I was recently reading Adam Bluestein's article in Inc. magazine, Debunking the Myth of Innovation, all about... you guessed it: Innovation (and how it's overrated)! The article debunks six innovation myths, including: - Innovation is about stuff
- Innovation is costly
- Innovation is a disruption
- You must innovate constantly
- You can't have too many ideas
- It pays to be first
In debunking several of these myths Bluestein mentions the importance of improving the customer experience, which always makes me exclaim, YES! Exactly!
However, my favorite part of Bluestein's article is not his customer-centric advice that a cool idea that excites your engineers should never become a working project until someone can articulate how it actually solves a pressing problem that your customers have; or companies get the highest return on investment when they focus on things such as improving business models, internal processes, and customer experiences. Nope, my favorite part of this article is the Do This Instead section. Bluestein encourages entrepreneurs and leadership teams to invest in employees and empower them to make improvements in areas they understand.
Now, it could be that the tie between customer loyalty and satisfaction and employee engagement has been on my mind a lot lately. We did just publish a new playbook, Retain or Drain: The A.R.T of Engaging Employees, and launch a new Employee Engagement Assessment. But frankly it goes deeper. You can't ignore the results of the 2008 Vanderbilt University study that compared the growth of companies with high customer satisfaction scores on the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) with the rest of the market. The ACSI portfolio outperformed the S&P 500 212% to 105%. The next step in customer experience improvement comes by focusing on employees. Which is why there's a similar study that compares best places to work companies to the S&P500 with similar results.
Bluestein argues that investing and empowering employees are tried-and-true strategies that have a better payoff than attempts at innovation. So, the question is, how effectively are you implementing these strategies?