Image Archives

25 Apr

To Increase CX (and Revenue), This Lender Gave Customers a Blank Check

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Line of Sight Group constantly engages in activities to keep abreast of trends in innovation, customer experience, sales methods, service adoption and business model transformation. One trend we have noticed are the parallels in the disciplines of product management, service design and customer experience.  Over the past few weeks, we have attended events and sessions in all of these disciplines and would like to share an observation demonstrating this convergence.

Representatives from the Baker Tilly firm shared an interesting Customer Experience (CX) case at the Product Development Management Association (PDMA) local chapter meeting the other day. It was the case of a lender pre-approving customers for vehicle purchases but then realizing that less than a quarter of the pre-approved customers actually returned to the lender to complete the loan. This was very disappointing to the lender as the process to pre-approve customers took time and effort. After performing a journey mapping exercise along with some current and future state analysis, the lender added one crucial step at the beginning of the process that changed everything.

What was the innovation?  The lender started sending along a blank check valid for up to the pre-approved loan amount with the customer as they entered the dealership to purchase their new vehicle. This gave the lender’s customers a powerful tool that provided them more control over the buying experience, let them bypass the time in the financial manager’s office where they were subject to every conceivable cross-sell and up-sell tactic, and allowed them to drive away in their new vehicle without returning to the lender in advance.

Thus, a CX initiative impacted the nature of the service/product (a blank check was added), the process (avoidance of a trip back to the lender), a much better customer experience (less effort and avoiding the trip to the financial manager’s office), and a boost in business for the lender (fourfold revenue increase). In this case, the CX started with the sales process, impacted the product and service offer, as well as what the customer experienced on their vehicle buying journey.  Understanding the external environment made up of the dealers and competitive lenders along with the customer journey enabled this lender to prevail in several key areas.

20 Apr

Line of Sight’s Competitive Intelligence System Now SCIP Endorsed

Line of Sight Group is proud to announce that our Market-i Competitive Intelligence System has been recognized as a SCIP “Endorsed” product!

Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) is the nonprofit Association representing the Integrated Intelligence industry internationally for over 32 years.

What makes our system unique? Prior to launching Line of Sight Group in 2002, president and founder Steve Schulz conceived the Market-i System when he was running CI programs.  According to SCIP, this makes the Market-i system unique and different because it was developed by a CI practitioner, not by a consultant or technology specialist with no background in CI.

The idea behind Line of Sight’s intelligence services offering, including our Market-i System, is that the most effective way for organizations to understand, respond to and anticipate changes in their external environment (not only direct competitors) is to collect and process information that best represents leading indicators in a systematic and ongoing way. It is done in such a way as to identify changes that are significant enough to deserve a more in-depth look. In addition, our intelligence services fit directly with our analysis services – we get to know our clients and their business and are uniquely positioned to help our clients develop deep insight and strategic options.

Line of Sight Group joins other service providers highlighted in SCIP’s (first-ever) 2017 Service Provider Assessment Guidebook – Highlighting SCIP Endorsed and Certified Services in ISCI. The guidebook is aimed at providing its members and potential users of these services some insight into the features and benefits that may be of service to their decision support program.

If you would like more information about our Market-i Competitive Intelligence System, please Reach Out!  To learn more about SCIP or to become a member, contact them at www.scip.org.

27 Mar

Cargill Uses Competitive Intelligence to Sharpen its Global Customer Experience Program

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One of the ways that Line of Sight Group keeps abreast of key marketplace trends is to attend industry association events. We recently attended an American Marketing Association (AMA) meeting that examined Cargill’s global customer experience model which is deployed to create consistently positive customer experiences despite a wide diversity of customers, products, geographies and markets. This approach is very comprehensive crossing multiple types and channels of customer interactions.  One of the most important aspects of the process was to hold up Cargill’s customer experience to that of its competitors across the board. Knowing how you are doing with your customers is one thing, but to also know this relative to the competitive set is one of the elements that makes Cargill a market leader on a global basis. This is another example of a company committing to understanding its external environment and using the gathered insight to make good decisions.

06 Mar

Bob and Jerry on Competing in Healthcare

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For the past several weeks, we have been busily reading the myriad articles and forecasts on Healthcare (HC) trends for 2017. There was even an article about all of the other articles.  With trends like a dramatically changing regulatory environment, continued momentum in HC consumerism, advances moving big data and analytics into cognitive computing and Artificial Intelligence, value management, medical device and pharma innovation, mobility, cloud, security, privacy and so on, 2017 promises to be an exciting and challenging year. Not only are things moving fast, but there are a lot of them and the very foundations of the industry are shifting at the same time. If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed and seeking enlightenment, we offer the timeless wisdom of Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia to make some sense out of the state of HC.

