Let Customers Co-Design Your Solutions and Strategy

  • Setting Expectations for Customer Co-Design and Other Customer-Facing Engagements

    The New CSM Guidebook: Part 4: Setting Expectations

    by Ronni Marshak
    No matter how well prepared you are for your customer-facing events, you won’t be completely successful if the expectations of participants haven’t been clearly set. Here are tips for setting the expectations of customers, partners, and internal stakeholders.
    Jun. 14, 2012
    Strategies
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  • Tips for Email Communications for Customer-Facing Engagements

    The New CSM Guidebook: Part 3: Communicating with Customers

    by Ronni Marshak
    When planning customer-facing engagements, the relationship begins long before the customers show up to the session. Here are guidelines for writing effective communications that surround a customer co-design event.
    May. 10, 2012
    Strategies
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  • How to Innovate Business Models

    Should You Create a Business Model Innovation Factory?

    by Patricia Seybold
    Saul Kaplan’s book, The Business Model Innovation, clarifies why so many internal innovation projects fail: they challenge existing business models.
    May. 3, 2012
    All Members
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  • When and How to Embed Customer Co-Design into Your Projects

    What Customer Co-Design Options Fit Your Purview?

    by Patricia Seybold
    We have found at least six opportunities to embed customer co-design into the projects you’re already doing. Our recommendation? Use customer co-design early and often.
    Apr. 19, 2012
    Strategies
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  • How to Plan for a Customer Scenario® Mapping Session

    The New CSM Guidebook: Part 1: The Eight Pre-Session Planning Activities

    by Ronni Marshak
    To get the most out of Customer Scenario® Mapping sessions, you need to plan carefully. Here, we provide an overview of the eight steps you’ll want to take before each event to ensure that your customer co-design sessions are successful and impactful!
    Mar. 29, 2012
    Strategies
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  • Local Motors: Open Source Car Design and Local Manufacturing

    Forging a Customer Ecosystem to Transform the Automobile Industry

    by Patricia Seybold
    Can you transform an industry from the outside? That’s what Local Motors is doing with the automobile industry with its customer ecosystem to design and produce great cars.
    Jan. 26, 2012
    Strategies
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  • What Stands in the Way of Successful Customer-Centric Projects?

    The Five “Gotcha’s” that Plague Most Initiatives

    by Patricia Seybold, Ronni Marshak
    Most customer projects encounter five obstacles to success: lack of resources, lack of access to the right customers, no buy-in from execs, inadequate execution, and no tangible results. Here is advice on how to overcome these internal showstoppers.
    Jan. 5, 2012
    All Members
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  • How to Think About Your Customer Experience and User Experience Design Strategy

    Make CX and UX Design “The Unique Way We Design Products and Experiences for Customers”

    by Patricia Seybold, Ronni Marshak
    Customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) design are strategic differentiators. We advocate creating a unified CX/UX strategy and elevating it to one of your three top initiatives. Here are some guidelines.
    Jun. 23, 2011
    All Members
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  • A Best Practice Example of Applying UX Principles to Product Design and Development

    Koko Fitness Demonstrated How to Do It Right Back in 2005!

    by Patricia Seybold, Ronni Marshak
    Koko Fitness, a small company that designs and sells interactive workout systems, has been a shining example of best practices in incorporating customer experience and user experience methods into their product design and development lifecycle.
    Jun. 16, 2011
    Strategies
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  • Is User-Centered Design the Missing Link?

    Bridging the Gaps Between Customer Experience and Product Development

    by Patricia Seybold, Ronni Marshak
    Empower UX professionals and embed them within your business units to help product managers and developers identify customer needs and develop products that are easy to use and to adopt, easy to support, and on target to meet a critical end-user need.
    Apr. 28, 2011
    Strategies
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  • How to Transform the Quality of Life in African Rural Communities

    Educate Young People to Be Entrepreneurs and Leaders

    by Patricia Seybold
    In western Uganda, URDT’s Vocational Institute addresses unemployment by training young people to be job creators—not job seekers—in their local communities.
    Mar. 17, 2011
    All Members
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  • Why the Huffington Post Is Successful

    Engaging Your Audience as Active Contributors and Promoters Was Baked into Its DNA

    by Patricia Seybold
    The Huffington Post became a successful, profitable online media property for seven good reasons. Most of these best practices are applicable for anyone providing online content.
    Feb. 17, 2011
    All Members
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  • Turning Innovation into Reality

    From Ideation to Implementation—Lessons Learned from Our Visionaries

    by Ronni Marshak
    How can you take all the great ideas that come from customers, partners, and employees and make them actually happen? Let’s look at the different aspects of outside innovation generation and what you need to do to actually turn ideation into innovation.
    Jan. 20, 2011
    Strategies
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  • Pandora: Delivering Personalized Internet Radio

    How Pandora Internet Radio Combines Taxonomy, Crowdsourcing, and Personalization to Improve Music Playlists

    by Patricia Seybold
    As is the case with many electronic publishing efforts, Pandora has merged the best of both worlds: a professional taxonomy with the wisdom of the crowds. Professional musicians categorize music, but people can vote on whether certain songs really belong.
    Jun. 10, 2010
    Strategies
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  • AIP UniPHY: Creating a Professional Social Network

    How the American Institute of Physics Is Creating Value Add for Its Members

    by Patricia Seybold
    How do you build a social network for professionals? The American Institute of Physics is paving the way by pre-populating the profiles and network connections of physics experts based on the research papers these experts have co-authored.
    Mar. 4, 2010
    Strategies
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  • What Happened in the Music Industry Will Happen To You

    by Patricia Seybold
    By 2000, the music industry was under siege by renegade customers. Here’s how new businesses and new business models emerged in response to customers' behaviors.
    Mar. 1, 2010
    All Members
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  • How Custom Product Design Can Spawn Customer-Centric Ecosystems

    How National Semiconductor, CustoMax, and Zazzle Built Vibrant Ecosystems

    by Patricia Seybold
    Three companies in different industries—CustoMax, National Semiconductor, and Zazzle—have built vibrant customer-centric ecosystems to let customers design their own products.
    Jan. 7, 2010
    Strategies
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  • Local Motors

    Reinventing the Car Industry from the Outside In

    by Patricia Seybold
    Local Motors is a new American car company with an innovative approach: get customers to design cars, manufacture them locally, and let customers help assemble their own cars Build-A-Bear style!
    Oct. 23, 2009
    All Members
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  • Want Customer-Contributed Content?

    Make It Easy for Your Customers to Multi-Post

    by Patricia Seybold
    Do you want customers to contribute content to your Web site? Customers are more likely to post or curate content in an environment that will "automagically" syndicate that comment or posting out to several other sites.
    Sep. 1, 2009
    Strategies
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  • How Citrix Evolved Its Online Community of Customer Advisors

    How to Recruit and Manage a Private Customer Community—Patty’s Visionaries' Interviews' Series

    by Patricia Seybold
    Andrea Davidowitz tells the story of how and why she launched a private B2B online community of advisors in 2007 and what she has learned about running and managing a private customer community. Andrea manages strategic customer programs at Citrix.
    Aug. 6, 2009
    Strategies
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