5 Tips for Keeping the Innovative Edge in Stakeholder Experience

Innovations don’t have to be new inventions or breakthrough products. You can innovate in how you treat your stakeholders—your employees, customers, vendors, investors. Here are five key tips for keeping the innovative edge in stakeholder experience.

1. Know the personas of your people. At first it may seem a bit odd to start assembling individuals within your enterprise ecosystem into a range of definable identities that we call personas. We know that people sometimes pigeonhole or stereotype others in a negative or prejudicial way. That’s certainly not what this is about! In fact it’s the exact opposite. The innovation leader needs to identify the range of amazing people he or she serves so that they can do a far better job of staying ahead of the pack. Remember, all of this will significantly improve everyone’s quality of life while concurrently helping you deliver on your organizational mission.

2. Hack the persona. In our busy consulting practice, we work with leaders around the world and help them develop ideation sessions, or what we prefer to call hackathons, to help them identify their stakeholder personas. This activity is fun and always results in a winning return on time investment.

3. Hack the journey. Apply an attitude of innovation across the entire stakeholder journey to engage, inspire, build respect, and connect at each and every touch point. Formalize this process through stakeholder journey mapping to ensure you’re delivering value across your stakeholders’ entire journey.

4. Create customer experience safaris. Innovation leaders are constantly moving about the organization as active observers to identify ways to invent better experiences for their employees. Think about the TV show Undercover Boss, and how the CEO puts on a wig and funky clothes and goes to work in one of the company’s stores, only to discover he or she was clueless about how poorly their employees and their customers were being treated? This was the scenario in every episode. Turns out every time a leader gets off their butt and spends time across the entire enterprise they learn something about how they can improve the experience for both employees and customers. My recommendation is to make this a weekly activity with the intention to identify new customer experience innovations.

5. Operationalize your customer experience strategy. Once you’ve built out your personas and identified the key touch points of your stakeholders, it’s time to build out an innovative customer experience strategy that ensures you get the proper insights and act upon them in a systematic way. This may seem like overkill, but innovation leaders know how to deliver exceptional experiences across the entire enterprise.