“For the times, they are a changin’” pretty well sums up the status quo. Thank you, Bob. For organizations competing in the HC space, it is particularly important to examine the increasingly complex and multi-layered external environment and to ensure that strategic plans are up-to-date, refreshed and aligned with the go-to-market initiatives. Leaders may also find themselves in the circumstance of playing offense and defense simultaneously.  Some built-in flexibility goes a long way when there are well funded start-ups seeking to innovate by employing new, simplified business models and established organizations seeking to do some disrupting of their own. No matter where the threats come from or where the opportunities may lie, it has never been more important to listen to what is happening in the market, connect the dots and then convert this into insight that can be acted upon. There are a lot of factors to consider.  Jerry rightly observes, “If the thunder don’t get ya then the lightning will.”

While most organizations conduct annual planning and align their go-to-market activities to the current conditions, it may not be enough. When in particularly challenging times, we might feel the need to regroup a bit and as Bob points out, “Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm.”  Leading organizations monitor their external environments continuously in order to anticipate market changes and make appropriate course changes. There are many methods to accomplish this that involve primary and secondary research, analysis and the pulling of various execution levers.

2017 presents potentially turbulent conditions. With a good and continuous view of the external environment, a sound and flexible strategic plan in place and solid execution, you will be able to navigate and compete successfully in the HC market. As Jerry sang, “May the four winds blow you safely home.”  Good luck in 2017!

27 Feb

Clarity at the Intersection of Product Management/Development and Analytics

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Last Wednesday, Line of Sight Group attended the PDMA MN Chapter Meeting entitled, “The Intersection of Product Management/Development and Analytics.” There was networking, a tour of Optum including their version of the “Big Board” to monitor data and trends worldwide, and a panel moderated by Dave Mathias that included practitioners Kristen Womack, Jasmine Russell, Edward Chenard, David Quimby, and Scott Thomsen. They had great stories and examples drawn from real world experiences.

The final question had the panelists share some favorite resources and tips, which I scrambled feverishly to write down:

You can find these resources and tips at the intersection of deep and practical.

12 Jan

Telephone Switch Created to Bypass Love Connection

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Almon Strowger was one of two undertakers in a small town near Kansas City in the 1880’s. He had a good reputation and a nice business. Then, things started to change for the worse. He noticed that his business was dying off dramatically. His close reading of the local obituary notices revealed that he was not getting the usual amount of business. In those days, homes were equipped with telephones that were on shared party lines. People often listened in on their neighbor’s conversations, too. To facilitate connections between callers, there was an operator who worked a cord switchboard at the local telephone exchange. When there was a death to report, a call came into the operator who patched the call through to one of two local undertakers on an “every other one” basis. Or so Strowger thought…

What Strowger uncovered in his research was that his competitor was dating the telephone operator, hence giving him the inside track to most of the funeral business in town. Needless to say, this state of affairs greatly frustrated Strowger and he complained to the local telephone company authorities…to no avail. His business did not improve. The operator ultimately married Strowger’s competitor and continued to keep most of the funeral business in the family.

Finding no hope with the status quo, Strowger switched strategies. By burning the midnight oil and using hat pins and electromagnets, he cobbled together a device that by-passed the operator allowing subscribers to directly connect to one another. On March 12, 1889, he filed his patent application and it was issued to him on March 10, 1891 as patent No. 447,918. He had invented the Telephone Switch. Strowger went on to form the “Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange” late in 1891. Strowger’s first customer was the telephone company in LaPorte, Indiana with 75 subscribers. Strowger continued making improvements on the telephone switch over the years. He added feature after feature to make the phones more reliable, easier to use and less time consuming to operate. Conversations over Strowger Switches were private and did not require any human intervention to operate.

Strowger bragged that his systems were “cuss-less, out-of-order-less and wait-less.” With all of this functionality, it is not surprising that the Strowger Switch became the standard technology platform upon which the US and British telephone systems were based on until the 1950’s and 1970’s respectively. Strowger eventually sold his company and patent to the Bell Company which later became AT&T, Verizon, GTE and Lucent.

