What’s our advice to savvy executives who are trying to grow and nurture a customer-centric organization? Collaborate with your customers through a Customer Co-Design approach. Although there are many methods out there to support customer co-design, we advocate our tried-and-true methodology, Customer Scenario^® Mapping.

For over 20 years, we’ve worked with hundreds of clients and their customers to design new products, websites, business models, mobile strategies, and, well, just about anything, by starting with scenarios—what the customer is trying to achieve—and mapping out the steps that the customer would ideally like to take to reach his goal. The methodology encourages customers and company stakeholders to work together on revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, ideas by envisioning the ideal situation, not the next progression of the current process/product/model/etc. And, as we always remind you—design from the customer’s point of view!

We’ve tested this method around the world. It has been used successfully in Brazil (with farmers), in New Zealand (with adult learners and sheep-shearers), in Uganda (with single moms, rural farmers, school children, and rural transformation specialists), in Germany (with pharmaceutical execs), in the UK and Netherlands (with high tech networking professionals and distributors), in China and New York (with global container shipping customers and customs brokers and shippers). We’ve also led co-design sessions using Customer Scenario Mapping in many different industries: financial services, healthcare, insurance, packaged goods, food preparation, hospitality, travel, retail, mining, energy, and others.

Here’s our brief orientation and overview:

Customer Co-Design and Customer Scenario Mapping
A Philosophy for Customer-Centric Organizations and a Method for Instilling It
By Ronni T. Marshak, EVP & Sr. Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group, September 12, 2013

(Read the short sample and download the full article in PDF.)