How can you avoid unnecessary development investments, make better decisions, and build services that customers actually need? At pension insurance company Elo, the answer lies in customer-centric development. When customers are involved from the early stages of development, real needs can be identified, solutions tested before implementation, and development work ensured to progress in the right direction.
Elo has been supported in strengthening customer understanding by Reflector’s service designer and consultant Juha Pihlaja. Together with the business functions and Mari Asikainen, who works in Elo’s digital service development, he has been building an operating model where the customer is considered from the very beginning of development work.
– When customers participate in development from the start, solutions are guided in the right direction immediately. This reduces the need for corrections and makes development significantly smoother, Asikainen explains.
– The earlier assumptions can be corrected with customer data, the less unnecessary work and rushed corrections occur later. At the same time, services become clearer, simpler, and better suited to customers’ needs, Pihlaja explains.
Involving customers in development
At Elo, customer understanding is gathered in various ways at different stages of development. Customers are interviewed, services are tested together with users, and a customer panel is also utilized to support development work. The goal is to ensure that solutions are built for real needs rather than based on the organization’s own assumptions.
– As experts, we are often deeply immersed in our own work, which makes it not always easy to put ourselves in the customer’s perspective, Asikainen explains.
Instead of trying to guess customers’ needs, Elo involves customers to share them directly. Customer-centric development is seen primarily as a partnership where both customers and the organization benefit.
The shared goal is to find solutions to customers’ everyday challenges and develop services that serve their users as effectively as possible. At the same time, customers get to influence services that are important to them, and Elo gains valuable information to support development work.
– At its best, it’s a win-win situation for all parties, Asikainen says.
Customer conversations not only help refine existing services. They can also reveal entirely new needs and open perspectives that have not previously been identified within the organization.
– It’s precisely in conversations with customers that we often find those diamonds we wouldn’t have even known to look for ourselves. These are exactly the things that can differentiate us from competitors and take services to the next level, Asikainen says.
External perspective helps challenge established practices
The role of an external expert has been particularly important in situations where the organization is too close to its own operating methods. In such cases, an external perspective helps identify areas for development, challenge thinking, and open up new solutions.
According to Asikainen, collaboration with Reflector has not only strengthened the customer perspective but also helped embed it as part of daily operations.
– Through collaboration, customer-centric thinking has become concrete and a natural part of our work. The external partner has not only brought insights but also helped us learn and adopt new operating methods that now manifest as customer-focused daily operations, Asikainen explains.
Customer-Centric development starts with small actions
According to Asikainen and Pihlaja, customer-centric development doesn’t require large initiatives or heavy service design projects.
In all situations, customers cannot always be involved in development, in which case previously gathered customer understanding serves as important support for decision-making.
According to the duo, one of the most common challenges in starting customer-centric development is also the scope of development targets. If you try to solve a problem as too large an entity at once, progress slows down and development work becomes burdensome.
– Often the most important thing is knowing how to define the scope small enough. When the whole is broken down into manageable parts, customers’ insights can be utilized along the way and development can be advanced step by step, Pihlaja says.
According to Asikainen, you don’t need to know everything in advance either.
– In expert organizations, there’s a tendency to think we should know the answers in advance. In reality, customers often provide the very best answers when given the opportunity.
Boldly experimenting with customer-centric development
Both Asikainen and Pihlaja encourage organizations to start customer-centric development with small steps. Utilizing customer understanding does not require a perfect model or large investments; the most important thing is daring to ask and understand, listen and experiment.
– Customer-centricity cannot be built as a single project. It gradually becomes part of daily operations and decision-making. When the customer’s voice is included in everyday work, better services are created for both customers and the organization, Pihlaja summarizes.
