Product and Service Innovation

Using the knowledge obtained through customer research, products and/or services can be significantly improved or entirely re-imagined. This creates new opportunities to design precisely what your customers need, now and into the future. Pressure testing your products and services regularly will keep you ahead of the curve, and your competition.

This is also known as customer-led innovation. It's not a leap of faith; it's a calculated step in the right direction. Customer-led innovation draws on previously gathered customer insights and uses them to inspire and generate ideas for new products or services.

Organisations who realise this will know that any new products or services will have to be thoroughly researched and designed to meet ever increasing customer needs. Customers expect seamless, intuitive and responsive service. They expect the organisations they deal with to have fully integrated systems. This means no matter who they speak to, via phone, email or in person, they are quickly recognised, acknowledged and have their needs catered for. Organisations must continually improve their service experience to meet these expectations.

Businesses on the path to customer-centricity use various methods to frequently test products and services via customer feedback loops. This enables them to continually improve their products in alignment with what customers value the most.

Human-Centred Design revolves around having a deep understanding of the people you seek to serve. It allows people working in organisations to increase their empathy and extend their knowledge of the problems or challenges customers are facing. This means organisations can be better equipped to create products or services tailored to their customer requirements.

Keeping the ideal customer at the forefront of the design process is crucial. This can be done by using customer validated research results to develop several common customer personas with particular needs. Teams can then centre their work around meeting the needs of these customer personas/segments.

Through rigorous research and design, an ideal suite of products and services can be developed for the customer. It's a process that works best when the solution goes through several iterations before the final product (prototyping). The product is questioned, checked, and assumptions are challenged. Then it's refined, improved and tested by potential users. Done right, some incredible ideas can become reality and the results can be transformative for a business.

Having already undertaken customer understanding research with Proto, Westpac sought to go further with Proto. They wanted to uncover deeper customer insight into why customers chose to hold multiple credit cards and why they chose one card over another. The aim of developing the "One Card" was to create an ideal product and service experience that would meet customers' critical needs and wants.