There are many lessons to be learned in this story:

• Know your external environment. Strowger kept abreast by reading the obituaries – he knew that he was losing market share. He also learned that the operator was linked to his competitor
• Have a back-up plan when disruption occurs. When his complaints to the local telephone company went unaddressed, Strowger set out to develop technology that would neutralize his competitor’s primary advantage – the operator’s discretion
• Learn what the market wants and needs. Strowger was relentless in his quest to perfect person-to-person communications

Be flexible and open to the possibilities. Strowger did his research, uncovered a need, innovated, and sold a solution where there were no competitors…quite a switch!

10 Nov

OUR STRATEGY ISN’T WORKING

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Our strategy doesn’t seem to be working.  What’s wrong?  When company and business unit leaders or product and market managers share this question with me I answer with the following question:  Is it your strategy, strategy execution or both?  In most cases, they don’t know, so I take them down a path of a few more questions that include:

First, are your strategy decisions aligned and compatible with your company’s vision, mission and core values?  If not, execution can be very difficult because your company’s mission and core values are foundational elements of your company’s culture.  If not aligned and compatible, Peter Drucker’s statement “culture eats strategy for breakfast” can cause a strategy which looked great on paper to fail.

Second, are your strategy decisions based on a comprehensive identification and assessment of your companies opportunities, threats, strengths and weaknesses?  Successful strategies exploit company’s opportunities and strengths and mitigate company’s threats and weaknesses.  The absence of comprehensive industry, market and competitive research lead to strategies that can fail miserably.  Absent outside objective research and analysis companies tend to overstate their strengths and underestimate their weaknesses.  When viewed through internal lenses strengths may look like competitive advantages when in reality they are simply table stakes and offer no competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Third, are the required execution levers in place for your strategy to be successful?  The execution lever checklist begins with the right leadership, people, organization structure, systems and processes, and culture.  Keep in mind that current execution levers don’t necessarily work with strategy decisions that include new products, markets, channels, geographies, strategic partnerships and/or acquisitions.

Finally, superior strategy and strategy execution requires focus, discipline and alignment.

 

Doug Hedlund
President, The Hedlund Group, LLC

Doug provides Line of Sight Group clients corporate, business unit, and product level strategy development and execution facilitation and guidance. Doug’s disciplined approach to strategy development and execution helps our clients translate our industry research and competitive intelligence into focused, actionable strategies and execution plans. Doug has evolved the disciplines and tools he utilizes over a twenty-seven year career in corporate development and strategy leadership roles at Deluxe Corporation, CUNA Mutual Group, and Mayo Clinic. In addition, Doug has taught the Strategic Management Capstone course in the MBA programs at the University of St. Thomas and Augsburg College since 2008 and 2009, respectively and has helped numerous organizations formulate successful strategy and strategy execution plans.

27 Oct

Disruption and Innovation – Two Sides of the Same Coin

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Last week, Line of Sight Group attended the Product Development Management Association (PDMA) Annual Conference in Atlanta.  Line of Sight Group was also an event sponsor. This is one of the ways that we keep a pulse on the opportunities and threats faced by the industries, companies and roles that we serve.  We did a little “informal” research project with the attendees who visited our booth that you can see here: http://lineofsightgroup.com/pdma-attendees-well-represented-on-the-product-lifecycle-curve/

Amongst the three days of breakout sessions, workshops and networking, there were three keynote presentations that really explored disruption and innovation at the business model level. Calling it innovation or disruption is really a matter of where you sit.

The first was Terry Jones, founder of Travelocity, chairman founder of Kayak.com and now, Wayblazer. He spoke about the trials and tribulations of the travel industry, making million dollar mistakes, but finally getting it right by bundling air, hotel and cars into a single trip over a single end-user site. Here is his website where you can get his slides: http://www.tbjones.com/ 

The second was Alan Amling, VP Corp Strategy at UPS. Here is his actual TED talk on the future of distribution that will not only include boxes on trucks, but drones, high speed cross country tubes and sending part specs to 3-D printers for manufacturing closer to the requester. It is UPS vision called, the My Way Highway:     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRaivgVBCB4

The third was Hania Jarrah Poole, VP Turner Sports, who talked about creating the March Madness, multi-platform, streaming offer, in a matter of weeks, to show alongside Turner’s subscription-based cable offer.  Here’s an abstract of her talk: http://www.pim.pdma.org/p/cm/ld/fid=2034 

All of these presentations revealed how business model innovation and disruption are different sides of the same coin. There were great examples regarding the pace of technology, the readiness of customers and the subsequent impact on new business models. It struck me that the most innovative/disruptive business models were the simplest, too.  These presentations provided a lot of fodder for discussion and were great for linking product management techniques to business model innovation, as well as go-to-market initiatives to strategy.

