by Rick Clayton

I'm a fan of statistics. As a manager, I keep statistics on everything from numbers that expose how well we're serving our customers to indicators that show how well we're contributing to the evolution of the company's products. But I don't track these stats because its fun. For me, statistics are a stabilizer, a GPS system. I know where I'm at and where I should be going. Without statistics, I'd be lost. So I track my numbers out of pure necessity.

Many service-providing companies rely heavily on customer feedback. Books such as The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld expound the necessity of farming feedback and suggestions from your customers. But numbers only go so far. They can help you know if you're meeting objectives, but little more. They can give you a certain measure of how well you're servicing your customer, but they can't help you develop new products or services that make their lives easier.

The fact is, most of our customers don't have the time to respond to our requests for an opinion, and those who do don't take the extra time to think about what the next generation of our product would look like. It would be nice if each customer took the time to think deeply about the services we provide, consider products they wish we offered, and submitted their conclusions to us with a pretty bow on top. The fact is, our customers are not as bent on our success as we are. They are expecting us to fill the voids in our industries. And if we do - and as often as we do - they'll buy. The point is, if we are going to reach our corporate potential, we have to know our customers and the problems they face intimately and meet needs they don't yet know they have.

Let me give an example. Sony invented the Walkman back in 1978. The device was hugely popular and pioneered an industry that continues today. Have you ever wondered why Sony didn't continue evolving the Walkman and invent the iPod? Or why AT&T didn't invent the cellphone?

According to Chip Conley, author of PEAK: How Great Companies get Their Mojo from Maslow, corporate executives are often not seeking innovation. "[I]nstead of imagining what would improve the lives of their customers, companies tinker with their existing products and make incremental product improvements based on the results of conventional customer satisfaction surveys." We put lipstick and rouge on our products or release the obligatory annual update and feel content with that. But sooner or later the need met by those products will be met in a better way by someone else because we failed to innovate.

Don't misunderstand me: I'm all about customer satisfaction. I want my customers to tell us and their colleagues all about how great we are, and mean it. However, I'm not so naïve to think you can't consistently get great feedback from your customers and never find yourself in the soupline. To stay out of the soupline, it takes both great service and innovative products and services.

Feedback and idea farming from customers has its place. I use it as a gauge of how well we are meeting objectives and taking care of our customers. But over the years I have harvested more meat from brainstorming sessions with staff and customers than I have from the feedback page on our website. My goal is to find new, innovative ways of making the lives of our customers easier, then improve those products and services through continued innovation. This requires we know our customers and the problems they face as well or better than they do. Feedback has a role in that. But it can't stop there.

It's time to innovate.

For more information on using innovation to stir things up in your company or industry, I highly recommend reading PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow, by Chip Conley.