Businesses have generated innovative products for decades. The evidence is seen everyday in so many blockbuster products whose sales have shot through the roof, and many brands who have acquired legend status. A lot of this is attributable to ingenuity, creativity, primary research and focus groups, lots of analysis of past trends and consumer behavior among many other practices.

However there is almost zero conscious research where customer engagement matters most. And in a digital world, that could be the difference between competing and leading. Are they able to address the long tail of demand?

That missing engagement is at the moment of truth, after all the analysis and strategy has been done.

1. How many retailers and brands are able to capture the brand attributes that customers are looking for in real time? Follow the decision making process they are pursuing as they browse your aisles? Sure, the latest line of jackets sold out, but did we also turn away a thousand customers who were looking for a specific color, or pattern?  We are not looking for general insights on mass customer preferences mind you. That level of insight led to the line currently in the aisles, and we already have that. What we are looking for instead is individual customer engagement? Are we turning them away, treating them like an object of mass advertising and pursuit? Is that a fundamental reason why stores are surviving? While we go off talking about Omni-Channel and digital!

2. How many banks capture the needs and demands – often subtle – of the customers who walk into the store, or ask a question on the phone. “We don’t have that, but how about this?”, is what we tell them. But no one really listens to that customer. No one records that demand into any system for a personalized follow up. Sure, we have our models that crunch enormous data, but none that can keep up with the demands of the consumers. Sounds a little contradictory, and also very archaic.

What can we do to stop thinking about digital for a minute. Stop thinking about social, about mobile, about multi-channel and about the flashy new technologies. Instead could we take a moment to think about customer experience and the gaps in that experience we can so easily fill in today.

What can we do to capture interaction at the moment of truth? And then channel it back in the most appropriate way. It may not be possible to tailor a product or service for every customer, but where it is possible to do so – and it often is these days – we can break new barriers in customer engagement and customer experience.

Digital has solved distribution problems, and it can also solve the problem of customization. Listening to our customers will tell us what customers really want. We are not really doing that today because we are busy bombarding them with offers and trying to make them buy what we have. There’s nothing wrong in that of course. But that’s almost like missing 90% of the potential of our digital technology investments!  Instead of listening to what each individual product will do for us, we need to map out our customer journey – how we want it to be – and then look at how the various technologies should be integrated. Technology is just that – an enabler. So we need to use it to meet out goals, not let it take over our purpose.

Photo credit: Simon & His Camera / Foter / CC BY-ND