27 Apr

Disruption + Speed Equals…Opportunity or Threat?

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A key observation in Geoffrey Moore’s latest book, Zone to Win, is that modern businesses are profoundly impacted by disruption plus speed coupled with the tension between protecting the existing business from disruption and innovating to catch the next wave. There is no simple answer. Where do you focus amidst all the chaos? Organizations are typically awash in internal information about their offers, technology, and capabilities but lack intelligence and understanding regarding their external environment.

There are many tools available for organizations to look at and listen to the external environment, the market. Here are a few. Customer satisfaction surveys are one way to glean external market feedback. At a very high level, a PEST Analysis examines the Political/Regulatory, Economic, Social, and Technology trends and the impact they have on an organization. Drilling down, a Five Forces Analysis examines an organization’s immediate rivals, the threat of new entrants and substitutes, as well as the power exerted by buyers and suppliers. Win/Loss Analysis is effective at identifying the specifics on why you win and lose deals and to whom. The aforementioned tools combine primary and secondary research techniques to cast a wide net to capture information and connect the dots about your market.

In markets that are fast moving and highly disruptive, knowledge of the external market is a great place to start.

31 Mar

Profiting From Change: How Some Health Care Organizations Are Navigating Industry Chaos

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For every industry there is a ‘current state’ and a ‘future state’. The space between them is called ‘change’….and in an industry like health care, the term ‘chaos’ is more appropriate.  This chaos can represent either opportunity or threat, depending on an organization’s ability to understand and respond by making the right decisions and investments. Innovation is happening at a pace never seen before in the health care industry. Political and regulatory change, technology change, demographic and societal change are all driving new market needs for consumers, providers, payors and others. From telemedicine to population health management to connected health, to social patient experience and crowd-sourcing solutions, the pressure on organizations intensifies as they jockey to fill those emerging market needs.

In the midst of all this change, executives are trying to make the right decisions to survive and grow. Product managers and developers need to place bets on new products and innovation, chief marketing officers need to invest in campaigns that position their organizations effectively, and sales executives need to compete ‘in the trenches’ against a dizzying array of competition. CEOs and other leaders need to bring all of these functions together to create strategic plans. Beyond making sense of the chaos, how does an organization gain the confidence to make the right investments in order to grow and not get left behind?

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet, no single solution.

Although no one can tell the future, some organizations are better at preparing for it than others. How is it that companies like Catamaran (now part of OptumRx), Coloplast and Express Scripts are recognized by Forbes in its latest list of the most innovative companies, while others seem to be paralyzed?

One way in which we’ve observed health care organizations change their mindset has been when they apply their expertise on the clinical side to their business strategy. These organizations are mining data from many sources and analyzing it in a longitudinal, systematic manner. They use the information to identify opportunities to engage directly with consumers, their providers, health coaches and others to close gaps in care. The concept has been applied across the health continuum in wellness, chronic condition management, pharmaceutical safety and adherence, population health management and many others. Optum’s Care Management program, Express Scripts’ Rational Med, Healthways’ TargetTM and Humana’s Gaps in Care programs are only a few examples.

What if this model could be applied to business strategy?

While there are distinct challenges with applying this model to business strategy, the basic model is something we’ve been applying for our customers for nearly 15 years to give them clarity about the changing world around them and the strategic moves that can help them grow their business. They apply this insight to everything from training their salespeople to developing new products and services to making high-stakes technology investments and more.

For health care organizations that are heads down, charging hard and working to meet growth and profitability goals, it can be difficult to take a breath and consider the benefits of applying systematic market and industry intelligence to strategic decisions. Applying the concepts of what they already know gives them a place to start. The basic notion of using empirical data to make decisions and perform interventions that improve outcomes is at the heart of healthcare….and at the heart of strategic intelligence applied to your business to improve growth and profitability outcomes.

If you will be attending the American Telemedicine Association conference May 14 to 17 in Minneapolis, please stop by booth #1325 to say hello and learn more about how Line of Sight helps organizations like yours make sense of, and grow, amidst the chaos.

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