Winning Mantra for SMEs: Co-create with Your Customers

The Small and Medium Enterprises, evolving into emerging businesses of today, face various operational challenges. With the ever evolving market dynamics, there is stiff competition all around and the customers have a wide variety of choice (most of the times) to the services that you have on offer.

How do you still ensure customer retention?
When we talk about customer retention, there are many interesting variables which are to be taken into account. A strong delivery is one such crucial measure. The business ecosystem is evolving so fast that every emerging business has to emerge accordingly.

But there is so much to do, How do we 'ENGAGE' our customers?
Co-create!!! Co-creation by definition has been explained exhaustively in this Wikipedia article. Lets understand by creating a perspective on the same with respect to the Customer - Enterprise/ Business relationship.

The Evolving Communication Landscape and How has it Affected Business Conduct
In the times we are living in, business is being carried out in ways which were never thought of before. The communication landscape has changed and evolved so widely that it has affected almost every aspect of how businesses communicate both internally with their employees, while engaging them towards success and also how they communicate and engage their customers/ clients.

Social Media and How are Emerging Technologies Changing Business
Technology is changing the way we communicate, which is further impacting the way business is conducted. With the Social Networking revolution dawning upon mankind, there is a whole different view and meaning to what we call freedom of speech.

Businesses globally are waking up to the power of the new medium. Your customers have the ability to talk as powerfully and communicate as strongly today. Its a two way communication and not just you listen and I speak relationship.

So How do You Co-create With Your Customers?
Each business has essentially two sets of customers:

• Internal: employees
• External: paying customers

For any business to be successful, you need to always have both sets of customers engaged strongly in your conversation.

Whether you innovate, ideate, come up with new services/ business lines, look at positively affecting your bottom-line, these sets of customers are highly crucial for every step, the business takes.

There are many insights shared on this topic by gurus, but I intend to make things a little simple and create a thought flow, which will eventually emerge into a process flow. Setting expectations:

                                          Source: http://blog.allencomm.com/index.php/2009/01/benefits-of-internal-collaboration-and-collaboration-between-client-and-vendor-teams/

• Value is co-created by the customer and the enterprise
• Individual is central to the co-creation activity
• Customer - Enterprise engagement forms the core of the value creation process
• Customer - Enterprise engage at various levels, across functions and hierarchies for driving value
• Value driven, focused Co-creation environments are created within the enterprise to foster the Co-creation ecosystem

Lets now take an example to put the case forward: lets say you are an emerging company (SME) who is looking to innovate and come up with new lines of business/ explore/ expand into further business opportunities, while being strong in your domain.

How do you essentially drive the whole exercise? OR let me ask the first basic question, who all do you think must be the stakeholders of this entire activity?

A view to this is, an emerging company, which is many a times crunched on bandwidth, must Co-create with its customers and prospects. It must make focus groups within the company which are driven by targeted goals. These focus groups must be owned by internal employees who are guided by subject matter experts/ advisors.

The next step in line should be engaging your core set of customers who are affected/ will be affected/ will be prospects by/ for your new line of business. Engage?
Yes! Engage. Engage them into working closely with your business. But obviously you cannot expect your customers to put in time in your business, they have their own work to take care of right?!

Yes they do, and that is where collaborative - knowledge management technology comes into the picture. There are many tools and SaaS based platforms which are powerfully being leveraged by many organisations to engage their internal customers, while increasingly empowering the external customers to work closely as one team with the internal stakeholders.

The Lessons
Co-creation has to do a lot about the culture. Its not a process which you implement and it will fall in line, its a thought which needs to be pulled through and ingrained into the working ecosystem of a company. The next stage is usage of smart, social and collaborative technology (many SaaS based platforms) are available now, which are smart and well affordable.

The third and the last leg of the journey is the customer. Bringing him from the offline interactive world to a mode where he/ she connects online and collaborates with you to create success an grow together is another initial hurdle to be crossed.

Happy Co-creating and if need, connect with us by dropping in a comment to this blog post and our team of experts will be happy to share thoughts on how your organisation could leverage the power of Co-creation.