You can have the impression that CEN-Xchange 10.02 was all about indulgence. Which might actually be a fair assessment. We learned about different methods uncovering the hotel experience from our «Hotel Seefeld» case. We then devoted our attention to the challenge of making the wine experience transparent on the online wine shop Romazini.com.
«CX Fundstücke»
Our new category unveiled three books and a blog post:
- Preditably Irrational by Dan Ariely
MIT professor Ariely shows how people tend to act irrational but in a predictable fashion. Important know-how when designing products and services. - The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
Classic on the process of innovation and creativity including the 10 ingredients for “How to create great products and services”
- Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley
Focusing on the roles within organizations to make innvoation possible. - Bold Brands – why now is the time to be brave in business and win by Shaun Smith
Shaun’s blog post features bold movements of businesses relentlessly focusing on their mission of serving their customers even against common business wisdom
Research methods tested at Hotel Seefeld
Marc Blume described the different methods tested in our field study at Hotel Seefeld, the obstacles, results and learnings.
The first method was the photo interview, where customers were documenting their stay with digital cameras and later described their photos, allowing the interviewer to ask questions and gather many findings.
Less intrusive for customers were the audio protocols where they commented on their experiences using a digital voice recorder. Results were less rich and clear since there was only the audio protocol and no opportunity to clarify remarks.
Finally there were short adhoc interviews at breakfast with people not briefed upfront. The findings were less in-depth but were not influenced by the fact, that people were briefed which put them in «hotel tester mode» and surely changed their behaviour as happened with the methods mentioned before.
Marc summarized three key learnings:
- Recruiting: Pay close attention to the personal context of the participants and adapt recruiting as well as other interactions to it. Choose incentives that benefit the person personally within a short time frame (in our case, the offer of a 50% discount on the hotel room was of little value to business travellers, whose companies fully covered their expenses anyway.)
- Choose an interative approach involving emplyoees to gather existing knowledge and elicit feedback on your findings.
- Instead of trying to aim at very broad findings along the whole experience chain, focus on single steps and go in-depth. Many clients already have a good understanding of what’s basically going on in their business.
Romazini.com – no lemons
Benjamin and Denis from Romazini explained to us their specialty of selling wine online: we have no lemons. Which was the first learning for us, since we didn’t really grasp this USP upfront.
They have 250 different types of wine on stock, each one of them among the best rated in their segment and price range, which sounds very appealing to me.
But having a good product is not enough. There are still many challenges: people can’t try your product. Searching for wine is different than for camera model x ABC-300. And wine taste is very subjective which rises the question whether ratings of users are really useful in this context? These are just a few challenges we came across.
All participants were very eager to find solutions and give tips. This effort might have been fueled by the superb German Riesling we very tasting at the same time…
These are some high level findings:
We don’t know enough about the customers, therefore we can’t specifically address their needs and expectations. Definitely a point to work on.
Romazini has the chance of standing out by the experience of doing business with them. This point has to be emphasized in order to make price less of an argument (my suggestion to dump all customers who ask for reduction might have been a bit rigid though).
Systematic investment in the relationship is key. Again in-depth know-how of customers will provide cues how to intensify this relationship.
I have the feeling we will continue that discussion (maybe along with some red wine…). In the meantime if you have any comments or suggestions feel free to leave them right here.
CEN-Xchange 10.03 will take place March 3. You will learn about BMW Financial Services introducing the company’s brand promise «Freude am Fahren» within their financial service offering.
If you want to join in next time please contact helmut.kazmaier@stimmt.ch.
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Thanks for the summary! It was very interesting indeed and I’m sure we could get some key issues we have to work on.
The Seefeld project was amazing too. It would be fun to find out more about the barkeeper next time
Well done! I like this event very much.
Red wine will be…
Great venue, thanks to stimmt.ch for hosting and challenging. In the end it all boils down to hard work and clever ideas. We appreciate the participants input and will 1. further identify customers needs, 2. identify partner companies to broaden awareness and 3. continuously overdeliver! stay tuned for more, Ben