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Beyond the product: Why learning to listen is key to innovation
Dilip Bhatia, chief experience officer, Lenovo
How can businesses get better at product innovation? It sounds paradoxical, but the first and most important step is to stop thinking so much about products and technology. Instead, companies should focus more on understanding everything about the customer experience — and getting that right means learning how to listen.
At Lenovo, we listen to feedback from across the customer journey — through advisory councils, customer panels and millions of product-ownership surveys — and use this to power our innovation. Our approach is agile: we zero in on specific groups to improve their individual experience of our products, rather than carrying out massive, costly projects that can take years to complete.
When professionals told us they loved the “sleekness and sturdiness” of the ThinkPad, we listened and built on it. To develop our Aura Edition of AI PCs, we asked 10,000 digital creatives about their work environments. And when gamers said they wanted a laptop that looked professional by day but was robust enough to support serious gaming at night, we factored that into the design of the Lenovo Legion. Getting that particular insight took an ethnographic study that observed gamers at home to find out what makes them tick, which meant we could challenge preconceptions and create the product they wanted.
Technology is instrumental here. Using proprietary AI tools, our experience teams can sift through ever larger volumes of customer data. This lets them collate insight from millions of online comments and feed it straight into our Customer Insights Dashboard (CID), giving us real-time sentiment analysis of reactions to products and features. In one example, we detected some dissatisfaction with a line of entry notebook displays that had lower resolution and brightness. We responded by upgrading our display specification, and our consumer sentiment scores went up as a result. AI also enables our eComm English-speaking sales agents can converse on chat in 50 different languages.
Listening to all of our customers’ voices has given us some of our greatest successes when innovating for inclusion through our Product Diversity Office. By partnering with the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in North Carolina, we can continuously learn how to make our products more accessible for users with visual impairments. As a result, ThinkPad keyboards now come with additional tactile markings on essential keys. We have also partnered with a local coffee shop and roasting business to create custom AI solutions on tablets in order to help adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities to flourish in the workplace.
But improving the customer experience is just the start of the product innovation journey. For a truly customer-centric culture, it is just as important to understand the total experience of a product — which means employees as well as customers. Because if you can’t take care of your employees, then they will not take of your customers. This is why we not only link part of the employee bonus to customer satisfaction data, we also listen carefully to our employees through surveys and listening posts and make sure they have what they need to thrive at work.