How can I use my customers as a source of innovation ideas?

I went to buy a loaf of bread from our local bakery a few weeks ago. The bakery is part of a small group that has been operating for about five years and the day I dropped in just happened to be the same day that they heard they had won a prestigious local business award.

The founder was deliriously excited and he showed me a letter that he intended to send all his customers about the win. Included in the letter was a note to customers asking for their help to make the business even better by way of submitting ideas for new products or improved service. The founder asked me whether I thought he would get many good ideas.

There is no doubt that customers are a great source of inspiration for innovation – both implicitly and explicitly – and businesses are foolish not to seek it.

Implicit inspiration is interesting because it comes by way of customer grumbles. Most businesses have daily encounters with grumpy customers and while this is insanely irritating, it also provides a useful perspective on the business that you don’t get when you are an insider, perspective that inspires ideas.

Unfortunately, many businesses fail to use this regular, free and relevant source of inspiration because the front line employees become immune to the grumbles and don’t hear them.

A simple example is this. Employees at a ski lodge laughed at the grumbles of guests about the (short) walk to the bottom of the slopes until a new employee arrived and noticed how hard the walk was for the large number of guests with small children. She told the offsite owner who immediately organised a shuttle service much to the delight of subsequent guests.

One way to make sure that you don’t lose this implicit source of inspiration is to simply ask your front line employees what grumbles they have heard. Challenge them if they say they have heard none. If you do this regularly employees will know they need to contribute something and will accordingly start listening.

Explicit customer inspiration comes from asking the customers directly for their ideas. Starbucks recently did this on a grand scale. Customers were invited not only to submit their suggestions to the Starbucks website but also to vote on them. Within a few months Starbucks had received over 16,000 ideas and implemented several of them.

But with customer-sourced ideas comes a word of caution. While I wholeheartedly encourage you to seek inspiration from customers, don’t abandon your internal search for ideas. The trouble, you see, is that we customers can rarely imagine the possibilities of what can be, so we limit our ideas to what we know. If Apple had relied on consumers you can bet we would still be attached to Walkmans.

The other problem with customer-sourced ideas of course is that they can be completely impractical. But don’t completely dismiss these too quickly -sometimes the purpose behind the idea, rather than the idea itself, is quite useful.

The bakery sent out its message asking for ideas and received back a sizeable haul. As expected there were some interesting insights, a couple of good ideas and a few examples of very lateral thinking. Regarding the latter, beer and bread may both be derived from cereal grains but it was a bit of a stretch to think that the bakery could double up as a brewery.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business” and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).

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