As it’s the investors and employees of businesses least prepared for the disruptive rise of competitors built on precisely designed and CX-focused collective intelligence, it is they who most need to know that the companies they’ve invested in are fit for the future, and are ready and constantly preparing for whatever CX challenge comes at them next.
Here is your chance to give them that surprise.
Although it has historically been accepted that the key to a business’s health lies in its actual, recorded sales growth, such rivals might also be mindful that the rising influence of social media is now introducing new challenges to this established measure, suggesting that even past sales success may now become a lagging, rather than leading, metric.
Whether derived either from actual customer experience (CX) or simply through rumour shared online, a sudden movement in social reputation can change attitudes rapidly, shifting sentiment sufficiently to deter future customers.
And, if negative enough, this can cause lasting damage, possibly even scaring enough buyers to curtail a business’s ability to generate new sales revenue.
The key test of a business’s resilience is now how prepared it is to focus the attention of its entire organisation to put its customer at the absolute centre of its world, business model and imagination.
To design the future intelligence of your business around its customer is to make it more sensitive in anticipating, responding to and driving competitive change.
Supporting this, internationally, there is now a growing recognition of the power of collective intelligence (CI) in helping businesses “think at a new scale.”
CI is created when a group of diverse minds works together on a problem, each bringing different information and skills that, when combined, and aided by technology, create a more complete picture of a problem – such as CX – and how to solve it.
CI combines machine intelligence – AI, data, and so on – with human sensitivities of imagination, instinct, emotion, judgement, reasoning, knowledge, experience and learning. Yet, most companies do not understand they already have the ability to mould new competitive intellectual capabilities from what their collective minds know.
And in most, likewise, as long as such intelligence and insight remains unexplored as to the new capabilities it can deliver – and unexpressed – it also remains out of awareness, meaning it can neither be measured nor managed.
When you need to know what its members think and believe, investigative reporting is just as relevant to what goes on within any community as it is to what goes on around it.
Thus, the task is to dig in, to explore, expose and enable what exists to transform it into a recognisable and now manageable competitive resource.
The challenge for chief executives and boards therefore lies in ensuring the customer’s interest and experience remain central when conjuring their teams’ collective creativity to capture their wisdom, imagination and intellectual productivity.
As teams are more creative when members recognise and embrace differences, and are able systematically to explore other members’ opposing perspectives, the task is repeatedly to provoke new insights to discover what new opportunities exist and where greater CX capabilities can be developed in pursuit of new customers.
Research suggest that teams able to engage in painstaking creative processes of “idea elaboration” and able to work with paradoxical frames – or to recognise and embrace the simultaneous existence of contradictory elements – can be highly, even radically, creative.
In turn, investigating and reporting back for comment on what is found in the minds of others will surprise everyone and give life to much that is presently unknown and out of sight.
So, to be usable, durable, communicated, shared and grown, the new knowledge uncovered must be articulated, summarised and turned into words that everyone understands and can work with.
If they are not visibly publishing a manifesto to which they can be held to account by customers, based on the intelligence, as customers, of those they employ, businesses are not serious about enhancing their CX.
And, taking investors with them, CX reporting – a form of reporting that works both within and beyond a business – will strengthen their competitive position by helping its team understand how to organise its thinking at a scale that enables it repeatedly to deliver a superior customer experience that drives customer acquisition, retention and ROI growth.
How CX reporting grows the intelligence of a business
As the platform for CX reporting, the investigation of intelligence will benefit a business most when it becomes a persistent, rolling program of enquiry structured to organise the mind of the business consistently around the interests of its customer.
In creating the state on which it is reporting, through its self-reinforcing, iterative, data-driven feedback loops, CX reporting is never static, but a constant internal mechanism answering the acid test of how fit for purpose a business is in its ability to attract and retain new customers.
It works at these levels:
- Businesses use it build superior CI and CX to attract and keep customers.
- Investors use it to spot-check a business’s health and capacities for growing future ROI.
- Leaders in all industries use it to keep abreast of competitive change by growing cross-organisational, cross-disciplinary CI in pursuit of superior productivity.
Internally, CX reporting allows the managers of that business to read and examine exactly where its strengths, weakness and vulnerabilities lie in that pursuit, and to adapt their business models to build competitive advantage.
Its goal is to design an organisation’s core collective intelligence around this mission by exercising CI in concert with the focused, deliberate pursuit of better management practices.
Let me help you grow the intelligence of your business around its customer
In creating CX reports, I aim to transform what is known and has been experienced by those across the workplace into a manageable intellectual resource through which those leaders can organise their thinking around designing their intelligence to achieve new goals in productivity, CX and ROI.
This simple formula can get you started.