Innovate for the Customer, Not For Innovation's Sake

"Until you understand the true need, you’re not going to satisfy your customers or solve any problems. You’re just going to be putting bells and whistles on something to make it appear more desirable than it really is."

Let’s face it – everyone loves innovation, and the result is a culture that takes pride in technological advancement. When we can take an existing system and either make it easier to use or more powerful, we feel that we are taking a true step in making business—and life—more efficient.

Unfortunately, as Dr. Chris Scorzelli, Kablooe’s medical innovation director and a featured speaker at the 9^thAnnual CMIQ Remote Services Summit, confirms in the aforementioned quote, businesses cannot let an unquenchable thirst for technological advancement get in the way of customer-centricity.

[eventPDF]

Businesses love being on the cutting edge. And they love opportunities to minimize their own inefficiencies while maximizing their own profitability.

But, as many unsuccessful remote monitoring systems prove, there is a significant risk of that business mentality conflicting with customer needs.

"Often, the value of the remote technology is the fact that the people are supposed to be servicing it don’t have to come out and send a repair person out, and they can do a lot of the problem-solving via telecommunications," explains Scorzelli. "Where that breaks down is where your user doesn’t have the time to spend if they need to interact with the device themselves.

"[Or, they] just kind of [get] annoyed by the fact that they have to make an effort to get something fixed beyond just telling someone. [The customer] ends up wasting a lot of [his] own time with [the remote personnel] trying to troubleshoot it when, basically, [he] just wants [the personnel] to deal with it themselves."

If businesses are not mindful of this challenge when creating remote technology for end-users, "[The devices] just don’t end up getting used…and they become more of an annoyance and an inhibitor of the technology instead of allowing the technology to be everything it can be."

By no means is remote technology—or any burgeoning innovation—without significant benefit for customers. In many cases, the ability to remotely monitor and control performance can, in fact, greatly improve engagement with a particular device or system.

But for it to be worthwhile, it is that dimension—the customer experience—that needs to drive the innovation. If the efficiency benefits and cost-savings are disproportionately reaped by the producer who no longer needs to send tech support out to a physical location and exist at the expense of the customer who now has to gain product knowledge and spend his own valuable time interfacing with the remote personnel, the technology is not achieving its purpose.

"Any technology that requires the user to spend the time himself to help facilitate the interaction is neglecting the fact that their time is valuable and it is not something that they really want to do," says Scorzelli.

Businesses can certainly look at motivations beyond "customer outcry" for investing in new technology. Scorzelli does not, for instance, dismiss the importance of "technology needs" or "service needs" in driving innovation.

Those needs are only of notable relevance, however, when they dial back to some sort of win for the customer—either through cost savings, more efficient delivery or more user-friendly device operation. If innovation harms the customer experience in favor of strengthening the bottom line, then it is not fulfilling its purpose.

Chris Scorzelli will be presenting at the 9^thAnnual Remote Services Summit on March 26-28, 2012 in Miami, FL.