One of the main Lindström strategies for coming years is to achieve excellent customer experiences. We must be sure that our offering brings the best value for the customer and meet customer needs. Innovation is one of the strongest drivers for ensuring excellent customer experience. What means innovation for Lindström?
In general, the innovation is the process of translating an idea or invention into a product or service that creates value to customers and for which customers are willing to pay. Collaboration and co-creation the ideas together with customers is the must. Allowing the customer to co-construct the service experience to suit their context will foster the discovery of customer interest and value, which we can turn into innovation and competitive advantage.
We must understand customer’s needs before any innovative actions, what is customer’s focus? What has been changed in customer’s business environment? Our customers expect the flexibility and added value from our service. So, we are using the innovation for develop our service according the customer’s expectation. Continuous improvement has always been part of our job and the failures are no break for us. We believe that real failure is when we stop trying.
Sparkling ideas become innovations
Customer-driven innovation is essential nowadays. If we would like to achieve the best customer experience, we must be open to customers’ feedback. Identifying customers’ pains and using that knowledge as a starting point for developing and designing our products and services gives us the opportunity to create something truly valuable. And how we are doing the innovation in the Lindström? Often, the best ideas come from the people who work with the customers, no matter what role they have. Those people are discussing the ideas with the customers and developing those by organizing ideation workshops with customers. Special essence of those workshops are creativity, openness and transparency, open mind and willingness. We try to encourage others to look on daily ongoing tasks and identify if there is something what we can do in unusual way.
When the right idea is crystalized, then we are testing the idea with other real customers to see if there is any potential for it and what kind of benefit it might provide. After idea testing, the pilot comes. Piloting is a test initiated to check all conditions before full final launch, goal is to understand what kind of added value it will provide, and customers are always involved in the pilots. If the pilot goes well, new product or service concept is developed and launched by development teams.
Innovation culture is a must
All this cannot be happened without internal leaders who focus on increasing the local innovation culture. That’s why we have set up the innovation agency several years ago. Those agents are full of passions and they encourage others to ideation. Innovation agents bridge the gap between the ideas and real results. All agents are committed to provide guide how to do local innovations with the customers.
We are looking into the future now more than ever to find new opportunities. There is not a such thing that bad idea and small opportunities are often the beginning of a great enterprises. Co-create better future with us!
