starts to become a regular part of your organization’s culture, make sure to model it for your team, incentivize it by giving it recognition (such as awards) and create continuing education about what good curiosity looks like.
